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#I thought it was all normal for the father to berate and be uninterested in the children at best
plan-d-to-i · 3 years
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1-people forget that in the universe MXTX created it is stated that YZY's situation is not normal, it is a patriarcal society so wives don't keept their names nor do whatever the fuck they want and they certainly don't humiliate their husband without even being told off, she's uniquely horrible and JFM is uniquely spineless. i always think JFM did love and worried about WWX but that last interaction he threw him under the bus to appease JC so his last memory would cement that he did love him
2- bc he didn't have more time to keep trying to make him understand and i always wonder how things with JC could have been fixed, easiest would be having had the balls to get rid off YZY early but if he divorced her (or got her killed lol) would JC have been different? or would he resent him even more for not protecting his mother? idk i feel like JFM was cursed from the moment he accepted to marry her and i can't help feeling bad for him
LOVE THIS. So I agree w like 99.9999% only my feelings over JFM change every five minutes. I never hate him but I vacillate wildly between i feel like he could've done more and ig he was himself a trapped in that situation so it's unfair to hold him fully accountable.
Madam Yu is an undeniably violently abusive woman who has married a kind, non-confrontational man. Most of JFM's flaws are only seen as 'flaws' instead of qualities because they framed as ineffective against someone as rank as her. I wouldn't even say he's spineless, because he does cancel YanLi's engagement for fear that it will make her as unhappy as his own marriage made him & effectively stands against his wife's demand on top of also passing on a very beneficial alliance w Jin Clan. (In fact Jin GuangShan is way more reluctant at the thought of taking this news to Madam Jin.)
Abusive relationships have their own dynamics so it's hard watching from the outside how JFM's resignation to his circumstances and avoidance are ineffective against, someone like YZY who materializes like a storm cloud to rain her venom down on everyone, especially WWX. Because WWX is not only bearing the scars piled on his back from YZY's whippings/'discipline' but he's trapped in a perpetual balancing act between JFM, YZY, jc and to an extent Yanli. He has to make JFM proud/see the value in keeping him around & at least in the beginning of his stay with the Jiangs we know he always tries to eat/take less than he needs, but he can't be so good & talented that jc feels threatened or set Madam Yu off. At the same time Yanli rewards him with soup and affection when he takes the fall for jc his first day there. This definitely establishes a pattern wherein WWX sees his usefulness within the Jiang sect in diverting punishment for the failings of those around him, especially jc, to himself. She also repeatedly asks him to just accept jc’s shifty behavior as a representative of his affection... bc she's a huge fucking enabler, which probably doesn’t bode well for how she’s come to interpret affection.
As for YZY she's the only one who paints herself a victim, when it's clear she's the instigator of the conflicts!!!! She’s literally the bad guy, boss, fly in the ointment etc. There's a lot of gaslighting in her interactions with JFM so I'm confused as to why people think that of everyone she's the reliable narrator or some poor sad victim of an uninterested husband??? She clearly does as she pleases in Lotus Pier, yells at JFM in front of Servants, accuses him of fathering a child with his friend's wife, she whips the head disciple for imagined infractions with a spiritual weapon! and pretty much just chills w her ladies when she isn't busy spewing venom wherever she goes. WITH NO REPRECUSSIONS. If JFM had been a woman and YZY the man I'm sure all her cringe stans would be frothing at the mouth to drag her(yzy) to hell by the balls.
People love to accuse JFM of favoritism towards WWX or showing him more affection. To me it's clear that for JMF, WWX is simply an extension of his father/friend & ultimately a subordinate in the Jiang household. JFM clearly cares about jc, it's not his fault that jc doesn't get it, and it's not his fault that YZY is always poisoning their relationship. JFM for his part is still trying to guide jc towards how he's meant to occupy his future position as Clan leader, quite gently too considering jiang cheng was berating WWX for saving their allies... I’m sure if anything JFM hoped WWX’s morality and sense of right and wrong would rub off a bit on jc & why wouldn't you want someone immensely talented and loyal and devoted to the well being of your son and family around?? JFM did a nice thing getting WWX off the streets but that doesn’t mean he also didn’t think WWX could be a good friend to jc who when WWX is first brought to Lotus Pier has ZERO friends, and was likely to remain with zero friends considering his personality. Only someone like WWX who is forced by circumstances, & his kind nature & gratitude to the Jiangs would be in a position to befriend him. So I think it's laughable to say JFM favors WWS when WWX was the sacrificial lamb friend/pet JFM gifted his son. Not to mention that the only person who says JFM doesn't properly value jc is again YZY. Ofc jc takes to like a duck to water because he's cut from the same cloth as his rancid mother and it's much easier to blame WWX for all his failings and misfortunes than to take a good hard look at himself or ever take responsibility for anything. jc doesn't do self reflection. There isn't any scenario where jc would have been a good person. He's lacking basic human empathy. His view of the world has him as its center. He can only relate to things as they concern and affect him and he doesn't even possess a modicum of honor that might keep such selfish impulses at bay.
To conclude, I totally agree. JFM cursed himself the moment he let himself be coerced by YZY and her Clan into marrying a person whose character and values he knew ran so deeply counter to his and his Clan's own. Sure enough under the control of jiang cheng, the original spirit in which Jiang clan was established is gone. It's a place devoid of warmth that people are scared to visit lest they be confronted w the screams of people being flayed alive.
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anthropwashere · 4 years
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i’m still, still dreaming magnificent things (part 4)
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
(Alternate site locations, plus a handy dandy GSheet of all the Resembool folk, plus a Spotify playlist to come. Head’s up, this chapter’s 19k words.)
=
It can't be.
It can't be.
Dad ran off. Dad left them. Dad died penniless and alone, with neither identification or cenz on him, and so was buried in a pauper's grave in some far-off corner of the world. Once upon a time—when Alphonse had still been alive—Ed had declared this to be the only acceptable reason for Dad's continued absence. It's a sad scenario to be sure, but it's one Alphonse reluctantly agreed with, then and now, if for no other reason than that it's the only one that makes sense.
More recently—and more hardened by the world and all its indifferent indignities—Ed considers Dad—"That bastard"—the type of creep to leave a string of broken-hearted single mothers behind him. Granny had all but boxed his ears the one time he'd said as such near her, and Ed had fled back to East City in a huff that same day. He didn't come back until his automail was practically a dead weight dangling from his stump, and then it'd been Winry's turn to berate him senseless.
(Ever since then Alphonse has tried not to linger on the bitter thought. He likes to think Mom had been a better judge of character than that, and even if she hadn't been there's no way the Rockbells would have ever opened their arms to a sleaze like that. Better he be dead, taken by the same illness that took Mom, taken by a terrible accident, taken by a petty thief with an itchy trigger finger. Better orphaned than abandoned.)
Dad is dead and gone. He has to be.
But there's no mistaking him.
Alphonse has seen this same face smiling sheepishly out of aged photographs a hundred times if he's seen it once. He knows this is the same face found in the family portrait pinned to the corkboard in the Rockbell's house. Ed had wanted to get rid of that picture but Granny wouldn't hear of it, so he'd compromised by covering the half of it with him and Dad entirely with pictures of Alphonse. That photograph is what, thirteen years old now?
And Dad still hasn't changed at all.
Without warning the little flock of birds all scatter in a burst of shed feathers and furious wittering. Alphonse shields his face out a habit not yet broken, only lowering his arm once the sound of flapping fades. The man—Dad, it can't be, it can't be, it is—watches them fly off with an absent-minded furrow to his brow. Alphonse is too far away to see what color his eyes might be behind his glasses, but he knows they'll be the same rare yellow as Ed's are and his were and something about that stings.
"You can't be here," he whispers aloud.
The man—Dad—moves on, heading up the dirt road out of town. It's baffling to see him in motion. There've been too many years with only photographs to know him by, too many years speaking of him in only the past tense. This—
This doesn't feel real.
He follows, half-expecting the broad-shouldered man to be a figment of his imagination, half-hoping he'll wink out of sight at any moment and things can go back to normal. He's almost—offended by the appearance of this absurd apparition, this inane interruption to his perpetually dull purgatory. He no longer expects surprises from any corner but Ed's, and even Ed can be fairly predictable in his own off-kilter way. In the years since Mom died, the only family he's had is Ed and Winry and Granny. Everyone else has gone away, taken away too soon, Dad in that number. But here—impossibly—he is again.
"You can't be here," he repeats, more adamantly this time. "This isn't—it can't actually be you. There's no way you're really Dad—"
The man stops, frown deepening as he turns back to regard the town proper laid out behind him. Alphonse follows the line of his gaze on reflex. It's a nice view from here, sure, but he's seen it a thousand times before and he'll see it a thousand times again. He looks back at the man in time to see him startle like he's just remembered something urgent. Whatever it might be doesn't matter a whit to Alphonse, of course, so he shelves that instinctive curiosity and glares up at him.
"No," he says, churlish and childish and damn near pissed. "This is stupid. This is bullshit. Why'd you come back now?"
The man says, "Alphonse."
The man—Dad. Dad isn't looking at the town proper. He isn't. His gaze is lower, focused on something far closer. But this is an empty stretch of dirt road, no houses nearby, nothing interesting to catch the eye at all.
There's nothing here except him. And Dad just said his name.
He shakes his head like a dog. No. No way. He—he heard wrong. He imagined it. There's no way Dad could possibly know he's standing here. Dad's alive; the fresh footprints in the road are proof of that. Only another ghost could see him, so there's no way Dad said his name—
Dad breathes shakily. Dad has the audacity to say, "It is you. Oh, Alphonse. What happened to you?"
He can't speak. He can't even move. If he does either thing he's sure this impossible dream—nightmare?—will fall apart. Dreamstuff and wishes, all of it useless to a dead thing like him.
This can't be happening.
Can it?
(Oh god, please. Please let this be real.)
"You—" His throat isn't real enough to choke, but he feels the need to clear it and start again anyway. "You can see me?”
"Of course I can," Dad says.
"He shivers. That—that was a reply. A real reply, not happy coincidence. A real reply from a living person. "Y—you can hear me too?"
"Yes. Yes, of course I can. Alphonse—"
"Stop."
Dad stops. His hand has twitched from his side, reaching out, reaching like he means to touch Alphonse. A hug, or to ruffle his hair, or whatever small gesture fathers do to sons they haven't seen in ten years. Dad doesn't know. Dad hasn't realized.
"I'm dead," Alphonse chokes out. "I died. Years ago. You shouldn't be able to see me. No one can."
Dad's hand hovers a breath longer, then falls. His overcoat hisses against itself. Hush, it says. Hush. "What happened?"
Everything. Too much. Too many years. Too many moments Dad should've been here, should've helped them, should've taught them to know better, should've stopped them—
"You left," he musters. "You left."
"I...." Dad seems to straighten. To harden. He recovers from his shock, and becomes so still he could pass for a statue. "I had to. I was always going to come back."
The laughter that bubbles out of him is nothing short of arsenic, bitter and foaming. He's as surprised by it as Dad seems to be. "Back to what? There's nothing left!"
Dad looks away from him, out across the rolling hills and the silver ribbon of the river bifurcating Resembool proper and Resembool rural. He looks to where their house once stood, to where there's only a tree half-blackened and a shrug of weedy ruins. Dad looks, and looks, and after a heavy moment he asks, "Where is my house?"
Not "our." His.
For a moment Alphonse hates this man just as much as Ed seems to. He hates him for his arrogance and his ignorance, his narcissism and his dismissal of the only living family he has left. Alphonse would be sick with fury if he were still capable of feeling anything, and so he sees no reason to be kind when he snarls, "Ed burned it down after he became a State Alchemist. You left. Mom died—" He clenches his fists raising his voice to be heard over Dad's sharp inhale, "—I died. Ed's gone. There's nothing left for you here, so why'd you come back?!"
"I—I didn't...." Dad steps back from him, shaking his head. He wavers; unmoored, floundering. "I didn't know. I don't—I'm sorry. Alphonse, I'm sorry, I don't...."
Alphonse knows he should do better than sling accusation and demand answers. He should be better.
But it's too much.
He can't. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Anger, black and stormy, fit to rival Ed at his most unhinged and spiteful, all but overwhelms him then. For all that he has no throat he still finds himself choking on bitter grief for what should have been.
(If only Dad hadn't left. If only Dad hadn't left when he did. If only he'd been here when Mom got sick. If only he'd been here when Mom died. If only he'd been here when Ed first voiced the idea of human transmutation. If only, if only, if only—)
He jabs a finger up the road. "Go talk to Granny. You owe your old drinking buddy a visit, at least. She'll be happy to fill you in on everything you missed."
"Alphonse—"
But he kicks off of the ground before Dad can finish, uninterested, unable, darting away. He doesn't care where, so long as it's somewhere he can be alone, away from living and dead both. He needs to be alone. He needs time to calm down. He needs time to breathe for all that he can't breathe, to find his center the way Teacher taught them to. He needs to find some distance so he no longer feels like the stupid little boy asking Mom when Dad will come back. Mom's gone, dead twice over—
(And guilt gnaws at him, as cutting as it  had been the day he watched Granny bury the thing they'd made.)
—and Dad is—
Dad is—
Dad's alive.
Dad's come back.
None of this makes any sense. None of this fits the tidy little afterlife Alphonse has resigned himself to; watching the rest of his family live out their lives and pass away without ever knowing some shade of him was still here, crying out and going unheard.
From the moment he realized even Ed couldn't sense him he's known he'll have to watch the three of them die. He's been dreading the inevitable report of Ed's messy death in the news for—for too long, really. Granny's only getting older. Already there have been a few occasions where he found her napping and thought the worst before some small twitch or snore relieved him. Winry's the only one he expects to see 1920, and beyond that besides. She'll finish her apprenticeship in Rush Valley and no doubt follow a similar path as Granny did at her age. She'll travel for a few years, or many years, but eventually she'll come back to Resembool to keep Rockbell Automail going strong where it's needed most. Maybe she'll marry one day. Maybe she'll have a child of her own, or even children. She and Granny have talked about that possibility once or twice, and Alphonse had laughed at the way she'd wrinkled her nose. But it's a nice thing to imagine on her behalf. A lineage that will last beyond her own small lifespan, the Rockbell name carrying on.
(Winry doesn't really strike him as the type to take her husband's name. Not with the weight Rockbell carries in the world of bioengineering.)
He's seen how the other ghosts all keep wistful vigil over the generations that have survived them and come after them. Watching them watch the living is the closest thing to a mirror he's got, and it's a sobering reflection. Sobering, lonesome, and yes, more than a little creepy, but it's all he's had to look forward to. He'd resigned himself to a state of uninterrupted observation, of decades and eventual centuries of quiet obsession.
But now here's Dad again, come back from the metaphorical rather than the literal dead to throw an enormous fucking wrench in everything!
He's had to watch Mom die twice already. He's going to have to stand over Ed's grave one day soon. He doesn't want to have to do the same for Dad too.
=
In hindsight, he realizes he ought to have gone to Rockbell Automail too. He could've heard word for word what Granny's spitting in Dad's face right now, found some petty gratification in whatever justified vitriol she's slinging. But it's....
It's too much.
All of it is too much. Dad here, alive, seeing him. If he were so inclined he could ask Dad any old question that comes to mind and be answered. He could tell Dad all the nasty, cruel things Ed might snarl if he were here in his stead. He could fill Dad in on every nasty, cruel detail Granny might be so inclined to gloss over out of kindness toward her old drinking buddy. He could do more today than he's been able to since that nasty, cruel night, and it's—
It's too much.
He's retreated to the cemetery for now. Not many people come out here to visit their dearly departed in the middle of the day, nor are there any ghosts perched on their headstones either. There's only him and the encompassing, comforting silence of a summer morning not yet overwhelmed by buzzing insects or birdsong. There's a breeze, heard rather than felt as it hisses through grass in need of a trim. There's the crinkling of the paper wrapper on a bouquet of flowers on a nearby grave (infant son of Filip and Katerina Danchey, born September 18, 1913). The sun is high. The sky is clear. It's probably warm out, not that he can feel it. He can't feel any of it; not the sun or the wind or the grass or the fabric of the clothes he died in. He can't feel anything, numb in a way the vocabulary of even the most precocious of ten year olds can't express.
(It still manages to surprise him, sometimes. How much dying has hollowed him.)
Dad didn't know.
All these years since Mom died, all these years since they tried and failed so terribly to bring her back, and Dad didn't know.
What kind of world can allow that? There must have been a thousand opportunities that Dad could have saved them from years of grief and pain and loneliness, a thousand days he could have picked up the pieces of their broken home before they could cut themselves to ribbons on the terrible hope of what if. A thousand chances at salvation, but Dad hadn't known he was needed here. All these years, Dad thought a happy home waited for his return. He'd thought Mom perfectly fine, taking care of their too-clever-for-their-own-good sons, living in a home Ed hadn't burned down just so he could keep treading water all on his own.
It's too much.
Better Dad dead than ignorant.
He sits at the foot of Mom's first grave, curled up with his arms wrapped tightly around his knees. Granny's been by recently; the headstone looks freshly scrubbed of moss, the nearby grass pruned of weeds, a small bouquet of white gladioli only just beginning to wilt beneath Beloved Mother. He sits, tightly wound, listening to the wind. His thoughts are a perfect match to the rushing, senseless noise.
He's overwhelmed. Overstimulated even, if such a word can be applied to someone who only has sight and hearing left of his senses. Either way, this tight knot of mute panic is a sensation he'd nearly forgotten the feeling of; the sticky way it clings, the choking way it squeezes. Funny, how quickly things fade without new stimuli.
Fucking hilarious.
He doesn't know what to do. How to react. How to act in the first place. There's someone new and alive to interact with, and it's Dad. Can Dad see other ghosts, or just him? If it's only him is it a matter of blood that lets him? If that's the case, then why can't Ed? If Dad can see ghosts, period—why? How? Is it something that can be taught? Would he be willing to teach Ed? Could Ed be restrained from punching Dad long enough to learn?
(Mm, that last one probably not. Granny though, she's impressively patient. She'd been putting up with Ed and Winry's constant fighting for years now. She deserves a sainthood for that alone, honestly.)
Time passes. Hours, probably. The shadows of the headstones are beginning to stretch thin and dark when he hears footsteps on the dirt road skirting the cemetery. He doesn't look when the footsteps soften on the grass, coming closer. He doesn't look when a man's broad shadow spills through him, darkening his own edges so that, for a moment at least, he almost looks solid in the burnt afternoon light. He doesn't have to look to know who's there. Funny, how he already knows—remembers?—the sound of Dad's footsteps.
Nothing is said for a long time.
Alphonse chooses to break the silence first, lifting his gaze to Mom's headstone. Her name, her birth, her death. The pretty but meaningless words carved beneath those facts to sum up her few years. 26 had once seemed like such a mature and far-off age. Funny too, how perceptions can still change even when you can't get any older.
He asks, "Why can you see me?"
Silence.
Then—
A soft, stifled sob.
He twists around to look up at the man, expecting....
He doesn't know what to expect anymore. All of his expectations have been wrung out and frayed to meaningless scraps in the wake of Dad's return. But tears? Dad's face contorting as he sinks to his knees? Dad tearing his glasses off to scrub his eyes? Dad, overcome with grief?
Shame is a salve and a salt both. Alphonse finds it easy then, a relief even, to let his anger and resentment bleed away. He was cruel to think so poorly of Dad, and an idiot too.
By the time Dad quiets his face has become a splotchy mess, eyes red-rimmed and a few strands of his hair clinging to his damp cheeks. Hair and eyes the same color as Ed's. The same color Alphonse's were too. He looks nothing like the man in Granny's old photographs, nor like the closed-off paper cutout Alphonse had built in his head out of secondhand stories and fuzzy memories. Dad looks miserable and wrung out. He looks like anybody would when they'd been told their whole world had crumbled when they hadn't been there to do anything.
Dad paws his eyes dry, slipping his glasses on again. "I didn't know," he says hoarsely. "I didn't. I thought she'd be.... I didn't realize I'd been away so long. If I'd known—" He takes a shuddering breath. "I would have come back. I swear to you—"
"I believe you," Alphonse says.
"I'm sorry. Truly I am. Trisha—" Dad's whole face crumples.
Alphonse considers him for a moment. "You never got any of our letters, did you?"
"...No."
Well. That's alright then, isn't it?
"Why can you see me?" He asks again.
Silence.
Then—
One large hand reaches out to cup the empty air where Alphonse's shoulder hunches. He grimaces, pulling away. "Stop that. I can't feel it."
"I...." Dad lets his hand fall back to his lap. "I've been able to see the dead for a long time. A very long time."
All those old photographs. Decades passing Dad by without touching him. "How?"
Dad breathes.
"I'm a monster."
=
It's dusk by the time Dad finishes his story. His impossible history. Lost Xerxes and the Philosopher's Stone. The Dwarf in the Flask. Unwanted immortality at the cost of so many dead. Centuries spent hiding away in Xing, learning the breadth of his curse. Learning too, everything he could about every single soul caught inside him. The sheepish admittance when pressed for details that the Xingese think rather highly of the man that came to be called the Western Sage. Friends come and gone, come and gone, come and gone. Growing weary of a reverence he'd never asked for nor sought to keep once given it. Going west, and farther west still. Decades spent wandering until Pinako strong-armed him into a friendship that led him following her hangdog to Resembool. Building a house, meeting Mom, falling in love.
On and on, and every word as impossible as the story all told is absurd. But it's true. It has to be. What reason would Dad have to lie to him? He's hardly even real.
"Are you alright?"
Alphonse blinks. Dad's moved to lean against Mom's headstone, slouched like it's become too much to support himself. Like he'd be leaning against her, shoulder to shoulder, if she were still here to be part of this. Dad seems thinner for the telling, scoured and sore, but relieved all the same.
Alphonse musters up a smile. "Yeah. It's just.... It's a lot to take in."
Dad's own smile is the one from the old photographs, small and sheepish, like he knows he's the butt of a joke he can't take offense at. "I'd understand if you didn't believe me."
"I didn't say that." He leans back on his hands, lets his elbows fail. He stares up at the sky, painted deep purple and burnt orange, too early still for the first dusting of stars. "It'd be pretty crazy to believe you," he says. "But I mean, I'm a ghost. It's... it's just a lot. That's all."
He falls quiet, turning everything over in his mind. Dad stays quiet too. Giving him space and time to reconcile. It's an unexpected kindness, and he feels a pang of shame for assuming it should be unexpected. Granny never shied from telling stories about Mom and Dad. He should have kept listening even when Ed turned tail and ran.
The sky deepens. By now the wind has calmed. No one else has come by, nor are their any houses within shouting distance. He tucks his chin to look at Dad discreetly. To drink in the realness of him through his eyelashes. Dad sits so still, carved from stone again. He's powerfully built, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. He'd look like any older farmhand if he weren't dressed like a scholar, his clothes well-tailored and well-cared for. Under a patina of dust his shoes look hardly broken in. His beard is neatly trimmed, though both its styling and his long hair are, from what Alphonse has gleaned reading magazines over any number of shoulders, out of fashion. There's a touch of crow's feet to his eyes, laugh lines bracketing his mouth, a roughness to his large hands that are at odds with how eloquently he speaks. He sits with one wrist perched on one knee, his other leg stretched out before him.
He sprawls the same way Ed does.
"So," Alphonse begins slowly. "You can see me because you're a Philosopher's Stone?"
"That's right."
"Do you know about the other ghosts here?"
"I do."
"Private Shriver? Mister Teller? Nurse Nichols?"
Dad nods. "And the rest, yes."
"Mister Sauter died after you left," Alphonse points out doubtfully, sitting up. "Mister Cuttler too."
"Sauter," Dad says, turning the name over in his mouth. "I know that name."
"Steffie Sauter's one of the other ghosts you'd know. She died in a house fire in 1870. Owen was her husband. He remarried eventually and took over his family's—"
"Boutique," Dad finishes. "Yes, I recall now."
"Did you see him when you got off the train? He died when a group of Ishvalans came here and bombed the station. That was near the end of the Civil War."
"I think I must have. I didn't realize he'd died."
Which begs the question, "What do ghosts look like to you?"
"Like anyone else, more or less."
When the Sauters get upset, they burn. Mr. Teller falls apart in a terrible streak of gore. Mrs. Morgenstern and Mr. Cuttler pale and bloat, spilling a poor shadow of foamy water. Private Shriver's face goes to ruin, and Ada gets flushed and waxen as her fingernails and lips turn blue and her voice goes hoarse and wrecked by the cough that tore her lungs apart. Uschi, Mr. Tafano, and the scritch-scratch ghosts are all too far gone to really show how they'd died, so that just leaves Mr. Beckenbauer as the only one of them unscathed by the heart attack that took him too soon.
Well, maybe. Alphonse only ever looks the way he did the night he died, at least to his own eyes. He's seen the others' gazes drift when he gets in a snit about something (usually Ed), tracing the edges of something he can't see. He's never had the courage to ask what they might be seeing.
Dad sighs, slipping thumb and ring finger under his glasses to rub his eyes. "And Cuttler?"
"Gil," Alphonse offers. "He was a soldier. Granny outfitted him with below-the-knee automail a long time ago. He drowned in a flood in the year the Civil War ended."
"Ah," Dad says. And that's apparently all he has to say.
Alphonse narrows his eyes at him, scrutinizing, calculating. He's tempted to ask—of course, it doesn't matter what he wants anymore.
But—
But it could, at least with Dad. He could ask questions, and be answered. Who's to say he'll ever get an opportunity to talk to another living person again? Why is he hesitating? He ought to just ask—
"What—" He winces anyway, and the wince turns into an irritable grimace at his own hesitation.
Dad's smile is gentle. Reassuring without words, the glint of his eyes nearly a tangible weight. Something about being looked at with so much—intent, forgiveness, love—leaves Alphonse almost dizzy. "It's alright. Ask whatever you like."
Alphonse looks away, out across the rolling hills of Resembool. His home and his purgatory both. The shadows have all been gently smothered by nightfall now.  In distant fields lightning bugs are beginning to blink, blink, blink. Calling out to each other in a language he can't understand. "What's it like not being able to die?"
Dad hums. Thoughtful rather than offended as Alphonse had half-feared he'd be. He seems like the type of man to always turn the other cheek no matter how hard he's pushed. Patient. Well, with how old he must be—as old as the scritch-scratch shadows? Older?—patience is something that he must have had to learn or break otherwise.
"Well," Dad says softly. "It's.... I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't come in handy. But it's not worth watching everyone I love die before me."
"Like Mom. And me."
Dad's face threatens to crumple again, but his voice remains even. "Yes."
Sympathy pangs in the place Alphonse's heart once beat. He thought he'd become accustomed to being dead. The emptiness, the loneliness, the boredom. The threat of inches shaved off his reach every year until one day he's as trapped in as narrow a space as the rest.
Resembool is a little town with little worries and even smaller aspirations. It's unlikely this will change no matter how many decades pass. Only the faces, the fashions, and the brikabrak inside each home are sure to change as generations come and go. He's realized this, rejected the finality of it for as long as he could, but ultimately he's resigned himself to joining the others in their quiet madness. Mr. Tafano, snarling at anyone who comes too near his tree. Ada feverishly taking inventory in the clinic's supply room. Mr. Beckenbauer stood in the corner watching his great-grandson, tapping out a noiseless pattern on his thigh from a time before the radio and the gramophone, a song from when he still lived and breathed and laughed, tapping and tapping and—
Clinging to their coping mechanisms for lack of anything else to hang onto. Breaking under the weight of their own inanity all the same.
His own inhuman existence has only lasted four years, and some days he feels driven half-insane by it. He does everything he can to stave off imagining the centuries that await him still, obsessively follows the townspeople so as not to think of his own inexorable winding down, tolerates even the dullest conversations and radio broadcasts so he doesn't think of the inevitable day Ed will go where he can't one last time, for good.
He wrenches himself out of that dark turn. There are better things to focus on right now. "I don't remember," he admits. "Dying, I mean. All I can remember is our transmutation circle going... wrong."
In the failing light he can just make out Dad's frown. "How do you mean?"
"The color," he says, and describes the event as best he remembers. It's a truncated summary, all the blood and terror wiped carefully away because Dad doesn't need to hear those details. Not when his frown deepens after hearing only the barest outline. "Like I said, I don't remember what happened to me. Everything went dark, and the next thing I was alone in the basement, apart from—from what we made."
"I'm sorry," Dad says after a moment. "I should have been here. To stop you from trying, if nothing else."
Alphonse nods. He'd thought the same a hundred times if he'd thought it once since that night, and now he knows for sure that Dad would have stopped them, if only he'd known he needed to. "Mom used to tell us you were coming back," he says. It's petty to say so, even cruel, but someone's got to. It might as well be him.
Dad does the right thing by flinching. "I... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Alphonse, I—I thought you'd all be fine without me here."
They'd thought so too, even after Mom died. So much for that.
He floats easily to his feet, slipping his hands into his pockets as he nods toward Rockbell Automail. "You should head back. Granny'll be expecting you for dinner."
=
It's strange, watching Dad and Granny have dinner together. How they so easily share new stories and reminisce over old ones. They've been friends for decades and it shows in how easily they fall back into finishing each other's sentences, in how naturally they move around each other, in how Dad knows where the cutlery drawer is and which cupboard Granny keeps her shot glasses. It's strange, because for the first time since he died a living person knows he's there. He feels almost—guilty whenever Dad's eyes flicker in his direction. He feels like he's intruding on something especially private, like he's eavesdropping on the adults when he ought to be in bed. It makes him feel more like a kid than he has in—years.
(Granny certainly wouldn't have recounted that particular story about the man she'd bested  in a drinking contest when she was 22 if she'd known he was there, listening in. At least not without a significant amount of censoring.)
He sits in a corner out of the way beside Den, who remains a coiled, growling knot all evening. The usually even-tempered dog doesn't so much as flick an ear at the sound of his cajoling. "What's the matter with you?" He asks in a huff, running his hands down and through Den's raised hackles. "Easy boy, easy."
Dad's eyes meet his again; when Granny's not looking he twitches his shoulders in a mute apology that baffles Alphonse for a moment until he puts two and two together. Half a million souls squeezed into one man's body, and dogs are sensitive enough to hear ghosts... well. Alphonse might not be able to hear so much as a whisper out of whatever might be in Dad, but clearly Den doesn't want any part of it.
"And I suppose you'll be needing a place to stay while you're in town?" Granny asks with a sly look over the rim of her glasses. Dad in turn smiles wanly.
"Oh, I wouldn't want to impose. The inn will be—"
"Don't even think of finishing that sentence." She grins at him, sharp despite the whiskey she's put away. "The nice guest room belongs to Ed these days, so you'll be in the new one. You've got good timing, you know; I freshened it up just the other day."
The new guest room is Auntie Sara and Uncle Yuriy's old bedroom. Granny, pragmatic as always, had boxed up their things while he and Ed had been in Dublith, selling or freely giving away anything that would do better in someone else's possession. She'd bought new linens, hung up a few paintings bought from a couple local artists, but to Alphonse's eye all that hard work carved something intrinsic out of the Rockbell's home. The room is too ascetic now, too barren. It's nice enough, but there's nothing homey about it at all.
Dad leans back, dismayed. "I couldn't possibly—"
"Oh, look at the time, you daft old man. Do you really want to drag Reuben and Starla out of bed now?"
"You might as well give it up," Alphonse says over Den's surly growling. "There's no winning an argument with her about anything."
This time when Dad's eyes flicker in his direction there's a faint smile to his mouth. "...Thank you."
=
In the morning Dad goes for a walk after breakfast, nodding discreetly when Alphonse asks him if it would be alright if he came along.
(How strange, to feel the need to ask permission for anything. How gratifying, to be answered.)
It looks like it's going to be a clear day, presumably still chilly out as Dad takes his coat from the stand as he leaves. A strong breeze comes and goes like it can't make up its mind, sheeting through the fields along the road. There's a riot of birdsong that breaks apart to angry chattering as Dad passes beneath them. Alphonse watches a particularly furious male scold Dad from the safety of a fence post, all its iridescent feathers puffed up and gleaming in the morning sun. As scared of Dad as Den is, who'd spent breakfast backed into the corner with his teeth bared and his tail between his legs.
"That must get old," he says, nodding at the bird when Dad only looks at him curiously. Had he really not noticed?
"Oh." Dad chuckles. "It can make things awkward, sometimes. There's nothing I can do about it though."
"Can all animals sense you? What you—are, I suppose?"
"Just about, yes."
"Can people? Granny didn't seem to notice anything weird."
"It's not common, but it's possible." Dad's gaze travels east, his eyes heavy with memory. "In Xing some are naturally attuned to the Dragon's Pulse, while others dedicate their lives to learning the flow of it. Alkahestrists, warriors, monks; any who wish to  know the body's strengths and weaknesses see this understanding. These individuals are able to sense the presence of people and even animals around them by the energy flowing through their bodies. So too, they can sense things that go against that natural flow."
Alkahestry had been one of many topics Dad had spoken of yesterday, embarrassed as he'd glossed over the Western Sage's influence on the Xingese practice. Until yesterday Alphonse hadn't even known alchemy of any kind was practiced east of the Great Desert. Then again, what he knows of Xing could fit on an index card with room to spare. Here in Resembool there's been virtually no influence from any quarter but its own. Sure, there are a few odds and ends to be found in a number of homes, purchased by traders from before the Civil War or brought home from larger cities. Some tapestries and small statues, a handful of silk scarves and embroidered slippers. Little things easily fit inside a suitcase. A touch of the exotic in otherwise firmly rural Amestrian homes.
Their home hadn't been different in that regard either. For one, Mom had owned at least one Xingese-styled dress. And for another—
"You had books written in Xingese," he says, faltering as he tries to drum up details from the hazy memories of their home. He can only reach back so far before it becomes so much dreamstuff and hearsay.
"Yes," Dad replies softly. "I did."
"What? Oh! Oh, no no, Granny saved those. There's a crate full of your things in her basement."
It was the only other time Alphonse knows for sure she went to their house after she'd buried Mom again. He knows she'd done it while Ed had been off in Central earning his pocket watch and Alphonse had been clawing uselessly at the invisible barrier all around Resembool. He hadn't learned she'd taken anything until months after, when he'd found her one evening paging through one of Dad's strange old books. As far as he knows Ed still has no idea Granny salvaged anything from their house. Ed had never asked Winry to collect anything he couldn't make use of.
Dad's expression softens. "Did she? I'll have to thank her for that."
"After you figure out a way to explain how you know she did it," Alphonse points out wryly.
Or maybe she'd write it off as one more of Dad's harmless oddities. God knows she puts up with some odd habits  from him, and accepts him for the whole of it with hardly a question or wary side-eye. But then, she's known him for so long; either she already knows all about him or trusts him enough to leave well enough alone. That's just how Granny is, honestly; whenever she sees someone hurting she'll offer them a good meal and her dry humor, and a bed to sleep in too if they need it. She helps others because she can't bear to sit idle, never mind a person's personality or history. No wonder she and Dad get on so well.
It's only as they crest the hill to where their home once stood that Alphonse realizes Dad wasn't walking for the sake of some fresh air. He slows, stops, hangs back as Dad presses on to the soot-blackened fence. Shame curdles within him, visceral enough he very nearly feels it twist a memory of his stomach and winch his throat tightly shut. He tangles his hands together as if he might wring out some fitting justification for everything that's happened these last ten years. He wants to say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we both are, we just wanted to see Mom smile again, I'm so fucking sorry—
But what good would that do?
So he stays silent, choking on guilt he doesn't know how to express to a man he barely knows.
In the end, Dad doesn't ask any questions. He doesn't hurl accusations or fall to pieces again either. In the end, Dad wipes his eyes and turns away from the ruins of their home without saying anything at all.
=
"So," Granny says after lunch, and the way she glowers as she cleans her glasses on the hem of her apron makes Alphonse flinch clear across the kitchen. "Do you plan on sticking around?"
Dad doesn't even bat an eyelid at the ice in her voice. He must be hell in a poker game. "No. I have unfinished business elsewhere. I'll be leaving in a few days. Sooner, if you prefer."
She harrumphs. "Is this business of yours going to take another ten years to sort out?"
"No."
Unimpressed, she puts her glasses on and seems to leave it at that, right up until they've settled on the porch with fresh cups of coffee. Then, in true Granny fashion, she goes in for the kill. "I expect Ed to turn up soon, if you can afford to stay a few more days."
Dad tenses. It's subtle, but Alphonse had caught the grimace with which he'd looked at the few pictures of Ed up on the corkboard. He gets it. There's something off about Ed's smile these days, something that sets a set of teeth on edge, and that's not even taking the new scarring into account. One look's enough to know Ed's been through too much for somebody who's only fifteen.
Granny, shrewd as she is, doesn't miss it either. "That's right. I heard from Jeannie Mandelbaum that Ed and a few other odd characters went out East recently. Practically bought all their horses, and cleared out the general store too."
Dad looks nervous for a moment, then his face smooths back into the familiar mask of passivity. "East? Not to Ishval, I trust."
"Ha! As I hear it there's not enough left of Ishval to still call it that." Granny sneers. She's spent plenty of evenings down at the tavern exchanging vaguely treasonous opinions with the other old timers. Almost no family in Resembool escaped the War unscathed. Far too many headstones were planted in the cemetery during that time.
"No one's sure where they went," she continues, "Only that it was likely they'd be sleeping rough and bringing along quite a lot of water besides. There's nothing beyond the mountains but desert, of course, and all that sand's going to be hell on Ed's automail without proper protection. Makes you wonder why he tore off without visiting me first, doesn't it?"
Dad hums, giving away nothing, and Granny barks laughter again. There's a game happening here Alphonse knows neither the rules nor the score of, but he's pretty sure Granny just took the lead.
"That was some time ago," she adds. "He ought to be back any day. So long as he intends to come back, anyway. I'm sure there's quite a few things he'd like to talk to you about."
Alphonse can't help but snort. "That's one way of putting it."
Dad's eyes flicker between him and Granny dubiously. She grins.
"Ah, like you deserve anything less and you know it. He deserves some answers out of you, don't you think?"
Dad sighs, and nods.
=
There's a comfortable lull the three of them fall into. Routine settles in with its usual mute and mule-headed determination. Having Dad around again, however temporarily, becomes normal.
Turns out, Dad and Granny don't need to say much out loud to understand one another just fine. Alphonse has seen the same familiarity among a lot of the older folks in town; in long-time spouses that hold hands after dinner and have whole conversations without saying a word, and old friends that developed elaborate bartering systems built on decades of inside jokes and IOUs. Dad and Granny know each other inside and out so well that a decade apart has done nothing to diminish their laughter and harmless ribbing.
It makes Alphonse wonder, the second night after Dad's return long after he and Granny had gone to bed, how time might touch him as it spools by. If he'll fall apart like Ada, or if he'll still be able to muster up a joke for Mrs. Morgenstern when loneliness drags her down to the bottom of the river. What was Mr. Tafano like when he first died? What other ghosts huddled in the hills of Resembool long before a town was ever built here?
He wonders what things will be like fifty years from now, and a hundred, and on. The stories he'll tell Uschi and Mrs. Morgenstern and Mr. Cuttler of the going-ons in town. What other unlucky dead will wake to find themselves mute and invisible but to a handful of people who'd died long before. He thinks of the jokes that lose all humor when explained to someone who hadn't been laughing along from the start. The petty slights that no number of years can soothe, the bickering that will continue out of habit long after the first argument's been forgotten. The private things kept between two people; not out of a need for secrecy, but out of a soft desire to keep something good going a little longer.
Well. He's already doing all of that, isn't he?
Fifty years, a hundred, and on. How will Resembool change in that time? Cars, certainly. Plumbing and telephones and electricity in every home too. Paved roads, at least in the town proper. What else might come and go or turn the town on its head?
He's not sure he'd admit it out loud, least of all to Dad, but he's... kind of excited to see what the far-flung future might bring, for all that he'll never get to do more than observe it.
"Pinako," Dad murmurs, drawing Alphonse out of his musing. He and Granny are sat at the dining table, going through a new shipment of approximately eight thousand sizes of screws. She hums absently, so Dad waits until she marks down a number down on the notepad next to her coffee before asking, "Why isn't there a headstone for Alphonse?"
Alphonse flinches.
There's no way Dad doesn't notice.
"...It was Ed's decision," Granny says. Her tone is neutral, her narrowed gaze anything but. "He's convinced he can bring Al back one day, you see."
Dad says nothing, though his eyes narrow in turn.
Granny nods like he's confirmed something anyway. "Yes. He's gone—mm. A bit strange, after everything. Joining the military didn't help that any, but I think in some ways it might have been the best thing for him. Lord knows he's never minded anything I've tried to tell him. Of course, for all that I might think he sounds half-cracked whenever he gets going on all that—" Another nod, this one at the corkboard where all the pictures of Alphonse are prominently on display, "—I never could make heads or tails of alchemy. Maybe he really is onto something. Or maybe not. Maybe he's just dead set on killing himself."
Alphonse flinches again, unable to stifle the miserable sound that escapes him, hating to hear his own morbid fear said aloud by someone so steadfast and reassuring as Granny. If she's thinking the same thing, then there really is no doubt about it. Ed's going to die trying, and there's not one thing any of them can do to stop him.
The seconds stretch. Dad remains silent, passive, counting out screws as if he hadn't heard her.
Granny's measured look deepens to a glower that could curdle milk. "The way I see it," she says archly, "Ed needs someone else he can blame before he runs himself aground. And the way I see it, you're the best candidate for the job. Being his father and all."
"Blaming me won't change what happened," Dad replies coolly.
"He's fifteen, you idiot," she retorts. "Do you think he cares? All blaming himself for Al's death has gotten him is a short leash and a trail of gossip rags hounding his every step. No boy his age should go through half of what he's endured, and all without more than me left to try and talk sense into him whenever he manages to limp all the way out here for maintenance." She takes a swig of coffee like she wishes it were something stronger, then sighs out her anger until she's just—tired. Old and tired and afraid of standing over another grave of someone she loved. "I've known you for a long time, Hohenheim. I know you're a coward and a bastard to the core, but you don't get to run from this. I'll tie you to the goddamn bed frame if I have to."
Dad's eyes flicker to Alphonse as the silence rings. Then he looks away, hunching a little, grimacing at his own coffee mug squeezed in his two large hands. "I know," he says. "I... I know. I'll talk to him."
On the one hand, Alphonse is glad to hear Dad's willing—more or less—to at least stay long enough for one conversation with Ed. On the other hand, oh, but that won't go well.
"He won't appreciate a thing you have to say," Granny warns. God, but Alphonse loves her.
"I wouldn't expect him to," Dad replies, and Granny nods like he's passed another test, and that's the end of that.
=
One of Granny's out-of-towner customers arrives the next day. Krista Lusk's service dog Charlie likes having Dad around even less than Den does, so Granny gives Dad a wad of bills, a grocery list, and a stern order not to come back until suppertime. She locks the front door after she's shoved him through it for good measure, and Alphonse smothers his grin behind one hand as Dad's left blinking in the mid-morning glare without even his overcoat.
"You better hop to it," he says. "She hates it when people don't do as she says."
"I know," Dad says, but he's smiling too. It seems to come more naturally to him with every passing day. Granny's a good influence on him. He ought to stick around for that alone, though Alphonse is beginning to suspect the man's as bad as Ed is at taking care of his own needs before anybody else's. Exhibit A: Dad remains standing on the porch like he doesn't have a lengthy honey-do list burning a hole in his pocket, staring down the dirt road with another one of his impossible to read expressions. His eyes flicker behind his glasses; left, up, then down in a grimace. Chasing after ghosts again.
Alphonse waits. A couple of days of—acclimating, is perhaps the best word—to Dad's myriad eccentricities has been long enough to learn that waiting is better than hounding Dad when he gets distracted like this. It must be terribly noisy in Dad's head with half a million souls clamoring around in there. He's only one more ghost vying for attention.
Eventually Dad blinks, looking down at Alphonse with a shrug of his broad shoulders in a gesture that'd look like nervousness on anybody else.
(Will Ed's shoulders ever be so broad? Will Ed live long enough to find out?)
"So," Dad says bracingly, "You seem to be adjusting well."
Alphonse stares.
Dad stares back.
The unspoken part of this observation—that he's adjusting well to being dead—sits between them like overripe roadkill that Dad doesn't appear to notice at all. Alphonse does his best not to laugh out of sheer disbelief. "You—you're not very good at talking to people, are you?"
Dad shrugs again, slipping his hands into his pockets as he goes down the porch steps. "Not really, no."
Oh boy. Well. Dad's trying, which has to count for something, right? He ought to at least try to meet him halfway.
He steps lightly into the air, staying a few feet off the ground to be at Dad's eye level. It'll be a little less awkward if they happen across anybody on the walk into town this way. Dad looks at him as he floats an easy half-circle around him, eyebrows raised but otherwise perfectly content to give him all the time he needs to sort his thoughts out. "It's not what I expected—" he begins, then corrects himself. "Well, I don't suppose I ever expected anything, really."
Organized religion and all its trappings is a concept he's never put much stock in, too much of a scientist even as a little kid to find comfort in the plans of some abstractly benign celestial being. Especially not any thing that had the audacity to try and justify orphans. He never chafed as brazenly as Ed did when well-meaning people told them God took Mom for a reason, but he'd bitten his tongue every time he'd held Ed back to avoid causing a scene.
"Ed and I, we never talked much about what we thought might come after death. We wanted there to be something, and it made sense to us that there would be more to a person than their physical composition, something more fundamental than a series of chemical reactions. But we never believed in all that, you know—" He waves his hands vaguely to encompass all the fluffy clouds and harps horseshit, as Ed would absolutely call it if he were here for this conversation. He's a little tempted to say the same, but he doesn't want to put his foot in it if it turns out Dad can still somehow muster faith in a higher power after everything he's endured.
"I mean, what Pastor Darbinian talks about sounds nice, sure, but it never sat right with me, and Ed—" He can't help but laugh a little, and is gratified that the corners of Dad's mouth curl upwards rather than down. "Well, if God's real, I don't think Ed would be happy with anything less than a chance to take Him in a bare-knuckle brawl."
Dad's mouth twitches outright, but he doesn't say anything yet.
"We believed there had to be some spark, divine or otherwise, something we could reach and subsequently bind to the body we designed. I guess that's a long way of saying we liked a good ghost story as much as anybody else, but we never believed they were real. Not really. So to wake up like this after we tried bringing Mom back...."
He shrugs off the old horror, the old terror, the bleak realization that he'd died—
Well. It happened, and there's nothing left for him now but the after party.
"It took some adjusting," he adds slyly, and grins when Dad has the decency to look chastised. "But the others all helped me understand what had happened."
Dad hums, almost starts saying something, then notices the cart coming up the adjacent road as they approach an intersection. He purses his lips into another bland smile that doesn't really seem to mean anything at all. Omar Springer gawks openly at Dad, barely reacting to his polite greeting. His son Rick, turned fifteen not even three weeks back, shows off the gap in his grin where Ed knocked out his tooth years ago as he waves. It's only after the dust of their wagon's passing has nearly settled that Dad speaks.
"There's a girl," he says. "A little younger than you. There used to be a gristmill out on the edge of the western woods—"
He's surprised enough to drop out of the sky. "You don't mean Uschi, do you?"
Dad stares. "You know about her?"
"I know her," he corrects, momentarily baffled when Dad only stares harder. "Wh—oh. Right. You wouldn't—I mean. I've got a much wider range of movement than the others."
"Really," Dad says.
"Yeah. I can reach just about anywhere within Resembool's borders. I"m not sure why, but I think it's because of how I died—" Oops, maybe he shouldn't be quite so glib about that. "—uh. I'm the only ghost here who, uh. Was in an alchemical accident?"
That's a stretch by every definition, but for all that he's certain it wasn't a rebound that killed him he still doesn't have a clue what really happened. It's likely he never will. If he's honest with himself he's still grappling with that. Not just not knowing, but being completely incapable of taking any steps towards knowing eventually. He's intangible, invisible, mute, useless, pointless—
Well. He'll get over himself one day.
"I see," Dad says, looking more uncomfortable than ever.
Desperate to pave over that particular gaffe Alphonse offers, "I had no idea anybody used to live out there until I met her. I don't think anyone else does either."
Dad is quiet, again, as he so often insists on being. Then he surprises by offering more than his usual wry noncommittal replies. His tone turns wistful as he speaks, in the same manner as Granny and other older folk in town whenever they reminisce about the days when they were young and the world's hardships still seemed worthwhile. "Pinako and I first came across the gristmill not long after I bought my house here. She was livid that I discovered something she'd never known about so quickly. Of course, I only knew something was there because I saw Uschi flying above the treeline."
Alphonse bites back the urge to ask what year that was because—
Because Uschi can't go that high anymore. Sometimes, not often, he finds her floating on her back, pressed flush to the invisible ceiling that keeps her trapped beneath a clear view of the countryside. She cries if he tries to distract her; this terrible keening that guts him straight through. When she gets like that... well. He's learned the hard way that it's best to let her grieve alone.
"Do you—?" He falters. "I mean, I've never asked outright what happened to her. She gets upset whenever I bring up anything about—that—for either of us. Do you know?"
"It was before I came to Resembool," Dad replies, instead of It was before my time, which is what any normal person would have said. Of course, he's older than the entire country. Talk about putting things into perspective. "I did some digging after I'd spoken with her a few times. The first settlement was located on the western end of the valley. It was all but destroyed in a fire. The Žitnik's gristmill was the first to burn down." Dad hesitates, mouth thinning, eyes flickering. "From what I gathered, her family was targeted by the other villagers."
"What? Why?"
The bland mask Dad's proven to be so keen on wearing slips; for a moment his eyes blaze. "For being different. Why else?"
Alphonse—
—stills.
He knows how isolated he is. How isolated his childhood was. As he is now, he hears and sees all the things the adults do their best to keep from children, yes, but Resembool is only a village, and not a very large one at that. More than that, it's thrived the way it has for generations. It's comfortable with itself, all its people familiar and familial and wary of upset. It's a place founded on traditions and expectations. Worse, it's insular. He knows there had been two Ishvalan families who had lived here before the Civil War that are gone now. The why and how behind their absence is a mystery he's never heard spoken of since his own death, which in some ways is a red flag all on its own. There are a handful of other races and ethnicities besides pure Amestrian here still; there are mixed families, and families that don't attend church the same day as everyone else, and plenty more who’d spit in God’s Eye if they believed there was an Eye worth spitting at. He knows those people are looked at askance, but he's never sensed any malice.
But that isn't the same thing as acceptance, is it?
Broadly speaking, Resembool is as uniform as the minuscule military unit on the northernmost edge of town. The same families have lived here since its founding, the population bolstered by farmhands and soldiers and the rare handful of those who wanted and could afford a fresh start away from the hustle and bustle of city life. He's heard stories of what the Civil War cost so many other places in Amestris, Ishval most of all. He knows, perhaps better than most, that a human life is worth more than the sum of what can be measured and weighed.
Still. Still, it's disheartening to be told that the cruelty and ugliness of the world at large festers here too. That people, long gone now, but people just like those he's gotten to know so well since his death, could look at another person and think something positive could come from murder.
"That's awful," he says.
What else is there to say?
=
The townsfolk all circle Dad like a flock of vultures as soon as he steps foot onto Main Street. Word of his return has clearly been making the rounds, and from the toothsome expressions flashed at him it's not likely all opinions are positive. Not that Alphonse can blame any of them; he and Ed were hardly the only ones to assume Dad had died, and most of the adults are appalled that their parents never married to this day. Scandals, however small, get their mileage here.
Mrs. Cartwright hails Dad from the newsstand with an artificial smile and a lot of arm waving. Alphonse doesn't even bother to stifle his laughter as Dad visibly steels himself before approaching. It'd be nothing short of delightful to watch her put the metaphorical thumbscrews to Dad, but she'll be at it for roughly forever. He can happily spend that time better elsewhere, so he leaves Dad to suffer on his own and hangs a left onto Miron Street.
He goes past the smithy, a rush of clanging and billowing black smoke as always, heading for the poorest part of town. Cris Street, all its houses settling crookedly into their foundations, are some of Resembool's oldest homes. Few of them are kept up half as well as those just a street over. No part of Resembool is impoverished, not really, or at least not to Alphonse's limited experience. Whole swaths of Dublith had been run to ruin by the on-and-off troubles with Creta and the terrible toll the Civil War had wrecked. He knows that for all that Resembool had been targeted directly once, it survived almost entirely unscathed.
That's not to say there aren't those hurting here. Alphonse has gotten to know everyone in town intimately in the years since he died; some better than they know themselves. He's learned that even in sleepy little villages there are people that hurt in ways there might be no way to ever fix.
A prime example of that—and the reason he's gone onto Cris Street—is George Petrescu. Mr. Petrescu only left the Eastern region once in all his 64 years, and that excursion left all but five of his company dead and his leg and shoulder riddled with shrapnel. All he'd gotten out of continuing the family tradition of military service was a few shiny medals, a lifetime of chronic pain and debilitating nightmares, a failed marriage, and a disability paycheck that just about covered the cost of whatever booze might pickle his liver fastest. Once upon a time he'd been a happy husband and loving father; Alphonse only knows he'd had twin girls once upon a time because he's seen the photographs Mr. Petrescu fishes out when he gets too deep into his cups. He's watched the man's face soften to a spongy mess of grief over what he'd had and thrown away more times than he cares to think, and every time he steps inside this ramshackle house he walks away sick with shame and second-hand embarrassment for all that this good man had once been.
He comes back anyway, because no one else bothers to intervene anymore.
Once upon a time, Mrs. Petrescu—Claudia, and Alphonse only learned her name through tutting gossip one night when Mr. Petrescu had embarrassed himself once again two years ago at a wedding he hadn't been invited to—had grown sick of her husband's unpredictable rages and called it quits after he'd hurt one of their girls. Molly or Holly, Alphonse has never heard which, only that Granny had needed to get involved, and that things had grown grim enough that Mrs. Petrescu had decided that the shame of raising her girls on her own elsewhere didn't outweigh whatever love she still harbored for the good man her husband had once been before the military had torn him to pieces. She'd left long ago, before Ed had been before, before even Aunt Sara had come to Resembool to apprentice under Granny. Mrs. Petrescu had left with her girls and all their belongings and gone north, and no one's heard anything from them but hearsay and supposition since.
There are a number of people in town with long, lonesome histories and no one living left to lean on. God knows Granny's three-quarters of the way to joining that number, for all that she'd deny it if Alphonse were capable of pointing it out to her. He worries after her, but at least she still has Winry calling two or three times a week. There are too many unlucky few who don't receive so much as a letter from those who might feel some obligation to keep in contact, but don't for their own reasons. Alphonse has come to know too well since his own death that there are worse things in this world than being invisible, things worse even than being dead. He could still be alive, still be heard and seen and everything living entails, but instead be purposefully shunned by his fellows. He could be shameful. An embarrassment. Someone the whole town pretends its hardest to never notice, never mind he could be stood right in the center of things screaming his head off.
Mr. Petrescu is one of those unlucky few, but it's not his fault. Not really. Not in any way that counts.
Alphonse passes through the front door of Mr. Petrescu's ramshackle home, all peeling green paint and sloughing apart roof. He squints into the darkness until his eyes recall he doesn't need to falter in the half-light. Old habits, still unbroken. Inside is the usual heap of detritus; stacks of broken, useless things that inch higher toward the cobwebbed ceilings with every passing year. Deeper inside the house is a bedroom, and buried in that dim room is a bed—that must surely reek to high heavens if the scrunched-nose expressions everyone makes around Mr. Petrescu when he fumbles his way out of his house is anything concrete to go by—and in that bed is the man of the house himself.
"Oh, for Heaven's sake," Alphonse tuts to himself. "I leave you alone for three days and this is what you do with yourself?"
There's no reply, of course, not that Alphonse expects one. Besides, from what he's gleaned Mr. Petrescu isn't a chatty man even with people who are willing and able to have a conversation with him. He doesn't even spare more than a few grunts for Mr. McElligott or the gaggle of teenagers that run the register at the General Store, and they're the ones he interacts with most not that the Pugh family won't let him patron the tavern anymore.
"Come on now, rise and shine!" Alphonse says, hopping over a pile of something-or-other to kneel on the bed, wiggling his fingers menacingly for his own small amusement.
It's the same thing he does for Granny, and for a number of others besides. Those lonely living souls who sink too deeply into maudlin rituals that hide them away from friends and neighbors alike, clinging to the outskirts of their own lives out of something adjacent to stubbornness and second cousin to habit. He's invisible and essentially mute, sure, but a cold spot like him can be a right tenacious little shit when he's so inclined. He grins as he sticks his hands through the blankets and wriggles them around until the lump on the bed grunts, grunts louder, swears even louder than that, and finally sits up.
Mr. Petrescu might have been handsome, once. Now he's a gray and pallid thing, gaunt in some places and flabby in others, covered all over in bristly gray hair that looks as coarse as steel wool. He snuffles and hawks up something thick into the trashcan by his nightstand. He reaches for the bottle by the full ashtray, scowling when it turns out to be empty.
"Good," Alphonse says. "You ought to get some sun, you know. It's a lovely morning out. A bit chilly, I think, but you'd be the better judge of that. Why don't you go and find out?"
The man looks around his dirty bedroom blearily, grumbling something that's more vowels than consonants and completely unintelligible for it. Then finally he fumbles for his cane and hoists himself to his unsteady feet. It always worries Alphonse terribly, those first few hobbled steps that seem to cost Mr. Petrescu more than he can afford. Sometimes he yelps like a wounded dog and sinks defeated to the floor, and those are days that are better left smoothed over and forgotten. Today is a better day. Not good, no. It would be unkind and inaccurate to ever say Mr. Petrescu has good days anymore. But he gets to the bathroom and sorts out that business and gets dressed in clothes with no obvious stains, and none of it with more than a few yawns and sleepy grumbles.
Alphonse leaves the man to all that personal stuff, more interested to see what the rest of the house looks like. He hasn't been by since Dad turned up and he's curious to glean what he can about what Mr. Petrescu's been up to. Hopefully more than dulling his senses with drink, and if he's not in much pain today that might not even be a fruitless hope.
The curtains are all drawn tightly shut so only thin outlines of gray light spot the living room and kitchen. Spots of reflected light glitter damningly throughout every room he peers, bottles left to gather dust where they'd been dropped. It looks like the house is dry, though there perhaps something was squirreled away in the bathroom because Mr. Petrescu starts to whistle as he gets dressed. That's alright. Alphonse can understand needing a little help to get a hard thing done.
Mr. Petrescu totters out of the bathroom, snuffling some as he paws his wet hair out of his eyes. Alphonse steps close to wriggle his cold hands up and down the man's spine until he jerks absentmindedly toward the couch to fetch an oversized knit sweater. It might have fit him well once, but that would have been years ago. Still, it's another layer to warm him, a bit of armor against the cutting gazes of his neighbors. It's better than nothing.
All told it must take twenty minutes of nagging before Mr. Petrescu gimps outside, but that's the hard part handled. From here Alphonse can trust the man to make his way onto Main Street. There the usual gossips will cluck their tongues to see him buying booze so early in the day, but there will likely be food bought besides and if it's Mr. McElligott or Ilya Jarrett running the register at the general store they might coax him into getting a few other necessities besides. If Alphonse hadn't been by today it's likely Mr. Petrescu would have gone without anything until nightfall, if he'd decided to leave his house at all.
It's the little things that matter. The little things are all that are left to him, and to Mr. Petrescu, and to who-knows-how many people out in the world. He has to appreciate the good he can still do, no matter how small it might be.
The truth of the matter is that there's a kernel of unlovely familiarity he sees in Mr. Petrescu. There are times the man barks insults at his fellows, scowling thunderously when no one has the spine to give him the fight he's angling for. There are times the man can't leave his bed for the pain he's in, bitterly cursing as he kneads the knotted muscles of his thigh. There are times when he stares unblinking at old photographs of what he'd had once upon a time, and his eyes become two nickel coins in his lined face. There are times the man rouses from another terrible nightmare sobbing apologies to the dead, and the rest of those nights are spent huddled near a lantern or sat on the rickety chair in his backyard watching the stars wheel overhead.
How can he see the rut Mr. Petrescu has slowly but doggedly dug himself into and not see a funhouse mirror reflection of what Ed might become one day? If Ed hangs on half as long as Mr. Petrescu, will he retreat into a bottle for comfort? Will his myriad hurts twist him hunchbacked and limping even on his good days? Will he become too bitter and sharp of edge for anyone to consider him worth befriending?
It is so, so easy to see the worst of what Ed might sink to in what Mr. Petrescu's life has quietly fallen apart to. He hopes things will improve for the man one day, that one of the living will take pity on him, that they'll take the time to help him when the scrap of pride and stubbornness he buoys himself with won't let him. Alphonse doesn't want to be the only one who cares. Not when he can do so little to help. He wants there to be others for Mr. Petrescu to lean on, and Ed too, and all the lonely hurting souls beyond his reach.
=
He catches up with Dad in the general store—it is Ilya running the register, that's a welcome relief—and perches on the counter to watch as the pair haggle through Granny's list. Then it's to the café for a coffee and sandwich to go that Dad takes to the station. There's a terrible moment where Alphonse briefly thinks Dad intended to leave now, but then he recalls the long-since memorized train schedule. There's no train due until tomorrow, and it won't leave until the day after that. He watches Dad give Mr. McCahan and Ms. Seelin a bland smile as he passes them at the ticket station, then settles himself on one of the white benches on the platform.
"Well, there's the talk of the town himself!" Mr. Teller calls out cheerfully, floating up off the tracks to land beside Alphonse. He hovers his hand over Alphonse's head, as close as he can get to ruffling his hair.
"Is it as bad as that?" Dad asks.
"If I know the hens are all a-flutter, then you know it's worse."
Dad grimaces. "What seems to be the common thread?"
"Oh, they're all right scandalized, of course. Aston had to break up an argument before it came to blows. I heard it secondhand, of course, but I think it had something to do with your imaginary fortune again."
Dad tuts, though it might be because he spilled coffee on his fingers. "I thought Pinako had taken care of that nonsense."
"Yes, well, you've not been here to remind folks of the facts stood right in front of them. Welcome back, by the way. Missed your arrival with all that hubbub with the hogs."
"Aston, you said?"
"Aston Clark. That'd be the painter. Or, well, I don't know if he'd picked that up yet before you left."
"What the fuck," Alphonse says loudly. Both men blink at him like they'd forgotten he was there.
"Oh," Mr. Teller says, looking guilty.
"Mm," Dad agrees, making a face like he thinks he should be unhappy his youngest has figured out foul language in his absence, but also knows he doesn't have any right to chastise. Good thing he realized that, because at this current moment Alphonse is discovering heretofore unrealized depths of outrage that might rival Ed and Winry both at their most rancorous.
He turns the full force of it on Mr. Teller. "You knew he could see us?!"
"I thought you knew," Mr. Teller says defensively.
"I think I would have mentioned it if I did!"
So it turns out every ghost that was around when Dad left Resembool knew he could see and hear them, and none of them thought this an important enough fact worth mentioning to Alphonse in the years since his death. Alphonse spends several minutes telling Mr. Teller—and Mr. Sauter too, when he decides to turn up with an altogether too cheerful wave greeting for Dad like there's nothing absurd about greeting a living person—exactly what he thinks of this slip-up, raising his voice every time the man ineffectively hides his grin until he's shouting. Dad, as ever, appears unaffected. He eats his sandwich. licks his fingers clean, and only then bothers to intervene.
"I don't think it's something that would come up too often."
Alphonse whips around to give him a distinctly unimpressed glare. "I'm pretty sure it should have." It's not like there's a wealth of gossip for the dead in Resembool to busy themselves with! It would make sense for one of them to mention to Alphonse that his own father would be able to see him if he weren't dead and did end up coming home one day, as turned out to be the case. Torn between keeping the glare on Dad—who's proven thus far to be wholly harmless, and apologetic to the point of second-hand embarrassment—and Mr. Teller—who won't stop grinning like the Winter Solstice has come early, the bastard—Alphonse opts for the middle ground of glaring at Mr. Sauter.
"Hey," Mr. Sauter protests, holding up his hands defensively. "I died after he left. How was I supposed to know?"
Alphonse goes back to glaring at Mr. Teller. "You didn't tell him either?"
"Nope," Mr. Teller says, entirely too giddily.
He throws his hands up. "What's the point of you!"
Mr. Teller pretends grave offense, clutching his chest like Alphonse has put a knife through him and making a whole laundry list of ludicrous faces. "Ah! D'you hear that, Hohenheim? No respect! No respect at all. What did that ol' Pantheress teach him for manners without you there to mind her, eh?"
Dad hides his amusement behind his paper cup. "Pinako's always known better than to listen to my advice."
"Shut up," Alphonse says, stamping on the urge to strangle—nobody, yes, but that’s only on a technicality he hasn’t figured a loophole around. "Stop. For—god, seriously? Don't make jokes. I've been dead almost four years and nobody thought to mention my own father happens to be an—an immortal medium? What the fuck!"
"Well hang on now, scale it back, lad," Mr. Teller says, turning his delighted grin on Dad. "What's this about being immortal now?"
"He's immortal, he's ridiculously old, we can talk about that later," Alphonse snarls. "The subject at hand right now is that you knew he was weird from the start and never said!"
Mr. Teller continues to be an absolute bastard and waves his hands dismissively at Alphonse without taking eyes off Dad. "Hush it, you. You might be able to talk to any ol' stiff you please, but shy of a funeral you and Owen are the only ones I get to talk to, especially after this one took off without so much as a warning! I never mentioned his, whatever, ability I suppose, because I figured the same as you; that the ol' bastard was dead."
"Hey," Alphonse says feebly, and only when it becomes apparent Dad's not going to speak up in his own defense. Being untroubled by some persnickety dead guy insulting him suggests he won't mind Ed calling him the same in a few days, which is good, though time will tell how well being a Philosopher's Stone will protect Dad's teeth.
"I don't make a habit of announcing what I am," Dad says, neutral enough that Alphonse can't tell if he'd like it if Alphonse stopped going on about it or doesn't care if he starts shouting it from the rooftops. Whatever, it's not like more than four people'd be able to hear him if he did that.
"What are you, anyway?" Mr. Sauter asks curiously. "It's been—what, a decade since you left? And you haven't aged a day!"
"Looks the same as when I was still alive too," Mr. Teller adds pointedly.
"It's a long story," Dad admits. "I'm sure Alphonse would be happy to share it on my behalf another time. I'm afraid I need to g—"
"Granny's stuff can wait," Alphonse says. Dad raises his eyebrows doubtfully. "It can. She only tossed you out because the dogs don't like you—"
"Oh, I remember that!" Mr. Sauter says. "My Lalea just about strangled herself on her chain whenever you came near. Course, she didn't like most folk, but she hated you. What's that got to do with anything?"
"Oh my god," Alphonse says loudly. "Never mind all that. Can we please, for thirty seconds, stay on topic? Mister Teller, you knew! Not just that he can see us but also that he's—weird! The kind of weird that made it liable he wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere!"
Dad blinks. "A ditch?"
"We had to assume something. It was that or go with Ed's idea."
"Oh, don't," Mr. Sauter interrupts, distressed, while Mr. Teller—bastard—giggles outright. They'd both been at the station for that cheerful conversation between Ed and Winry. Mr. Sauter steps up, hovers his hands over Alphonse's shoulders like he'd try to settle him if only they could touch. "Al, come now, that's enough. You know Walt only meant well—didn't you, Walt?"
Mr. Teller bobs his head, as sincere as he ever gets. "I can't say what the rest were thinking, but you always look so torn up whenever the topic of your parents came up. I didn't want to be the one to bring your dad up when the chance of him coming back seemed slim to none."
Dad's mouth thins. Alphonse ducks his head to hide his scowl, embarrassed of all things. It's Mr. Sauter who speaks into the empty space couched between them, smiling genially. "It is good to see you again, Van."
=
Ms. Lusk won't be leaving until the train wends its unhurried way back down to Resembool in three days time. Granny, usually happy to let her out-of-towners stay under her roof free of charge—seeing as how they're already paying out the nose for the limbs she's built them—surprises Alphonse when she phones Mrs. Forney to arrange for a room at the inn instead.
"I'd have you here as long as you needed any other time," Granny tells her as she finishes writing up the bill, nodding toward the back porch where Dad stepped out to put some distance between him and the dogs, "But that one's a dear friend of mine and he won't be in town long."
"It's no trouble," Ms. Lusk assures her, and even goes out of her way to stick her head out the back door to wish Dad a good day. Then she gathers her things and her usually even-tempered guide dog Pepene and strides off down the road. She'd come up with an obvious gimp in her ankle but today she strides off whistling. Alphonse likes when Ms. Lusk has to stay a few days. She's always good for a few fun stories. Maybe he'll stop by the inn around suppertime to listen in.
Granny waits until Ms. Lusk is all but a speck in the distance before she goes to stick her head out back. "You can stop hiding now."
"I was admiring your garden," Dad corrects woodenly.
"Get in here, freeloader," Granny says, grinning. "I've got a lot of work to get through today. You can do me a favor and make dinner."
Dad smiles as he comes up the steps, holding the door so both Granny and Alphonse can walk "Any requests?"
"A fellow so well-traveled as you has surely picked up a few novel recipes along the way," Granny replies dryly. "Surprise me."
Turns out Dad expected Granny to put him to the test at least once while he's here, because along with everything else she had him but he'd added a few purchases of his own, paid for from his own pocket.
(How do wandering alchemists slash itinerant scholars earn money, anyway?)
"What are you making?" Alphonse asks, perching up on the corner counter out of the way to better watch him work.
Dad hums. "She's always liked it when I make something she won't find elsewhere. I… hmm. Yes, I think so." He offers a smile in Alphonse's direction. "Do you like eggs?"
"Not anymore," Alphonse replies archly.
"Before, then," he corrects, completely unruffled.
"I did, yeah."
"Would you like to learn how to make a Xerxesian dish?"
There's a note of hesitation in his voice, so soft that Alphonse nearly misses it. But for all that Dad tries to go around like he's carved from stone, he looks away from people he's wary of hurting the same way Ed does. For that alone Alphonse has no trouble hopping down to join him by the sink, grinning up excitedly. Dad falters, then returns it as honestly as whenever Granny startles laughter out of him.
"Well, then. It's a bit like an omelette, or perhaps a frittata is a better comparison…."
Dad doesn't share the same sure grace as Granny or Teacher have in the kitchen. He pauses at odd moments, chops and measures everything as if being even a hair's breadth off would mean having to scrap the whole dish and start fresh, and for all his caution he nearly burns it anyway. Dad's panic is charming in its own way; in how another rough edge in Alphonse's impression of him is smoothed away by watching this impossibly complicated almost-stranger nearly spill his hard work on the floor no less than three times. Still, he lays out a charming spread for two before going downstairs to fetch Granny.
Kuku sabzi, he'd called the dish. Alphonse turns the foreign words over in his mind, regarding it like a clear piece of polished quartz found among river stones. Unexpected and almost alien, but beautiful in a way that demanded curious hands to pick it up and take it home to display.
Of course Xerxes had its own language. He wonders if anyone else survived the country's destruction, merchants or soldiers or a handful of lucky farmhands working just beyond the array. Are there any descendants of those few? Are there any others who still know Xerxesian?
(Has Dad had even one opportunity to speak his native language with anyone outside his own head in four centuries?)
Dad comes back up after a few minutes and, after another of his pauses, moves the pan to the sink to soak before attending to the fresh-brewed coffee. "She'll be up shortly," he murmurs.
Alphonse hums, still half-lost in thought, imagining how Xerxes might have been once upon a time. The faces, the fashions, the brikabrak inside each home. So many dead. So many ghosts caught up in an even smaller space than the scritch-scratch ghosts huddle and weep, an even smaller space than the buried basement he'll huddle in one day too.
"You must miss it," he says. "All of you, I mean."
Dad does not flinch, nor freeze. There's no hunch of his broad shoulders as he stirs in milk and sugar, no tremble to his hands as he picks both mugs up. When he turns, however, his smile is brittle. His eyes are as flat as two bronze coins. "Yes,” he says. “Very much."
=
The following morning Dad goes for another meandering walk. When he meets other people he dips his head and bids them good day and always seems completely immune to the gobsmacked looks he gets as he hops over a property fence or through somebody's garden. Alphonse can't decide if Dad's just that distracted by so many conversations in his head or if he's a fan of petty vengeance. Granny had been thorough on filling Dad in on all the unkind things said about Mom and Ed, and who had said them.
Honestly, Alphonse prefers meandering the countryside with him instead of following behind in town. There, as yesterday had proven, any number of toothsome so-and-so's were eager to know just what Dad's been up to, and where he's been, if he's heard Ed joined the military, has he heard a fraction of the madcap adventures Ed gets into, and isn't it a fright, the military taking him at such a young age? What's the world even coming to, child soldiers and the threat of war on three borders, it'll be Ishval all over again if Bradley's not careful—not that Ed would be shipped to the frontlines at his age, surely things aren't so dire as that! But he must worry, mustn't he? And oh, how terribly sad it is, Trisha and Alphonse, what tragedies, so young when they passed, and he and she never did get around to tying the knot, properly, did they? The poor dear, it was so hard on her after he left, raising two boys on her own, such a strain on her frail nerves, it's no surprise what happened—
On and on they'd gone, killing Dad with kindness until he managed enough feeble excuses and pleasantries to satiate them for the time being.
Yeah, Alphonse is nothing short of relieved that Dad opts to avoid town altogether today.
Dad had told Granny that he didn't want to be in the way while she worked through a small backlog of paperwork, and she'd told him about the box of his things she'd kept without prompting, clearly keen to keep him around. She's coerced a number of people in town to keep an eye out for Ed and bribed a few more to strongarm Ed up to Rockbell Automail if need be. Dad had given her a look like he knew exactly what she was up to, but thanked her anyway.
(Alphonse loves watching them snipe at each other.)
Of course, Dad's real reason to leave the house is so he can talk freely with him. Alphonse didn't even need to ask; Dad had smiled at him first thing this morning, then told Granny he was going to get out of her hair for a couple of hours.
So they walk, and they talk, and every time Dad meets his eye and replies to something he’s said it’s a thrill that nearly electrifies him, leaves him almost-warm and almost-shaky, giddy and tripping over his words.
But.
But there’s only so long he can skirt the edges of what matters, however uneager he is to breach an unhappy topic. He wants to know why Dad left. He’s desperate to know, but terrified all the same. What if Ed was right? What if, despite or because of what he is, Dad fled from the responsibility of being their Dad and into the arms of another woman? Women? What if Dad really has left a string of brokenhearted single mothers behind him, going back farther than even Ed’s cynicism could ever imagine?
What if, what if, what if?
The memory of physical pain is a slippery thing he’s lost his grip on, but grief and fear wound him daily. For all that he yearns for answers, for information and truth and knowledge, this is something he finds himself shying from. He fills the morning, as he has the previous days, with inanity. How did Dad meet Granny? What other countries has he been to? What was the tastiest thing he ate in Hermetica? Did he ever learn to play a musical instrument? Has he ever seen the ocean?
These are safe questions with answers that almost always require lengthy anecdotes to explain the answers. Alphonse exults in the new information, in tales of far off places and wonders that make Dad light up with fondness and nostalgia for people who’ve long-since passed away.
But.
But something akin to guilt gnaws at him the longer he puts off asking the obvious. His time with Dad won’t last forever, this he already knows. Soon, in a handful of days at most, Dad will face whatever cruel—and justified—vitriol Ed will sling at him, then be on his way to….
To what?
He doesn’t know. This is what he’s been too afraid to ask. He’s been too cowardly to ask.
It’s far, far from Rockbell Automail that he finds his spine. He wheels a tight circle in the air to meet Dad face-to-face and asks, “Why’d you leave?”
And Dad tells him. More than that, he tells him why he has to leave again. He doesn’t soften it; the danger, the stakes, the truth of what’s coming. He pays no lip service to the age Alphonse was when he died, speaks as plainly as he would to Pinako or any other adult he trusted. He tells him that nothing short of the fate of the world hangs on the outcome of next spring’s solar eclipse. All of Amestris will die in a handful of moments if the Homunculus isn’t stopped, killed the same way Dad’s people were. He tells him about the array he’s spent the last ten years designing and implementing. How even if he’s incapacitated it will remain a viable—and the only sure—counterattack. Dad tells him he left to save the country and who-knows how many millions of innocents.
It all sounds so absurd, so impossible. The same as every other story Dad’s told him, really. Van Hohenheim: the impossible man. A liar, many would call him. But even as small a town as Resembool has more than its fair share of liars, and Alphonse has seen them all caught in the act time and time again. Dad’s no liar, of this much he’s sure. He’s just a man caught up in a very long and very strange tale.
But a word settles like a bruise he can't ignore. “Incapacitated?”
Dad’s eyes crinkle like he knows exactly where the conversation is going, like he’d much rather not have the conversation at all, but knows better than to try and change the subject. “I’ve never been one for fighting. If it came to that alone, he’d have the upper hand.”
“He’ll kill you,” Alphonse realizes, horrified.
“I’m sturdier than I look—”
“So you’re going to let him keep killing you, or maiming you, or whatever, as a distraction until your counter-array can un-kill the entire populace?”
Dad hesitates, which says enough.
“What about after? It’ll still be you versus him. If all you do is stand there, he’ll just kill you again and again until you stay dead, and he’ll still be there afterward to do whatever he likes!”
“I won’t be facing him alone. My friends—”
Alphonse barks unkind laughter right in Dad’s face. “What use are any of them? They’re dead!”
For a moment Dad towers over him, broad and burly and strong despite the scholarly way he dresses. For a moment his face clouds with anger. For a moment it seems he might shout. For a moment it seems as if he would do more than shout if Alphonse were as real enough to punish as any other child that’s spoken out of turn.
The moment passes.
Dad sighs, his eyes shuttering. Whatever strange anger that filled him gutters to so much smoke. “Are you upset you don’t have a headstone?”
“Wh—? What?”
“I said—”
“I heard you.” He shakes his head, blinking like that’ll bring some sense to this conversation. “Who cares? You’re going to die next year if you don’t—”
“I do.”
“What?”
Dad starts walking again, charging ahead with his long-legged stride through grass tall enough to tickle his knees. Alphonse keeps up for as far as he can. “I care. About you, and Edward. Would you feel more at ease if there were a headstone for you beside—beside your mother’s? Do you think it would help put Ed’s mind at ease?”
“I don’t see how that—”
“Was there anything left of your body? Have you looked?”
“Wh—no?”
“No, there wasn’t? Or no, you haven’t looked?”
“No! I—what does it matter? You should be worried about yourself!”
Dad turns abruptly, fast enough that his ponytail whips over his shoulder. “I’m not,” he bites out. “I’m nothing but a cage for the dead inside me. I wanted to be more with your mother, but I squandered that too. If I’d been here, I could have—” He sucks in a breath, forces it out slowly before speaking again. “I owe you so much, Alphonse. More than I have time to give now. Please, answer the question.”
This—
This means a lot to Dad.
And they’re running out of time. Ed will be here any day, and after that inevitable fallout Dad will leave for….
Maybe for good, depending on how this apocalyptic eclipse turns out. Alphonse is still reeling, still trying to make sense of the scale of such a thing, of the chance that all of Amestris could be gone in the blink of an eye on the whim of a false-faced monster from a fairytale. How absurd. How terrifying.
“I….” He takes an unnecessary breath, watching the wind play with the loose ends of Dad’s hair, ruffle the grass in waves. The edge of the forest is a song of whispers, leaves rustling and boughs creaking. They’re far from any house out here, on the very edge of Resembool’s border. "Whatever happened that night, it wasn’t a rebound. There was nothing left of my body before Ed burned our house down.”
“Was there any blood? Any sign of injury at all?”
“I followed Granny back to our house when she went to bury the thing we made. All that was left of me were my clothes. Not a drop of blood or anything on them. I just….” He makes a popping gesture with his hands. “Pfft. Atomized, or something. I don’t know. What does it matter?”
Dad—
—turns away without a word. He walks off, the tension sloughing off his broad shoulders. “If I’m remembering correctly, there are a few others like you out in these woods. Their Aerugan is a bit older than what I picked up, but last I was out to see them we could get on well enough.”
“They’re back the way we came,” Alphonse calls after him. “South of here.”
“Three of them, yes, but there’s another half dozen just beyond that ridge. All killed in a skirmish around the founding of Amestris. Signore Rovigatti was an alchemist, incidentally, and he—”
“Dad.”
“—has the most fascinating opinions regarding the applications of geothermal energy in large-scale transmutations—”
“Dad.”
He turns back, the picture of surprise to see that Alphonse hasn’t moved from where he’d towered and demanded details and ditched the original topic of conversation entirely. “What’s the matter?”
Alphonse musters up a smile he hopes is more apologetic than grimacing. “I can’t go any farther.”
Between them is an invisible wall that may as well be a yawning chasm. Here they stand; the restless dead, and the wandering immortal.
“...oh.” Dad’s voice is very small. Very quiet. “Well. I…. Pinako probably finished that paperwork by now. Would you like to head back?”
Why is he trying so hard for so little? Isn’t he afraid of the Homunculus? Of the risk of dying? Of what might happen if he’ll fail? Does he even have a plan B? These and a hundred other questions squeeze the empty space where Alphonse’s heart once beat; he’s almost breathless, dizzy with worry for a man he’d thought dead until a few days ago.
But Dad doesn’t want to worry him. Dad’s treating him like a child, like he’s too young for the hard truths of the world. He wants to pretend, and make amends, and be as much of a father as he can be to a ghost.
A part of Alphonse is insulted.
A far greater part of him is grateful for the attempt.
=
While they were gone Granny dragged the crate full of Dad’s things up from the basement. The two of them go through it after lunch, Alphonse overseeing with a grin hidden behind his hands. It isn’t much, in the scheme of things. A shelf’s worth of old books and handwritten journals, a few photographs, an inkwell Granny had made him decades back, a few other odds and ends. Alphonse is really only interested in the books; there are pictures a-plenty of Mom strewn around Rockbell Automail, and plenty more of Mom and Dad in the same photograph book that’s got the pictures of Dad going back fifty years.
The enormous book of mythology that Ed had read obsessively during his rehabilitation is a beautiful thing, richly illustrated and covering a number of cultures. Dad lingers overlong on the scant chapter on Xerxes for Alphonse's benefit; the thinnest by a suspicious margin now that Alphonse knows the truth. It praises the Philosopher for hiding away the Stone that destroyed Xerxes in its hubris. Even the woodcut of the Philosopher is a mockery, broad-shouldered and square of face, lording over a sea of grateful followers. Dad-adjacent in a way that’d make Alphonse's skin crawl if he still had any.
In addition to that there are several other books written in Amestrian, none of them less than seventy years old. History and alchemy, chemistry and philosophy, medical and theological; a traveling scholar's primer on a foreign country's state of mind. There are a few slim volumes in unmistakable Xingese; intricate characters printed vertically in faint red columns, with the odd page filled with illustrations done in sweeping black ink. Alphonse recognizes the art style from a few houses around town, though those wall scrolls are all on wall scrolls all done in far greater detail and by hands of obviously better skill.
There are notes scribbled in the margins of all of them, indecipherable cursive that he and Ed had never been able to make heads or tails of. They'd concluded it was either a foreign language they'd never seen before, or a cipher, or perhaps even both. It's only after going from the medical text straight to the last book Granny saved from the fire that Alphonse puts it together. He doesn't think he makes any noise when he realizes he's been futilely attempting to read Xerxesian since he was five years old, but Dad does give him an appraising eyebrow when Granny isn't looking.
"I remember this old thing," she says, tugging it carefully from Dad's loose fingers and the soft cloth it had been wrapped in. She tuts when the spine cracks loudly. "Lord. How old is this anyway? It looks like it ought to be on display in a museum."
"A little older than you," Dad teases.
"Ha, so half as old as you?"
Dad hums noncommittally, and Alphonse can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Granny leans closer to get a better look at the fully-colored illustration she'd opened to; a beautiful picture of two men in embroidered robes on a hillside. The younger man has been drawn with a beard the exact color of Dad's, and both have unmistakable yellow eyes. "You had this with you when we met. You clucked at me if I so much as breathed on it funny."
"That's because you kept breathing pipe smoke on it," he reminds her. She only cackles again.
"What language is this anyway? Ishvalan?"
Dad glances at Alphonse, clearing expecting—something. What though, Alphonse has no idea. "Xerxesian, actually."
Granny sits up abruptly, all the better to turn astonished eyes on Dad. "You're joking. It's not an original, is it?"
"I came across it in a museum in Almaliq just before I left Xing. Beautiful, isn't it?"
"You stole it."
"I did not."
"So you were more than a drunken scoundrel back in your prime, eh?" She's grinning now, wider the more Dad flusters. "Had to get your kicks with a little art theft, is that it? What other priceless artifacts did you ferret away? Should I have been prying up the floorboards for your secret stash? Are you the one who ran off with the crown jewels of Oirialla?"
“Pinako….” Dad practically whines. It’s incredible.
"That doesn't sound like a 'no' to me!"
"I didn't steal this." He plucks the books out of her reach, giving her a reproachful look over his glasses as he settles it back onto its protective cloth. "It was a gift."
Granny laughs herself straight into a fit of smoker's cough, deep and wracking in a way that always worries Alphonse a little to hear such a loud noise boom out of someone hardly taller than him. "From who? The Emperor?"
"A friend," Dad replies simply, but when Granny looks away to wipe her eyes, still chuckling, he looks over at Alphonse and nods.
"Of course you were friends with the Emperor," Alphonse sighs. "No, wait, I bet it was more than one. How many Emperors have you known?"
Dad thinks about it as he turns to another illustration in the book, this one of another blond and yellow-eyed man on horseback. Overhead, a bird with crimson plumage soars through a faded blue sky. After a moment of consideration Dad taps two fingers on the table, then taps again.
"Four?" A slight shake of his head. "Twenty-two?" A nod.
Alphonse doesn't even know why he's surprised.
Granny, recovered from her mirth, settles her spectacles back on her face and picks up her mug. "Why in the hell would a 'friend' give you something like this?"
Dad's mouth curls in a sly little smile. "He had a thing for blonds."
Granny toys with him like a cat that's caught a bird it hasn't decided if it'll eat or not, and he pretends to be cowed as anything right up until he sees an opportunity to make her choke on her coffee. No wonder she liked him enough to drag him back to Resembool.
=
There's a cold front coming in. The radio promises rain all through the southeastern regions, warning of flooding likely in some areas and reminding of the proper measures that ought to be taken for those who live near bodies of water. It's not likely to rain much here in Resembool, not this close to the cusp of summer, but Alphonse feels a twinge of anxiety all the same. He knows all the parents down in the town proper will be corralling their younger children inside until after the storm dissipates, barring windows and guarding doors from any of the more adventurous breakout schemes that might get drummed up as boredom sets in. He knows that tongues will wag, as tongues do, telling again the cautionary tale of the poor Elric brothers to any who need a sharp reminder of how dangerous the river can be.
Edward: lost a leg, lost his family, lost his mind, likely to lose his life off in the military.
And Alphonse: lost.
It's a shame, really. He loves rainy days otherwise. The smell (such as he remembers), the cool wind (such as he remembers), the peace (such as he remembers). He still has his sight and hearing at least, and he can still appreciate the cool gray skies, the pitter-patter tapping of strange music on rooftops and tree boughs, the flush of new green staining the countryside, all the little mushrooms that spring up like a magic trick. He tries to not let the story the town cobbled together to explain what Ed and the Rockbells won't sour his mood, but sometimes....
Sometimes the silence before a storm is the loneliest place to be.
But he's not alone now, is he?
He glances over at Dad, who appears as lost in thought as he's been. More, probably. Neck-deep in five hundred conversations at any given moment. Alphonse has no idea how he manages to get out of bed every day and pretend that nothing's wrong. Probably the same way so many others out there manage the same thing; knowing that the less attention drawn to oneself the better, no matter the personal cost. It's one thing to be weird or sick or broken; it's something infinitely worse to be caught in the act.
Alphonse looks back the way they came, where the sun's well along its westward arc. Sunset isn't far off. Most of Resembool is bathed in a warm afternoon glow, all its rough edges softened, made distant and easy to forgive. He and Dad had come up from the town proper before this; Dad carefully carries a modest bouquet in both hands. Mrs. Caddeo had made her usual attempts at simpering conversation, but it had run off Dad's cool passivity like water off a duck; she'd left him to browse in an uneasy silence.
Dad only went to the flower shop after Alphonse mentioned Ed's habit of making wreaths. Would it have occurred to him to bring flowers to Mom's grave otherwise?
He supposes it doesn't matter. It's not like Mom's ghost is hanging around to take offense.
There's someone else visiting the cemetery when they arrive. Mitch Corcoran nods politely as Dad passes, murmurs something too low for Alphonse to hear. Dad nods back without replying but doesn't stop. Alphonse is relieved when Mr. Corcoran takes the hint and goes farther down the row where he buried his wife in 1882.
They come to Mom's grave.
They stand there quietly.
Nothing needs to be said. Nothing needs to be forced. This grave doesn't hold Mom. There's a body quietly decomposing under their feet, but her soul's no longer bound to it. Mom's not here. She hasn't been here for ten years. Mom is a few pictures in Granny's collection, a few knickknacks saved from the fire, a few stories, a few memories. That's all.
Mom's gone. This grave is simply someplace for the living to come to grieve now and then, some place tidy to bury what she left behind. Alphonse hopes it's nice, wherever she is. He hopes she's happy. He hopes she's not angry with him and Ed for trying to bring her back. He hopes she's not disappointed they failed.
"I don't remember what she sounded like," he admits quietly.
Dad stirs slowly, swimming up out of whatever mental labyrinth he'd been caught up in. He kneels to place the bouquet before the grave. Alphonse expects him to transmute it into a wreath too, but he doesn't. The paper wrapping crinkles under his rough fingers as he adjusts the ribbon; purple, to match the flowers. Mom's favorite color.
"She never raised her voice," Dad says, standing again. "She never needed to, to get her point across. She had this way of looking at someone she was angry with that would make anyone feel two inches tall."
How many times had she given him and Ed the gimlet eye for making another mess? "I definitely remember that."
Dad glances down at him with a look like he knows exactly what he's not saying, though the knowing twinkling in his eyes is softened by memories. "She loved to sing. She had a real gift for it too, for all that she never had any formal training. She only needed to hear a song once to memorize it perfectly, and when she got tired of whatever the radio had on she'd come up with her own songs, just like that."
Alphonse remembers that too. Not the songs themselves, but the way she sang them. Swaying her hips as she washed the dishes. Spinning circles in the living room with him or Ed stood on her feet. A hum that vibrated down her arm, through her warm hand on his back, and settled deeply in his chest as he fell asleep.
"You met Mom when she was, what, eighteen? Nineteen?"
Dad hums noncommittally, like he's hoping Alphonse won't press for details so he won't have to say something like, Younger than that, but I'd prefer it if the ghost of my dead son didn't think I was a dirty old man.
Which, pfft. It's a bit late for that, not that Alphonse would ever say as such. A 400-something year old man showing interest in anybody can't really help but look like a dirty old man. There comes a point where what matters most is the intent behind the interest. If it turned out Dad really was the type to leave a string of broken-hearted young mothers behind him then sure, Alphonse would have happily shouted himself cross-eyed until Dad displayed appropriate contriteness. But he'd have to be blind to not see the way Dad loved—loves—Mom. He'd have to be cruel to ignore the waver in Dad's voice whenever he says her name.
He doesn't care that Mom had probably only been a handful of years older than Winry and Ed when she met Dad and decided this weirdo was the one for her. He just wants to know more about Mom.
So they talk. Alphonse asks the questions that he never thought to when he was still alive. Little things, little details that aren't—important. Not on any grand scale, not compared to the grand and tragic end of Xerxes, the rich history and political minefield of Xing, the far more literal minefield of Amestris' endless border skirmishes. He asks how they met, and where, and what their first date was like. He asks every single variation of "What was Mom's favorite..." he can think of. He asks if she ever wore her hair short, if she ever saw East City, if she'd ever gotten drunk and done something stupid for the sheer fun of it. Dad seems happy for the excuse to go on about her in detail, perking up even more once Mr. Corcoran leaves and it's just the two of them in the cemetery.
A question occurs to him that he mentally flinches from, but that only means it's too important not to ask. "Did she—want to be a mother? Or was Ed an accident?"
"He was," Dad confirms after one of his usual pauses. "You were too, though we'd settled here by the time she realized she was pregnant again. Ed, however...." Dad chuckles.
"What? What is it?"
"I'm a bit embarrassed now, but—well. Before, when I was still human, I always liked the idea of starting a family of my own. I was a freedman, with a title and more wealth than I'd ever dreamed of having, but it didn't feel right to keep it to myself. I wanted to share—everything with someone. There just wasn't time, not when I worked in the King's court, not so close to.... Well. It was only ever an idle wish. One the Homunculus never did understand. He only saw families as a handy unit of measurement for how humans breed for the continuation of the species—"
"Charming," Alphonse remarks dryly.
"Yes, well. What I mean to say is...."
Dad sighs deeply, considering his words with great care. "When she told me we were going to have a baby, I panicked. The idea of being a father terrified me. Of being responsible for something so fragile and temporary. Or what if turned out as monstrous as me? What if, what if. A baby isn't a choice to be made on a whim one day. Children are—important. Incredibly so. And there I'd gone, all but forcing Trisha into shelving every other potential thing she might be considering to do. Her whole life ahead of her, and she was so young...."
Another sigh, this one a quieter thing. A letting go of what was. Acknowledging that for all that the past can still wound, it can't be changed. "Well, she tracked me down in short order. Scolded me soundly for making her run around in her condition, then asked me what I was so afraid of and tore my every last worry into shreds in no time at all. She told me everything would be fine, better than fine, and of course I believed her. But I was still—nervous. Even after Edward proved to be perfectly human, and you as well, I was still so scared of hurting you boys. She never saw the sense in that. Loving you both was the easiest thing in the world for her."
Dad looks at him, direct and matter-of-fact. No room for argument at all in his eyes. "She loved you boys. Don't ever think for one moment that she didn't."
Alphonse smiles up at him, wishing he could do more than say, "Thank you. Really. I—"
"HOHENHEIM!"
They both twitch, though it's Alphonse who recognizes the furious snarl and the figure in black practically sprinting up the road. "Oh no."
"Is that...?"
"Yup. Sorry, in advance. Or maybe not." He shrugs, flustered. "Just—he's definitely going to keep shouting at you."
Dad visibly steels himself as he turns around. "I suppose that's the least I deserve."
===
((Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and stick with me to the end.))
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yulon · 7 years
Text
The Wrath of Sabellian (pt. 39)
Sabellian meets an old ally. Wrathion wonders about the future. Ebonhorn seeks guidance.
Sabellian and Furywing stared at one another.
The last time he'd seen her, she was on her way to the Black Portal.
He took a step forward.
She took a step back, turned, and fled back through the tunnel.
“Who are you lot, then?” asked the remaining dragon. She stared at them with a dull expression. “More hideaways? No one but her and I for ages and suddenly everyone starts showing up.”
Sabellian ignored her. He leaped from the platform and shifted mid-fall, landing with a crack on the stone below.
Furywing.
He vaulted after her despite the shouts from the others. Within a handful of footfalls he was in the tunnel she had disappeared into.
How was she alive?
He heard her up ahead; Sabellian stormed after her. The tunnel was vast – vast enough that even he was not cramped for space – and dark. This was not Dwarven-made. It felt more natural.
It curved suddenly, and as he turned with it, he found himself awash in light. Sabellian halted so his eyes could adjust. The tunnel had opened into a circular cavern lit with torches, large as an orc and bolted around the walls.
Furywing was at the far corner, her back to him, her sides heaving. She looked the same as she had all those years ago: blueish-black of scale with a blacker underbelly and wings wide and red. She was maybe a little skinnier, making her ram-like horns seem too big for her face and the scars on her tail and back legs deeper than normal. Scars from Gruul's first attack.
“You live!” It was a question, a command, a curse. He stalked forward. “You!”
Betrayer!
Furywing turned to look at him, her gold eyes full of fright.
“I'm the only one left,” she said. “Please -”
“Father?”
Sabellian stopped. He flared his nostrils.
Samia walked from behind Furywing in her human guise.
“Father?” she repeated with increasing disbelief. “Wait – don't kill her,” she added with a flash of hurry. “Just listen -”
Sabellian's anger and revulsion eked away at once.
“Stupid girl!” he interrupted with a snarl. “I told you to stay home!”
He shoved past Furywing, the traitor, coward, and swept out his paw to pull Samia close to him.
She looked whole. Uninjured. She looked maybe a little annoyed at being handled around like a whelp, but – she was safe.
Safe.
“Well, I had to come rescue you,” she said, her voice wavering. “That didn't really work out like I wanted it to, though.”
He snorted smoke.
“Clearly not,” he said. “What are you doing here? Why did you go with Serinar? You despise the idiot.”
“I thought you were dead.” Samia looked up at him, and now he saw the reason for her wavering voice: her face was full of the same relief he felt, her eyes disbelieving. “Wrathion told us he killed you. I thought he might be lying... but I never found out because of the Dragonmaw.”
Sabellian softened. He ran a claw down the side of her face with a gentleness his wicked talons, each large as a man, belied.
“He certainly tried,” he said. “And certainly believed I was dead. But I am here, as are you. We are safe.”
She smiled. Her expression grew a bit more controlled, a bit more in-check.  It was like watching a reflection.
“You really shouldn't blame me for coming after you,” she said, and gave him a flat look. “You were late in coming back, and after the Blacktalon Agents attacked Blade's Edge, I knew I had to do something.” Her face soured. “Or try to do something. Father, I'm sorry, but... I don't know what happened to Pyria. She was with me and Vaxian and she disappeared after  the Dragonmaw caught us.”
“Pyria is with me.”
She sucked in a breath. “What? She is? How? Where'd you find her?”
Sabellian explained their journey into Blackrock, the dragonkin, and finding the drake injured but alive. She listened silently, her eyes intent and unwavering. When he finished, her shoulders seemed to melt into her back and she sighed a deep, relieved sigh.
“Thank the Titans,” she murmured and ran a hand through her hair. “I knew she might be okay. I hoped... whatever. I just don't understand. How did she track us?”
“I don't know. She'll have to explain when she wakes.” He shook his head, and with the movement shifted down into his human form to be on her level. He took her shoulders in his hands and kept her at arm's length. “Samia. Whatever the case, I have come for you and Vaxian. We're going home.”
“Home?” she repeated. “What about Wrathion?”
“He's been taken care of.”
She looked at him with a hungry glint. “Is he dead?”
“No. Something a bit sweeter, however. He's here with me. You'll have time to ask him about his punishment, I'm sure.” He frowned. “But you didn't answer my other question. Why did you come here with Serinar? What happened at the Vale?”
How foolish of him. In his relief he had forgotten his earlier fears about her possible corruption. How could she have escaped an explosion of Old God energy and be left untouched? She was acting normal, acting herself, but that's what it was like. You acted yourself until you turned and started killing because you simply felt like it.
Samia grunted softly. “We didn't have much of a choice with Serinar,” she said. “When the Vale exploded... we escaped, and Serinar told us he knew somewhere safe where we could rest and recuperate. I went here for Vaxian. His wing is broken terribly.”
“You could have carried him home,” he insisted. He peered down at her. Studying.
“But we still had to find you – dead or alive,” Samia said stubbornly. “Not to mention find Pyria and the nether-drakes. I wasn't going to slink home defeated, and – the nether-drakes! Was Pyria alone?”
“When we found her, she was,” he explained dismissively. “Though she said the nether-drakes were with her when they entered the mountain.”
Samia frowned, her brows furrowed. “So they could be in here somewhere.”
“Maybe.”
“Father! Didn't it hit you to look for them or ask those dragonkin?”
“I wasn't about to go on some wild hunt for dragons I care little for,” he said. “I'm only here for you and Vaxian.”
Samia looked like she had a lot to say about that, the way her face screwed up. Before she could berate him further, Sabellian swerved.
“And you are feeling... well?”
She gave him an odd look.
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Samia's face hardened. “I've heard nothing.”
“You're certain?” he pressed. “Nothing?”
Samia frowned at him irritably. “I think I would know if I was corrupted or not,” she said. “I'm not one of the younger ones. I remember what it feels like.” She softened. “I'm surprised, too. The Vale – Father, it was unlike anything I'd ever seen.” Her gaze grew distant, as if she was back there in the smoke and destruction. She shook her head. “That, and being down here. Uncle Nefarian's old laboratories are just a mile away, did you know? I haven't dared try to get closer, though. I don't want to see any... oddities.”
“Wonderful.”
She smiled apologetically, but it fell from her lips almost at once. “I'm worried about Vaxian, though. He's weak and hasn't woken up very much. Seldarria's trying to take care of him -”
“Who?”
“Seldarria,” she repeated, then caught herself and said: “Oh. She's the other dragon here with Furywing.”
That must have been the dragon at the entrance.
Speaking of Furywing – he glanced around, and saw she was pressed close to the opposite wall. He growled, though she wasn't looking at them.
He felt a hand on his arm and looked at Samia. “Try not to be too hard on her,” she said quietly. “She and I have spoken a lot since I came here. She's really just the same as before.”
“A coward?”
“Father,” she said sternly. “Try to be nice for once.”
He grunted.
“Let me talk to her,” he said. “Alone.”
“Sure.” She went to move away, but Sabellian caught her and pulled her into a tight embrace. She stiffened against him in surprise, but a heartbeat later pulled her arms around his back and returned it. He squeezed her and closed his eyes. Soon this nightmare would be over. Soon they would go home, to the others, to their family, the only thing that mattered. She was safe. His eldest daughter, the sole survivor of his first clutch from Gruul's assault, alive and whole and safe.
She was the one to pull away first. “Aw, Father,” she said. “You old soft-serve.”
He grunted again, embarrassed. “Go on, then. Let the others know I haven't fallen into a trap back here.”
Samia nodded. Before she left, she squeezed his arm and said: “I'm glad you're alright.” Then she was gone, her footsteps echoing away through the tunnel.
His good mood faded as he was left with Furywing. He could smell her nervous energy.
“I know you must be angry at me,” she said. “And I'm sorry. I didn't have much of a choice when we left.”
Sabellian turned and shifted back into his true form in the same motion. He growled and flexed his claws. “Because your other little friends wanted their old life back? We had orders.”
Furywing's eyes darted from side to side. “It was a mistake.”
Sabellian growled again. “A month after you left, Gruul came and killed half of Deathwing's eggs, seven of my children, and Kesia.”
He took some amount of pleasure from her pained look.
“Kesia is dead? I heard rumors about Blade's Edge, but I...”
“I'm sure what you heard is true,” he said. “Where are the others?”
“They're dead.”
This time, he took quite a lot of pleasure from the admission.
Who was the fool now?
“Obsidia died in the Twilight Highlands,” Furywing murmured. “Kill by mortals. She was one of the last broodmothers alive. And Rivedark was killed at Wyrmrest during the Hour of Twilight.” Her voice faltered. “Insidion... Insidion was killed by a group of Bronze near Dustwallow.”
“A shame,” he said. “Insidion was one of the decent ones.”
She looked at him like he was unsure if he was mocking her or not.
“How did you come to be here, then?” he asked, his tone dismissive as it was uninterested.
“I thought this place would be abandoned after Nefarian fell again,” she explained warily. “I found Seldarria here. We've been here since the end of the Cataclysm.”
“It never occurred to you to come back to Blade's Edge?”
“What for? We all thought you had died when Gruul came again. We heard no word from you, no message when your Father returned...” She picked at her front talons. “Especially after we heard about the dragons impaled on the mountains.” She bowed her head: a subtle way of averting her eyes. “I'm so sorry. I never wanted -”
“Don't apologize to me,” he snapped. She flinched. “You knew as well as all of us did that you were leaving my brood and I for dead.”
Sabellian had known his father's orders to stay and guard the eggs – eggs that would one day become the Netherwing – meant nearly certain death. But with the others there – four highly trained bonded pairs of dragons – he'd thought they'd had a chance. That together, they could use their combined wit and force to outsmart (not very difficult) and outfight (a little bit more difficult) Gruul the Dragonkiller.
Then they'd abandoned him.
All because they missed their old life, no matter if it meant them being corrupted. No matter if it meant any future clutches they had would be born as servants in the thrall of the void.
Cowards. Betrayers.
Furywing lifted her head. She met his eyes. “My consort wanted to go. I had to make a choice, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, and because of that choice, both of our consorts are dead.”
“None of us can see into the future!” she cried. Her wings flared up around her, and the light of the torches caught her red membranes. It illuminated the reason for her name: root-like striations through the webbing, deep, deep black and fearsome, flickering in the glow of the torches. The black seemed to shimmer in the glow, ominous like spilled blood. Furywing.
“All I knew was that I felt lost all the time. Aimless. We were there to protect the eggs, but... but it wasn't the same... I didn't feel like myself.” She shook her head. “And Insidion felt the same. We just wanted to go home.”
“And be corrupted once again,” Sabellian said, his voice dripping with malice.
“At least it was normal for us,” she said. Her face was full of shame. “And least it gave us purpose.”
“Yes. And now look where that grand purpose has led you! Hiding like a rat in the dark!”
“And you're here with me,” she snapped, then softened. “We can't all be strong like Samia or you or how Kesia was. I am alone. But at least I still feel like I'm doing what I was made to do.”
“Being a monster?”
She looked at him in the eye, unwavering. “By following what the Black Dragonflight has always been. At least I know what I really am.”
The implication was like a kick in the snout. How dare she? His fins flared high on his head.
“All you are is a coward,” he hissed. “Enough of this. Stay out of my way. You owe me that much, worm.”
Furywing wilted at once.
“I suppose it is.”
---
Sabellian heard his daughter's voice far before he came back to the main chamber.
“I should kill you right now, you self-righteous little prick!”
Sabellian emerged into the cavern. In the center, Samia was looming in front of Wrathion, one finger pointed at his chest. Seldarria watched the from the side, still near the tunnel she'd poked her head out when they'd arrived. Left stood behind the ex-Prince, her hand gripped right on her crossbow. It was loaded.
“I didn't know Goya was going to trap us,” Wrathion was saying. “I hardly -”
“You were going to kill us anyway, prat!” Samia jabbed her finger at Wrathion's chest. Left growled.
Sabellian came to her side and shifted into his human form. He placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Don't bother spending your anger on him,” he said. “He's already received his punishment and more.”
Samia glared at the whelp. With one last, lingering scowl, she moved away. But not before stomping on his foot. His face lit up red with pain but he bravely stifled the yelp Sabellian saw balloon in his throat.
“So you truly are the Black Prince?” Furywing asked from behind them. She'd crept after Sabellian after they'd spoken, and now sat at the tunnel entrance, keeping as far away from Sabellian as she could.
“Just Wrathion, now,” Wrathion said stiffly, and cast an annoyed look at Sabellian.
“Nice new outfit, by the way,” Samia said. “You look like a homeless pirate.”
“And you look like a poor adventurer!”
“You're going to try to kill us,” Seldarria butt in. She was an older dragon, maybe seven thousand years old, with a generous amount of plumpness around her ribs. Like Furywing she had no fins, but did have sloping horns that swept close to her neck and then curved skyward at the points. They were quite unique.
“No,” Wrathion insisted. “I am only here to -”
“Kill us!”
“No!” He looked exasperatedly at Sabellian, who stared back at him. This was his reputation; he was going to have to deal with it himself. The whelp glared at him, then looked back at Seldarria with a calmer, more sly, expression. “I am here to help Sabellian get his son and daughter. It's a contract I'm under. Unfortunately.”
“I don't trust you,” she said. “You all come waltzing in here with Nefarian's brother just to get a couple of dragons who could just fly away by themselves any time they want?” She looked at Wrathion, her distrust as palpable as a smell.
“It's true, Seldarria,” Sabellian cut in, tiring of the tirade. It sounded like someone had filled in the dragon what they were doing there. “And don't worry yourself over him. The contract is true as well. He's more of a prisoner than a helper, anyway.”
“I don't see any chains,” she said, but without as much venom as before. She watched Sabellian warily. She saw him as the real threat, he realized – not Wrathion. Not as much, at least.
And why wouldn't she? She was sequestered near Nefarian's old lair that Sabellian, being the remaining son, could stake a claim to if he wanted. Not like he did. No doubt she worried their time here was up.
“They're magical in nature,” he said. “We're only here for my children. Nothing more.”
Seldarria twitched her claws. She glanced back at the nearest tunnel.
“So you'll be leaving soon.”
“Tonight, if possible.”
Samia straightened. “What about Vaxian?”
“What about him?”
“He can't travel.”
“No, I assumed he'd still be able to fly with a broken wing,” he drawled irritably. “I was going to carry him.”
“But he has an infection.”
“You didn't mention that before,” he said, eyeing her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was busy being overwhelmed because my father was back from the dead.”
Sabellian scowled. She was certainly pushing her attitude.
“Luckily we have a healer,” he said and nodded at Ebonhorn.
The tauren had said nothing since entering the cavern. At least that Sabellian had seen. He watched with a keen eye as they had spoken, but when spoken to, looked uncomfortable.
“Somewhat,” the tauren said.
Samia frowned at him. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Spiritwalker Ebonhorn,” he said. “Ebyssian.”
“Never heard of you before,” Seldarria said. “And you look like a cow! Very charming, dear.”
Ebonhorn pinned his ears back and snorted smoke.
“He's here to help like the boy is,” Sabellian said. “Excuse us for a moment, Seldarria.”
She rolled her shoulders back.
“Oh, alright,” she sighed. “I have to check on something anyway.” She glanced at Furywing before rising and going into the cave she'd come from before.
Furywing was too far away for hear to overhear. Sabellian flicked a hand to beckon everyone closer.
“What do they know, girl?” he asked, looking at Samia.
“As far as?”
“Does Seldarria know what Outland did for us?”
“It never really came up,” Samia confessed. “Furywing does. At least, maybe... she might think we're already corrupted now that we're back, though.”
He'd thought the same. She seemed to hint that she knew he was pure – for the time being – but she could have just been talking about the past.
“Good. We're going to pretend we're just like them.” He eyed Wrathion. “Though that won't help you much. That bird has flown.”
“Corrupted?” Ebonhorn echoed. “Why?”
“I'm sorry, who is this, actually?” Samia interrupted, pointing at Ebonhorn.
“Your uncle,” Wrathion said, smiling when Sabellian gave him an evil look. Samia looked at Sabellian, then at Ebonhorn, then back again.
“Wait. What?”
“I'll explain later. Or he can tell you, I don't care,” Sabellian said irritably. “Now, as I was saying. The dragonkin that attacked us knew our... condition. If Furywing and Seldarria come to know – I don't feel like fighting.”
“We didn't even tell the dragonkin who were with us,” Wrathion said. “They just knew. No doubt these two know already. They were probably warned.”
“The Old Gods planted the thoughts in the dragonkins' minds,” Sabellian said dismissively. “They're lower life forms; it's easier for them to be swayed. It isn't as if all Black Dragons know what the Old Gods know.”
Wrathion looked unsure. And uncomfortable.
“But they can still be swayed,” he said.
“Yes,” Sabellian said. “But it'll probably take more time. The Old Gods ramp up to things like that. It starts with paranoia, intrusive thoughts – they won't suddenly snap and foam at the mouth calling for our blood like those stupid dragonkin.” A prickly feeling rippled up his skin every time he said Old Gods. Down here, surrounded by the earth, he felt as if he were invoking them with every utterance of their names, even a broad a term as that one. “Of course They know we're here. But the more quiet and less suspicious they are, the better we shall fare.” He glanced at Samia. “And the quicker we leave. They don't like not having control of their toys. Understood?”
They all nodded, though Wrathion looked troubled.
“Where is Vaxian, then?” Sabellian asked Samia.
She nodded to the western-most tunnel. “Leads up to a lead that overlooks the cavern. I can lead you to -”
“No. Stay here and watch the boy. He can explain what you missed. Ebonhorn, come with me.”
The tauren grunted.
“Yes, leave me with the dragon who wants to kill me,” Wrathion mumbled.
“Oh, yes, as for you,” Sabellian said, looking at the boy. “You only said you felt Vaxian and Samia down here. How did you miss two full grown dragons and nearly fifty dragonkin?”
Wrathion's face fell. “These two must've been blocking me. Somehow.” The ex-prince looked even more troubled than before. He picked at his sleeves and looked around, as if wondering if there were any more lurking dragons in the dark.
“And can we expect your next tantrum because you found more family members you thought you were dead?”
“Oh, not to worry,” Wrathion drawled. “I'm getting rather used to it.”
His smile was strained.
“Rexxar, come with – where is he?”
“Up here,” called a gruff voice. Sabellian looked up. Rexxar was sitting on the second level of the cavern: the level they'd arrived on. He was still standing on the ledge with Gravel. Keeping guard, perhaps.
“Come down here. Bring Pyria with you.”
Rexxar gave a curt nod. Within moments he was at Sabellian's side, and without so much as a gesture Misha trumped out of the shadows. On her back lay Pyria. She was small enough and the bear big enough that it was comfortable for the both of them.
“Oh, Titans,” Samia said. She rushed forward and held Pyria's face in her hands. “I should have been there to help. She was the one who freed us in the first place from inside the Black Market.”
“Ebonhorn will get her up soon enough,” Sabellian said. Ebonhorn wrinkled his nose. “Let's go.”
Sabellian turned and started toward the tunnel Samia had pointed out. Rexxar, Misha, and Ebonhorn followed.
“You don't trust her,” the half-orc said when they were out of earshot and Ebonhorn was far enough away from them he probably wouldn't hear. The innards of the tunnel were almost identical to the one they'd come from: all black and red rock. Dried magma oozed along the path.
Of course. How hadn't he thought of that before? They must been in an emptied lava belly. The tunnels were where the lava had flowed, and the main chamber where it had pooled. Maybe it had been emptied by the dwarves millenia again so they could build their now-ruined settlement in the main chamber, or to direct the lava to a place that would suit their needs better.
“No,” Sabellian said. “No yet.”
“She did not seem...”
“Insane? No. But that's not quite how it works.” He paused. It was always hard to explain what it was like to others, and something he did not entertain much in speaking aloud. “It's not as if you suddenly become someone else. You start having thoughts. They seem like yours, but they're not. And then one day you may look at, say, your little bear there and think slitting her throat might be amusing.”
Misha shook her head and snorted.
“You never think you're insane,” Sabellian went on in a slow drawl. “You're just going what you think you should be doing.”
“Even if it means doing something you'd never do.”
Sabellian snorted, sounding quite like Misha. “Yes. Though you only realize that after the corruption leaves you. If it ever does.”
Like when he arrived on Outland. Realizing his entire life was a lie. Realizing he was just a husk, a puppet.
“I'll kept an eye on her,” he said. “And the others. No matter Vaxian's condition, the longer we linger, the longer They have time to do something on their behalf. More than they already have.”
---
Vaxian was just where Samia had said he would be.
The chamber was long but the ceiling very short – short enough the ears on Rexxar's wolf-helm brushed the top. Pieces of dwarven architecture lay in a heap along the far wall: columns, bricks, even doors, among other things. It might have been from the ruined stone town from the main chamber. Some of the longer, flatter pieces had been put together to make beds, however, and on some lay a cushion of thin dry cave moss. On the one closest to the western wall lay Vaxian.
He was sleeping soundly on his back, one hand flat on his chest which rose and fell in steady breaths. Even though he knew to expect him, Sabellian felt a rush of relief. Another child safe.
Rexxar said Vaxian had gotten his wing broken fighting off the Dragonmaw so Samia could escape with the others, though she hadn't left him. A flicker of anger rose in his chest. That was not like the Black Dragonflight; Nefarian himself had tried to kill Sabellian dozens of times. They could be more than their curse that his father had given them. Furywing was just weak.
Sabellian went over to the dragon and placed his hand on his forehead. A little colder than it should have been. He frowned thoughtfully.
Next to him, Rexxar set down Pyria in the empty bed. She didn't stir.
“He smells like a roast,” Rexxar rumbled.
“Herbs,” Sabellian said distractedly. “Cinderbloom, Frostvine. Some sort of lotus.” He lifted his hand from Vaxian's forehead. “At least they're treating him for whatever infection he has.”
“You doubted as much?” asked Ebonhorn from behind.
So he hadn't overheard them about Sabellian's doubts about Samia. Or he had, or was playing dumb.
“I only have some suspicions,” Sabellian said. “Come take a look at him.”
He moved away. Ebonhorn took his place.
So fixated on Vaxian before, he hadn't noticed the opening right to his side. It acted more like a window than anything else. A quick glance outside shown it overlooked the main chamber and allowed a nice airflow. Good for a makeshift sick bay. Better than stale air.
“The Dragonmaw should have suffered more losses than they did,” Rexxar growled off to the side. “They are brutes. Even the lowest beast has greater valor than him.”
“Their deeds will catch up to them,” Sabellian rumbled. And indeed they had, if Wrathion's reports from the Vale were true, and much of their “catch” had gotten away. If only they had the time, and Sabellian the energy! He'd make them pay even more himself.
But he had a brood, other children, to go back to. And at least Samia and Vaxian had escaped and were alright, now.
That was all that really mattered.
Ebonhorn was kneeling near Vaxian's cot. He turned the dragon on his side to inspect his back. It'd been ripped open to reveal bruises black and yellow, marring his brown skin with vigor.
“How is it his injuries manifest in his human form?” Rexxar asked. “If he lacks wings in it?”
“The pain would be in his back, at the core of where the wing joint would sprout during transformation,” Ebonhorn said without looking up. “You can't escape the pain just by shifting into something else. And he shouldn't be in this form to begin with. It's stunting healing.”
Sabellian crossed his arms over his chest. That was a good point.
“Get Pyria settled first,” he said. “Then we'll wake him and have him shift to assess the real damage.”
Ebonhorn looked at him. “I told you I'm not the best healer.”
“But you're our only healer.” He wished, for the first time since this nightmare began, Anduin Wrynn was here. “I'll aid as I can with my alchemy, though my reagent stores are... limited.” That was being generous. He maybe had enough to make three health potions, if that. “Rexxar. Do me a favor and ask Seldarria what herbs she's been using. She must have some stored away.”
“I think you owe me many favors after this is over,” the half-orc mused. Sabellian mumbled. Rexxar snorted in amusement at him and left with Misha.
Silence fell over the chamber. Some distant voices rose from below, but they were too far away that Sabellian couldn't hear them clearly. He thought one might have been Samia.
After a time, Ebonhorn lay Vaxian on his back and stood. He readjusted the moss bedding.
“Why are you here?”
Ebonhorn looked up at him.
“What?”
“At Blackrock.”
Ebonhorn gave him an annoyed look. “I told you. A vision from the Earthmother -”
“I know that,” Sabellian said. “But you came all this way because a dream told you to?”
Ebonhorn leveled his eyes at him. “It was more than a dream,” he said. “I've never felt such urgency in my life.”
The Mountain heaved on roiled on the horizon, as if the very earth was trying to push it off her back. There were eyes and shadows that grabbed, but the Earthmother urged me to delve inside. And now I’ve found you all. I don’t know if healing the drake is my only purpose for being here, but - I suppose I’ll find out.
Sabellian gazed out of the window. “It doesn't sound like any of such doom will come to pass,” he said, but even as it left his lips he knew it was only because he hoped it was so. He had Wrathion, he had his missing children. He wanted no more threats moving over his head.
“I could have misread the vision of darkness and a thousand watching eyes,” Ebonhorn rumbled flatly.
“It sounds like a vision from the Old Gods themselves,” Sabellian said. He remembered saying the very same thing to Wrathion when the boy had explained he'd had visions of rivers of blood from Azeroth and the Legion's coming invasion. Such doom, such paranoia. What the Old Gods thrived on. “Do you not find it odd that you were led to a pit of your own corrupted kind?”
“You are a very paranoid dragon,” Ebonhorn said.
“It's kept me alive.”
“Maybe,” the tauren replied. He joined Sabellian at the ledge and took off his skull helm. It revealed an aged, graying brow and scars etched in places the bones had hid in their shadows.
Together they watched the dragons below: Seldarria back again, curled up close to her tunnel, Furywing speaking quietly to Samia off to the side, and Wrathion standing on his own, looking around with a suspicious, wary expression.
“My vision led me here to my corrupted kin for a reason,” Ebonhorn said quietly. “Already I find myself needed, even if it is something I'm not trained as well in.” He paused. “And it is not the dragons below that I worry about.”
“Then you and I have that in common,” Sabellian said. Seldarria, Furywing – they were just prisoners like every Black Dragon before them, and every Black Dragon to come. The true fear was those lurking below. The thousands of eyes.
They stood in silence for a while, watching the remains of their Flight below.
“Are we what you imagined?” Sabellian asked.
“I don't know,” Ebonhorn rumbled. “I never tried to seek out my own kind because I feared rejection. I feared I would be attacked because I wasn't like them.” One of his ears twitched. “I decided it wasn't worth it, in the end. How could I find comfort or companionship in a Flight built on the darkness I always lacked?” He put his hands on the ledge and heaved a sigh. “But this... there's such an air of desperation and sadness. It's... disheartening.”
“Pathetic, you mean.”
Ebonhorn snorted. “I was trying to word it more kindly,” he said. “But, yes. That as well.”
“You are much different than the rest of us if you're actively trying to be kind. Black dragons don't do well with that.”
“The corrupted don't,” he said, then caught himself. “My apologies. I didn't mean -”
“Don't bother yourself. I know what I am.”
Or what he could be.
But Furywing... perhaps she was right.
Deep down he was just like her. And nothing would ever change that.
But the tauren was right too. The might Black Dragonflight now reduced to this: hiding in the dark, waiting to be hunted. Father would be ashamed.
And he should have been.
He had helped do this to them. He had been the truly weak one. He had failed them all. And when the Aspect fell, the rest of them had. If you were the Aspect, the rest of the blood followed. No matter their choice.
What did Furywing and Seldarria even hope to do here? Hide and survive? Did the Old Gods want them to wait, to gain power, until the mortals were weak?
But there were only two dragons, and only fifty dragonkin. They'd be dead within a week – if not less.
And this... this was the fate of his own family. Come here to grow corrupted and die, or die when Outland finally fell apart and they fell into the Twisting Nether.
Sabellian's shoulders fell. He was only saving his children so they could die at a later time, far before they should pass.
Desperate and pathetic indeed.
He was no better than the rest of them.
“It was a Titan artifact.”
“What?”
Ebonhorn looked down at his hands. “It was a Titan artifact that cured me of corruption.”
Sabellian could have laughed. Of course it was. “As with the boy,” he said. Ebonhorn looked at him sharply. “Are you some stitched-together abomination too?”
“... No,” Ebonhorn said.“When the tauren and drogbar raided Father's lair, they found the Hammer of Khaz'goroth. Deathwing had been guarding it for centuries. When Huln got a hold of it, he banished Father away from the Lair forever.” He paused for a long time. “Afterward, when they were clearing the rest of the caverns, they found a clutch of eggs.”
“The ones in stasis.”
Like the ones Deathwing had given Sabellian to guard, he realized slowly. It hadn't occurred to him before the similarities in such tales.
Ebonhorn nodded. “Just another piece of his treasure,” he said. “Huln knew that if we hatched, we'd end up like Deathwing. And if the Hammer had the power to banish the Aspect...” He shrugged. “He thought if might banish the darkness. The Hammer holds the power of the earth, and Black Dragons are of the earth. I suppose it made sense.”
Ebonhorn went silent.
“And?” Sabellian pressed.
“It worked,” Ebonhorn said. “But all of my siblings...” His ears pinned back along his head. “I was the only one to survive.”
And lingering, small piece of hope he'd had – small, small, but still there, damn him – curled up and became dust in his throat.
Just another reminder he and his children were stuck, cursed.
“It is a closely guarded secret among the tauren – truly a secret between the descendants of Huln and I.” He straightened and dropped his hands from the ledge. “It offers no help to you. Or anyone. It's why I didn't tell you before.”
Sabellian looked down at Wrathion. “The boy told you about my family's plight, then.”
“Yes.” The tauren looked at him. “I wish the Hammer could help. But -”
“Yes, yes. Another dead end. The other artifact was the same.”
“I hope you trust me a little bit more,” Ebonhorn said after another hush between them.
Sabellian smiled wryly, though it didn't quite meet his eyes. “You said I'm paranoid. That means I don't trust easily.” He glanced back at Vaxian and Pyria. “But you've helped my children, and you shared a secret with me, even if you're just here because some earth god told you to be. A little trust, perhaps. A little more.”
Ebonhorn nodded. He put his skull cap back on. The beads along the ceremonial feathers rattled.
“I'll be communing with Azeroth this evening,” Ebonhorn rumbled. “You are welcome to join me.”
Sabellian laughed.
“Azeroth can offer me nothing,” he said. “I'm prone enough down here, and she's only a conduit for corruption for me.”
Ebonhorn frowned.
“Wrathion will be joining me.”
“Of course he will. He's been following you around like a starving dog.”
Ebonhorn shrugged. “He seems starved for learning.”
“If you knew what he was like, you wouldn't be so kind to him.” Sabellian moved away from the ledge and took up a space between Pyria and Vaxian. “But it's something he should admit to. I tire of telling it again and again. It's his sin to confess.”
Ebonhorn studied him.
“I'd asked why you were traveling together because I sensed your mutual... mmm... animosity,” he said. “He didn't say much. I will ask again.” He made his way to the exit. “I'll call upon you again before – if you change your mind.”
“I won't.”
Ebonhorn looked back at him one last time. In the dim light, he looked like any other tauren: hulking, fluffy, sharp of eye and with a quieter strength though the sweep of the muscles might suggest brute force instead. But staring at him, Sabellian saw the slope of his chin, the keenness of his gaze, the way he held himself, and saw Onyxia, Nefarian, his mother and father and even him there.
“No matter what you feel for me – hatred or indifference or whatever lingers – I'm glad I'm finally able to meet a living sibling,” Ebonhorn said. “And if that is all Azeroth wanted me to come here for – I will go home content, knowing I have even a little family off of the mountain like me.”
He turned and silently left, leaving Sabellian alone with the two sleeping dragons.
They ate together that night: all of them there on the lowest platform, some as dragons, some as mortals.
Serinar was supposed to bring dinner back, but considering his was predisposed, Furywing and Samia went hunting. Wrathion had caught Sabellian watching them leave with a wary slant to his eyes. Whether it was a discomfort about her being alone with a corrupted dragon or because he wanted none of them to have anything to do with Furywing, Wrathion wasn't sure. He'd recognized the dragon from one of the Trial visions. She'd been one of the dragons who had left with that broodmother, though when they'd left in the vision, she'd lingered behind to try to explain herself to him, though he'd ended up angrily shooing her away.
He wondered about Sabellian's anger toward her. Maybe for abandoning him. That seemed the most likely.
Oh well.
Wrathion picked at his piece of basilisk (that he'd cooked, this time) and listened to the conversation around him. Samia and Ebonhorn were speaking about the mountain layout; Seldarria was trying to keep up a conversation with Sabellian, but he kept only responding with one-word answers or outright ignoring her.
Wrathion hadn't spoken very much; he felt invisible, or like a very large and frightening bug everyone was trying their best to ignore.
It was made a little worse because Left was off hiding somewhere. She said it might be best if she was in the shadows, lest a possible threat know she was already there and take her out first to get to him.
He wished Anduin was here. Then he'd at least have someone to talk to.
“Did you kill Serinar, then?”
Wrathion looked up from his meal. Seldarria was looking at him. She was in her dragon form like Sabellian and Furywing, and her pale red eyes were fixed down on him in a lazy sort of way.
“Sorry. What?”
“It really can't be a coincidence Serinar fails to show the same night you appear,” she pointed out. “So did you kill him?”
Seldarria had a voice that sounded like she was always on the verge of a yawn. Wrathion had a hard time taking anything she said seriously. “No, actually. I didn't.”
“That's certainly hard to believe.”
“He didn't kill Serinar, Seldarria,” Sabellian droned.
“I don't choose to believe that,” she said. “And you could be here helping him kill us all.”
“I thought we already had this conversation,” Sabellian said irritably. “He's my prisoner, I am only here for my children, and when I leave, he'll leave with me.”
“And will he be a prisoner forever?” Seldarria turned to look at Sabellian. “Or will you unleash him onto the world again? What's stopping him from coming back here with his mortal assassins and killing us? We know what he did to the others in hiding!”
Sabellian met Wrathion's eyes. Had that not occurred to the elder dragon before?
Honestly, Wrathion himself hadn't done much forward thinking for once in his life. He really just thought that Sabellian might change his mind and kill him after all, and if he didn't, one of his children might; he had to face their “judgment” anyway. Samia herself might do it with all the cold looks she kept giving him.
“He won't come back here,” Sabellian said at last. Curiously he glanced at Ebonhorn before turning back to his basilisk.
“He had better not!” Seldarria said. “Furywing and I have done quite well for ourselves down here and I won't have some child ruin it all for us!”
“Doing well by hiding in the shadows, you mean,” Wrathion said.
“The little monster speaks his mind!” Seldarria cooed. “Yes, hiding in the shadows. It is quite preferable to being dead.”
“Even when you're just some glorified slave?”
Seldarria squinted at him.
“Boy, enough,” Sabellian warned, but Seldarria leaned forward.
“No, please, speak your mind, dear.”
“Don't make Them angry,” Furywing murmured. “Please take about something else.”
An uncomfortable silence fell over them.
Wrathion felt as if he had been struck. Fahrad had said something similar before he'd been killed.
“Nevermind,” the ex-Prince muttered.
The conversation grew strained after that.
Ebonhorn was the first to finish. He rose and nodded to Samia and Furywing.
“Thank you for the food,” he said and gave another bob of his head. Furywing tilted her head at him. “You'll have to excuse me. I have to prepare for -”
“Oh please, oh please, do you have any more food to share?”
The voice was new – and soon a form followed it. A creature scuttled lizard-like into view. An oversized basilisk? But as it came into the light he realized it wasn't four-legged at all: it stood on two legs and walked hunched and nervously.
It wasn't a dragonkin. Or maybe it was, but none Wrathion had ever seen. It was human-like in body, slimmer than Gravel, but with dragon features: claws, a draconic face, a tail, black, dull scales. It wore nothing but a ragged loincloth and some armor on its shoulders. Open sores and cuts littered its body, and he even thought he saw some stitches around some of the joints of its limbs.
“Hello, Kyrak. That depends. Do you have anything of value today?” asked Seldarria.
The creature crept forward.
“What is this?” Sabellian said. He stared at Kyrak with disgust.
Kyrak glanced at him. He eyes widened.
Then he shrieked, loud enough it echoed off of the top of the ceiling.
He jumped back, trembling, his head bobbing up and down.
“Master! I wasn't stealing from – these are only – they asked me to do it!” He pointed at Seldarria and Furywing.
“Oh, Kyrak, you poor, dull thing,” Seldarria tittered. “That isn't Nefarian. That's his brother, Sabellian. You remember the one, don't you? Or maybe not, no one even really seems to...” This was met with a hateful look on Sabellian's part, but Seldarria didn't notice. “Or maybe you were created after he left. Hmmm.”
Kyrak froze. He squinted at Sabellian.
“Are you s-s-sure?” he asked. He trembled a little.
“Very,” Seldarria said.
“This is Kyrak, Father,” Samia said, albeit uncomfortable. “He's one of, uhm... Nefarian made him.”
Understanding dawned on Sabellian's face. “I see.” He wrinkled his nose and looked away to eat his meal again. He muttered something, but Wrathion didn't hear it. Something about toys.
One of Nefarian's infamous experiments? Truly? Wrathion leaned forward in his seat and studied Kyrak. But the new information didn't highlight much to the wretch, except to maybe explain away the stitches and patches of mismatched flesh. He was pretty pathetic looking.
The same dragon who'd made Chromatus and had risen his sister from the dead had made this twitchy thing?
Why on Azeroth would he do that?
“Made me into this,” Kyrak mumbled, startling Wrathion until he realized it was only in response to Seldarria's explanation. The creature gave Sabellian one last wary look before he inched forward again. “Food?”
“What do you have, Kyrak?” Furywing reminded him gently.
Kyrak shuffled ever closer, though he stayed as far away from Sabellian as he could manage.
After a moment's hesitation, he pulled a bag off of his shoulder and emptied it on the ground. Vials, small pouches, a flash of onyx and red bounced onto the stone. All together it looked like a fine assortment of garbage.
Seldarria snatched the onyx piece. It was an amulet of sorts that ended in a chunk of obsidian and ruby. She draped it over one of her horns.
“Vials from Maloriak,” Kyrak said and wrung his hands together. “The pouches hold armor pieces.”
“These will do,” Seldarria said brightly. She reached forward, grabbed the remains of one of the basilisks and tossed it at him.
It was really just the bones and skin, but Kyrak dove in with relish. The sound of cracking bones and slurped marrow soon filled the cage, much to Wrathion's disgust.
“You have a looter?” He raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
“Oh, not to worry, he's really quite practical,” Seldarria said as she toyed with her new bauble. “There's so much left over in Blackwing Descent that adventurers haven't picked through, and no one dares go down there anyway these days, not even us! Can you imagine? That place is surely haunted. Anyway Kyrak knows the place so well. He brings things for food.”
Wrathion stared at her.
In that moment, he was struck by the sheer depravity here – the sheer scrapping-by mentality of these dragons. The dragonkin lingered aimlessly, waiting to be ordered by a superior who might never come, and the two dragons loitered around collecting trash.
When he'd first seen them, warnings had gone off in his head as before. New threats. New enemies of Azeroth, just like he'd thought when he'd seen Sabellian and his children. Serinar. Fahrad.
But even corrupted, Wrathion saw just how harmless they were. At least, harmless in how pathetic they were. Here was a sad fringe of the legendary Black Dragonflight: earthwarders, devils, and now lost souls. The dragons he'd killed had at least been threats – except maybe Fahrad – but these...
Once their Flight had moved mountains.
Now they collected garbage.
How many of these little fugitive communities were there? How many dragons hid from him and other hunters? The sudden sureness that there were more out there struck him as deeply as Furywing's fear of invoking the Old Gods had. He'd already been wrong so many times over about being the last black dragon – so much he didn't care anymore.
Azeroth was so large, so sprawling. And if Furywing and Seldarria had managed to mask themselves from him, couldn't others?
What if they found one another? What if the Old Gods commanded them to?
What if the Old Gods had moved on to different avenues for the time being?
He glanced at Furywing. Wrathion had always thought corruption was a constant. You were evil; you wanted to do evil things. Fahrad had just been being dramatic at the end.
But it had always left him wondering. If the Old Gods had seen through Fahrad's eyes that Wrathion was killing their servants, wouldn't they have had Fahrad kill him far earlier?
These dragons were corrupted. But what if they still had a core of themselves deep inside? What they could be?
What the Black Dragonflight should be again?
His heart was thumping hard in his chest as he picked aimlessly at the piece of basilisk cooling in his hands. The idea that there might be other dragons out there should have filled him with fear and rage, like when he'd discovered Sabellian.
But they hadn't surfaced. They hadn't killed anyone. There was no sightings, no talk of strange murders, not even disappearing flocks of sheep.
Right now, their corruption was in lull. Surely they were still mean spirited like Sabellian – and himself, he admitted – surely they were spiteful and bitter and angry at the world. But they weren't lashing out, as their corruption might want them to.
But with if, in this time of lull...
What if they could somehow...
He threw the meat into the fire and made his way to Ebonhorn.
“I've just had a wonderful idea.”
Ebonhorn looked at him.
“What is that?”
Here was one such dragon. A dragon like him.
What if there could be more like him? Like them? Ever since Wrathion had learned about the Hammer of Khaz'goroth and Ebonhorn's own lack of corruption, the whelp had felt so much less alone in the world. A dragon like him. A dragon who understood.
Titans, what if there could be more?
When he'd hatched, he'd known with certainty, with every bone in his body, he had to save Azeroth. He had his mortals to aid him, but sometimes their efforts never seemed enough. They weren't like him. Even Anduin Wrynn, who understood him maybe more than anyone, wasn't like him. And when he'd hatched, he knew he had to save Azeroth by getting rid of the tormentors who had once been her guardians. Only then could she be free.
But now... everything was different. Everything was changed. Ebonhorn, Sabellian, Samia... now there were opportunities he hadn't had before. Oh, sure, he loathed Sabellian and Samia, but their presence gave him opportunities to help Azeroth in a different way. He'd failed her by not eliminating the rest of his kind from her, but maybe he'd failed for a reason.
Maybe my failures actually mean something.
“It's a surprise,” Wrathion said with a grin.
“Oh. Then what was the point of telling me in the first place?”
“To get you interested. Now, can we go do your shamanistic ritual now? Before I utterly change my mind about all this.”
Ebonhorn blinked slowly. “Alright,” he said with an air of suspicion. He rose and nodded to the side. No one paid them much attention as they left. Except Sabellian. His eyes followed them. Wrathion got the distinct impression that he didn't like them being alone together.
Well, too bad.
As they left Wrathion caught Samia watching her father. Though not him, he saw: an amulet he hadn't noticed the dragon wearing before. It looked like a crane. Samia's eyes were fixed on it. At least she had good taste. It was a nice necklace.
He and Ebonhorn made their way down one of the tunnels. Ebonhorn had said he'd scouted a good place out beforehand, and Wrathion had trusted him. Only after sending two of his Agents down there anyway, as well as to look around the rest of the tunnels to get a feel for the place. Most of the tunnels led off into various chambers, while others led into different parts of Blackrock all together, like the one they'd come from. One of the paths even seemed to go to Nefarian's old lair; it was probably how Kyrak got to and fro.
“I'd like to ask you something,” Ebonhorn said.
“If you'd like.” He stepped over a pile of sharp rock. The path Ebonhorn had chosen was smaller than some of the others, but more lush. Moss, green in some places and red in others, grew like a carpet on the floor and on some sides of the wall. It undulated back and forth, first on the western wall, then on the eastern wall, sometimes on both. It gave the effect of being in a tide. From some of the moss grew subterranean flowers, thick of petal and almost neon in color. Some gave off a low glow, but most of all the mushrooms he spotted did.
“I knew that something happened between you and Sabellian. It wasn't my business, so I didn't ask. But every dragon here stares at you like an enemy. Why?”
Wrathion's enthusiasm sank.
“Oh. Well. I may have had some dragons killed.”
Ebonhorn looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“There were threatening Azeroth!” he insisted. “One even mind-controlled dozens of mortals in Gilneas City! I had to protect everyone from them.”
“Hmm. And Sabellian was one of those targets?”
“Yes... though only after I thought I was the last of my – ah, our – kind.”
“I'm sure he didn't take too kindly to that.”
“No,” Wrathion said uncomfortably. “It's the reason I'm stuck here.” Should he add in about the 'killing one of his kids' bit? Maybe not.
“What was he doing, then?”
“What?”
“You said the others you killed were doing threatening things. What was Sabellian doing?”
Existing. “It was more of a... preemptive strike.”
Ebonhorn furrowed his brows.
“No wonder the others stare at you like that,” he said.
Wrathion didn't like that reply. Ebonhorn didn't know anything about him, which was nice, because for once he didn't have his reputation as dragon killer trailing behind him like a bridal train. A reputation he usually liked having, but Ebonhorn didn't stare at him like the others did.
“I did what I had to,” Wrathion insisted. “I was just trying to make Azeroth safer. That isn't so bad, is it?”
Ebonhorn shrugged. He reached out as they walked and trailed his fingers over the moss.
“Maybe it wasn't at first,” he rumbled. “But it sounds to me like you tried to take the future of an entire Flight into your hands.”
By killing them all. Wrathion sniffed. He couldn't deny that, but how could he ever explain to Ebonhorn the duty he'd felt? The duty he'd felt to purify? No one understood that. Not even a dragon like him.
“Someone has to,” he said.
Ebonhorn hummed. “I don't think so,” he said thoughtfully. “The Flight is split into so many scattered pieces, now. I don't think we have a future at all to even choose.”
It said it like a fact, emotionless. Wrathion stared at him.
“Maybe there is,” Wrathion said coyly.
“Maybe there is,” Ebonhorn said. “Maybe Azeroth wants there to be, for us all to be here together.”
That made Wrathion giddy with excitement. “My idea might help.”
“Not sharing that yet?”
“Not until we get to where we're going. Where are we going?”
“We're nearly there,” Ebonhorn said.
Within minutes they made a turn and found themselves in a small enclave.
And it was beautiful.
The moss here grew nearly everywhere, swallowing up the black rock and magma, though some of it reached out like claw marks through the green. So did the flowers, the mushrooms – the place seemed to glow from within, as if it stood on a light source from below, and filtered it through the vegetation. It smell of fresh soil and oil earth, of grass and wet fungus. He relaxed as he entered the place.
Here he felt home.
“I'll have to set up some things,” Ebonhorn said. He looked at Wrathion. “Are you ready for this, boy?”
“Of course I am.” How could he not be? Soon he would be communing with Azeroth herself, something he'd never been able to do himself. She'd always just given him visions and that was all.
Soon... he might have the answer to all their problems.
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francisneuman · 5 years
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Constantly feeling inadequate and unimportant
So a few things to start off with: I'm merely 17, live in Hungary and primarily learn German. The latter is merely about the grammatical mistakes I'm bound to make, so sorry in advance.
When I was a little child, I had a normal family, or so I thought. We moved a lot, I constantly had to "break up" with friends and find new ones, and being the introverted shy kid I was, it was hard. After that, we settled into a considerably large city (for Hungary anyway) and I went to primary school here. The first two years were amazing, I made a handful of friends and went to all kinds of summer camps. The teachers liked me and I liked them, even though we only had 2 to please. And a German/English teacher, but they were out of the picture for the majority of classes.
Then the third year changed everything. One of the two "main" teachers was completely fine, the other...
No other way to describe her than as a ruthless cunt. Threw crayons and sponges with plastic cases at 9 year olds, berated me constantly, for my drawings, the way I performed in PE class, and also for me not writing down the individual results of additions (I mean, as with 13+3+9=? you also needed to write down the individual result of 13+3, above the plus). Also wanted to give half the math book as homework, only to never actually bring that homework up, ever.
Absolutely everyone loathed her. Thankfully, she only taught us for one year more, although that's two years too much to be fair.
The rest of primary school (up to eight grade) I spent with being too afraid to show my drawings to anyone but the teacher, never ever raised my hand even though I knew the answer to the questions, never joined any competition nor did I make any friends outside our class.
I was afraid. Of being ridiculed, of being humiliated, of seeming like a total ass. But this fear was not new, back when I was a child, I feared my father too. He didn't show me any affection, my mother was a stay at home mother for a while, so she had time to take care of me. But I never got a hug, my concerns were belittled, and I was just kind of neglected. And I was too timid to ask for any of this, so I turned to videogames. The Witcher and Rome Total War mainly.
To be fair, my parents could've tried their best, they could've expected a different kind of kid, after all, I was their firstborn.
But the pain struck me truly when my brother was given everything I ever wanted. Like he was a nobleman's heir or something. And here I was, the meagre serfboy, who should've been working by the age of 7.
Miraculously I handled it pretty well for a considerable ammount of time. Never whined about any of this, never tried to garner sympathy, to cry for help. So I maintained my image as a kind of "aloof but mature, funny but serious, strong but gentle (add whatever contradictory exaggeration you want to add to that list)" guy. That false image seemed to have attracted (if not romantically then platonically) one of my classmates. After she sat down next to me because the whole classroom had to be rearranged because of some delinquent guys.
She was an intriguing person to be sure, but we got along fine. I felt content next to her. I had a purpose, and she appreciated me for it. I helped her in history, she helped me in biology. Hell, she tried to push me to get a 5 in biology in eight grade because I had an average of around 4.47 (5 is the best, 1 is the worst grade here). I declined but got the 5 because the teacher knew it was the only subject I needed to get a straight 5 average.
Some time afterwards I went to a new school, a grammar school (or high school), and it was exhausting. Constant tests, seemingly useless subjects for someone who got into an advanced German class, mandatory PE lessons, 5 per week.
I felt like absolute shit after a year. I loathed literature, I wanted no more chemistry lessons, and seemingly we got one of the worst batch of the otherwise good roster of teachers. The history teacher always had something else to work on, the chemistry teacher wanted us to memorize everything and give it back to him 100%, the literature teacher taught in an incredibly boring and uninteresting way, but the English guys and gals got it even worse.
I decided to write about this to the previously mention friend, who after having enough of my whining, decided to just go silent on me. Tbf, she could've wanted to help just didn't know how, but I find it hard to believe.
So I sinked deeper and deeper, but I didn't want to acknowledge it as full-blown depression, because I thought it was just a bad season or something (to this very day I don't know exactly what my problem is). I don't blame it on her or the new teachers, they just weren't aware of the full picture.
Then I decided to just draw and write poems and maybe short stories from time to time. It helped, sort of. And after a year, out of fear I deleted all of my poems and stories, threw out my drawings and limped through tenth grade.
Then we went on a class trip to England, and it was pretty good. The family was very welcoming, the landscape was beautiful (altough I still prefer the Hungarian plains) and the few people I interacted with were polite. Unlike in Vienna, but that's a different story.
Along with us came a girl who I would later have a crush on. We shared similar interests, could talk for hours and understood eachothers grievances. She had her fair share of terrible experiences, she was bullied because of her height and humiliated in front of her current class. In a weird sense, this made me feel like my problems were nothing, because I never truly experienced this, I was just paranoid of this kind of treatment.
We were friends for four months and yesterday I broke down for something minor and went to her for consolation and advice, but I broke even further and then I became paranoid about what happened to the last girl who I told this stuff so in the chaos I confessed to her and practically told her that this negativity could spread on to her so she must cut all ties with me.
She told me that I was tired and needed some sleep. I was puzzled, because she was right, I realized I was behaving irrationally. I felt immense shame and just buried my head in the pillow.
But what do these things have to do with the title? Well, you see...
I love writing stories and poems, but I hate literature, so I feel as if my words are worthless. I love to draw, but everywhere I look, I'm reminded that my works are nothing. Anything I do, there's always something wrong with it. It's inadequate, it's worthless, awful, terrible, it should burn and never disgrace anyone's eyes.
I feel as if I achieved nothing, which to be honest, should come to no surprise for a 17 year old, right? But there's this looming threat of dying suddenly, with people either thinking I was a bland loser or an idiot, a wannabe Shakespeare or something. And that scares the hell out of me, because I live merely to maintain my grandfather's name, may he rest in peace. I was always told I resembled him best. So by dying in such a way, I bring dishonor to both him and me.
submitted by /u/Avre01 [link] [comments] Constantly feeling inadequate and unimportant published first on https://neuroscientia.blogspot.com/
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Text
I was a bad daughter, I’m not gonna pretend I was a princess, however there was a reason for it and at the time it was unknown. Being a bad daughter provoked a bad father. He would put me down belittle me, and make me feel like there was no way he could have had a worse daughter. Fast forward to eighth grade. A normal day I had dishes and homework to do. I started working on my homework as soon as I got home and I had a lot. So I was still working on it when my dad came home. He went off when he saw the dishes hadn’t been done. We fought and I went to my room to get some space. Well that wasabi good enough. He followed me. He started throwing my stuff destroying whatever he could and then, he got about an inch from my face and threatened to kill me. My mother didn’t do anything to stop this. That was the first night I held a blade to my wrist. After that my mom made my dad go to anger management but only after putting the decision of divorce in my 14 year old hands. I couldn’t put my sister through that so of course I said no. My dad improved but only in the physical sense. I was still beaten down berated and belittled. Once I started high school I though I’d be able to start fresh…but things only got worse. I was immediately labeled the outcast, the loner, the freak. I tried hard to fit in but I just never could. Then one day the one person I thought was a friend saw my arm. Saw the scars and fresh cuts and demanded I stop making a big deal in front of what seemed like my whole school. She stopped talking to me and I became the emo girl. I was told more times than I can count that I should kill myself. People passed notes, spread rumors. I did my best to ignore it. Then sophmore year of high school came around and so did my first suicide attempt. My mom found me and she took me to the hospital where I had to get stitches and was evaluated. Then started the psychiatry, the bipolar, depression, insomnia, panic attack, and anxiety diagnoses. That whole year my mom kept a very close eye on me checking my wrists every other day always checking in to see if I was ok. I learned to fake a smile from this. And I started to cut on my legs instead. It was after all easier to hide but I didn’t get as much relief from it. High school continued and the bullying didn’t stop. Then I met Xavier. He was so nice to me and he knew what it felt like to be the outcast. So we started dating near the end of junior year. Things got slightly better at school but home still sucked. Then my senior year of high school I turned 18. On my 18th birthday I had a bunch of friends over to hang and a few spent the night. After everyone went to bed we started to make out like teenagers do it he pulled me into the bathroom. He started getting aggressive and I couldn’t get him to stop. He put his hand over my mouth to keep me quiet and he had his way with me. I still remember thinking that this had to be happening to someone else that this couldn’t be me. I kept quiet about what actually happened but told my mom we had sex unprotected so I could get the morning after pill. Then rumors started spreading bout how I was a slut and I’d put out for anyone. They all stemmed from him. He convinced me to stay with him by saying no one else would love me which I already believed. I never wanted to have sex with him but it still happened all the time. Finally I had enough and ended things with him but because no one would love me I attempted again. Same routine as the last one mom found me got stitches no evaluated, but this time they also sent me to a psych facility on a 51/50. That was a nightmare. The staff don’t care, the doctors are uninterested, and they prescribe you whatever will keep you in line. You have no privacy. When I got out I quit school and got a job as a peer advocate for mental illness which required you to have a mental illness…which is what confused me when I was fired for having a panic attack during work after I found out a friend tried to commit suicide. My friend at the time Erica moved in with my family and got me into drinking and smoking and drugs. I had a crush on her so I would have done anything to be around her. Then she met my cousin. I told my cousin ahead of time that I liked her and he still let her give him a blowjob. And when I finally admitted my feelings to her she denied me and asked if she could sleep with my cousin. He didn’t see a problem with that. Then I met Ben, and suddenly my life completely revolved around him. I started living with him, I quit my job, I quit going to therapy and taking my meds. I started smoking a lot of pot which impaired my ability to really see the downhill slope he was taking me down. It started great but slowly there was more fighting and more verbal abuse. I got a goat. She was perfect I hand raised her and she was my baby. Then at a training for a new job I get a call from him saying that she had died. He told me it was an accident. I knew it was a lie but I was in the middle of turmoil. I buried her myself. I got a couple cats that were super sweet. He broke the hip and femur of the male cat. I had to take him to the vet to find out it would cost $3000 to amputate the leg as there was no other choice. I started saving up then one day I came home and both the cats were gone. He said they got out but later I found out he had let them go, and we lived where there were a lot of mountain lions, he sentenced them to death. We moved houses and got a dog. He was aggressive with the dog but it soon turned into abuse. He would beat him then leave him outside in 100 degree weather. Then he started turning on me. At first he just grabbed me hard or shook me but eventually it turned into bottle throwing. I still have a terrible scar that probably won’t ever go away. Then he assaulted me. He grabbed my by the hair and threw me into a doorframe picked me up and threw me again this time down the hall. I got outside and called the cops who arrested him. But I made the mistake of going back and I got pregnant. It was the happiest and most nerve wracking thing ever. I wanted so bad to have it, but there was no way I’d let a kid grow up with him as a father so I terminated the pregnancy. Now I don’t know what to do I am not in therapy yet but all this weighs on me constantly. The cuts don’t help as much no matter how many no matter how deep. I can’t pull myself out of the darkness. How can I keep breathing when I’ve already died on the inside…
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wellmeaningshutin · 7 years
Text
Short Story #59: Airplane.
Written: 3/7/2017
-Hey, do you fly often?
-Yeah, why do you ask?
-Well, you seem a little worried. I was just wondering if you’ve ever been on a plane that was acting like this before. I don’t like the way its been shaking, and the storm-
-No, its never been like this for me. Its probably nothing though, and I’ll just get up and- never mind.
-Is that good? They wouldn’t want us to remain in our seats if everything was alright, right?
-Well, they always do that during landing and take off, and those are-
-We’re not doing either of those things, but I appreciate the fact that you’re trying to comfort me. My names Travis, what yours?
-Allen.
-Well, Allen, nice to meet you. You might be the last person I ever talk to, isn’t that something? I never expect do die in a plane full of strangers, but it seems like that might happen.
-How did you expect to die?
-What?
-Well you said you never expected to die this way, is there a certain way that you predicted. Like, whenever you thought about dying, did you ever think ‘Oh, I’ll probably fall into the alligator exhibit at the zoo’, or something along those lines?
-Now that I think of it, I never really thought of it.
-So why’d you say you never expected to die this way?
-I don’t really know, but it doesn’t really make the phrase any less accurate. I could be dying of cancer right now, and the phrase still would’ve been appropriate. Hell, I could be in the process of being strangled to death by a two ton hooker that was upset that I didn’t pay up, and I still would be right.
-Well, there’s still an implication with the phrase, a certain subtext, and without it-
-Wait, why are we talking about this right now? We might fucking die any minute, and you want to go over semantics? What kind of person are you?
-I was just trying to keep you calm, and it was working until you got all agitated.
-Oh, shit. Yeah, yeah I can see that. You’re a calm fucker, aren’t you?
-People tell me that.
-If you’re so calm about this now, Allen, then why did you seem agitated before? If you have so little worry about rocketing to the ground in a steel deathtrap, then why sit there and distract me with pointless conversation.
-I need another drink, and I’m starting to think I might not get another one. I was hoping to get a little wasted on the flight, just so the time will pass easier, or maybe I could sleep easier, but all I had was this rum and coke, and it has done very little for me so far. Oh, don’t look at me like that. At least I’m being practical about the situation. I’m focusing on comfort, and here you are trying to die of a heart attack before the plane even hits the ground.
-So, what? You don’t give a shit about dying, you just need to wet your mouth a little more? Are you an alcoholic or something?
-Only when I’m bored, Travis. Only when I’m bored.
-And right now, we might die, and you’re looking for entertainment?
-Do you believe in god? Do you have a religion?
-Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t I?
-Well I don’t. You believe in the afterlife to, don’t you? No, wait, don’t answer that, of course you do. Every religion has an afterlife, because they’re all created due to the fact that everyone seems to be afraid of dying. No, don’t get offended right now, who knows how much time we have left, and who wants to spend that time arguing? Now, I believe that there is nothing when we die, just a huge load of nothing. Think about what life was like before you were born, and that’s how I feel like it will be after we die. Isn’t that boring? Isn’t that the dullest thing you can think of? So why wouldn’t I look for a little bit of entertainment right now? These might be my last moments of consciousness, so I might as well enjoy them, I might as well try to get plastered.
-You’re a cynical son of a bitch, aren’t you?
-That’s what they tell me.
-….
-….
-Okay, so, I’m not sure if I really agree with your beliefs and all, but I also don’t think right now is a time to care. And, like, its okay that you believe those things, because if you’re a good person inside, I believe that you’ll get it good in the afterlife anyways. See, it doesn’t matter in what you believe in, it matters whats in your heart, and, well, you seem like you have an awful lot of good in there. You tried to keep me calm when things seem- Jesus! That was not good, the luggage fell right out of the-
-Yeah, I saw.
-Holy shit, we are going to die. Oh lord in heaven, please allow this plane to touch down safely, I will give everything up, I will embrace your word, I swear this to you. Oh no, oh jeez, oh no. I’m sorry for the wrongs that I have done, and I hope the good in me has out done those terrible, terrible-
-What are you talking about?
-I’m sorry, but that was supposed to be private, and I don’t like it that you were eavesdropping on me like that.
-There’s no privacy in death, we all die alone and exposed.
-That sounds like a load of bullshit. Look at this situation, we’re in a crowded plane, how would that be dying alone? Fuckin’-
-A plane full of strangers. Its like how you can be lonely while you’re surrounded by friends. Just because you’re in a crowd doesn’t mean there is anyone around who knows you, so in a way you’re on your own, which would make you alone. So a plane full of strangers doesn’t mean a thing because it doesn’t make you any less alone.
-…
-I’m sorry if I-
-No, no.. Its fine, don’t. I’m good. Don’t worry about me.
-You look upset, and.. Shit. Look, I’m just talking out of my ass, I’m just a little agitated because I can’t seem to get a god damned drink. If it makes you feel better, if we have the time, we can get to know each other so we wont die alone. Does that make you feel better?
-Yeah, I guess you have a point there. So, what is there to know about you?
-Wait, you should go first, I was curious about-
-Well, Allen, I don’t mean to be rude, but were running on an unspecified amount of time that can run out any second. You’re the one who wanted me to calm down, for me to not die alone, so shouldn’t I get to know you first, so you wont be a stranger to me?
-If I don’t know you, doesn’t that make you the stranger, and wont you still be the one to die alone?
-Shit. I’m having a little bit of… Okay, fuck. We don’t have the time for me to sit around and think this through, so lets just do a quick game of rock, paper, scissors. One two three… Fuck. Okay, I’ll go.
-We could do best two out of three if you want.
-No, no. I’m fine with it, and I’m no sore loser so I will man up and tell what I have to say. I was raised on a trout farm in the middle of nowhere, and really I just had a pretty uninteresting life. I spent a lot of my childhood jealous of the kids who were able to grow up on normal farms, because at least the had pigs, cows, chickens, horses, all sorts of interesting animals to talk to. Do you know how interesting fish can be? I’ll tell you, not a bit. The worst part was that I didn’t have any siblings, and friends were hard to make because my parents insisted on homeschooling me. They claimed that it was to give me the best education, but really they just wanted me to spend more time taking care of and gutting the fish. So the only form of company I had were those fish, and I would mainly just squat down and tell them how much I hated them. Sure, when I was younger, I tried to get them to do tricks, like playing fetch or jumping through hoops, but I grew jaded real quick, and of course I eventually became spiteful. ‘I hate you more than anything’ is the main gist of what I would tell them. I probably would have tried to beat them to death with rocks or something, but gutting and preparing them was something I had to do often, so even killing them became boring. I had all this pent up aggression and boredom, but nothing to do with it.
-Couldn’t you have just read books, watched television, played with toys, you know, normal kid stuff? Why’d you spend your off time berating the fish?
-Well, I- Good God that was a big one. Whew. Okay, so my parents really never let me have any of that, they said it wouldn’t build character and would just turn me into some lazy bum, going nowhere in life. My father would always tell me that hard work built character, and trout were my means of hard work. He’d try to say that if I didn’t want to do my work, then that would mean I didn’t have character, and he didn’t want any bums without character living in his house, so he’d beat me if I complained.
-Shit.
-Yeah, but its good now. In a way, I guess, I think I was also dealing with the pent up anger that I had towards my father, but I took it out mainly on the fish. I guess I knew that it wasn’t really their fault, they were to fucking dull to really cause any problems, and all of the responsibility lied with the man who took my childhood away from me. Its like… when prisoners complain about the chains-
-I think they’re mainly in cells nowadays-
-Just bear with me, we don’t have time for your semantics.
-That’s not what semantics- oh okay, sorry.
-When they complain about their chains, they’re not really angry at their chains, but they’re angry at what the chains represent, the people who put them in those chains in the first place. That’s how I felt about those god damned trout, but I can tell you I refuse to eat one, even up to this day. If I was starving to death, and there was only trout to eat, I guess I would have to die. Okay, let me get to the point, since there’s something I need to talk about before we reach the end, before we smack into the ground. I haven’t really talked about this since, but we’re going to die, so what the hell. No better time to, I guess. Don’t want to die alone, so I might as well let you know me better than most people do. Oh, before I tell you this secret, I want you to know that I’m an accountant. So, there’s not really a whole lot happening in my adult life, just a lot of boring stuff that really isn’t worth mentioning. If you can survive being raised around fish, shit, nothing will be boring to you anymore. Anyways, the secret. Well, I had all of that anger built up inside of me, right?
-Yeah.
-And there was no way that it was going to stay inside. Anger tends to fester under the surface, anger tends to slowly rise and grow, kind of like yeast, until you have this big loaf of anger and.. Well. I’m not the best with metaphors, but you can see where I was trying to go with that, right?
-Yeah, don’t worry. I understand.
-Okay, so I eventually had to take long walks around the neighborhood, which wasn’t really like the suburbs or anything because the houses were spaced out really far from each other. If you had to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor, it was really easier to get in your car than to take a walk. Because this was always a long walk, I would usually be cooled down by the time I reached the first house, and then I would just walk back home, no problem ready to go to bed. One night, however, I decided to keep walking for a long while, but I think it was because I hardly had any breaks that day, and it was just nonstop work. So I was pretty angry about all of it. I think I may have been sixteen at the time, so hormones also probably played into it, but I guess the reason doesn’t matter. I did what I did.
-What did you do?
-Well, I was getting close to the third house down from us, and I see this girl walking down the same street too. No, don’t give me that look, I didn’t do anything sexual, but it was still just as bad. I beat the shit out of her. I think it was because she asked me how I was doing, or maybe because she just looked at me the wrong way, and I just went berserk. I think I was able to feel her ribs break when I stomped on there, as she was curled up on the ground, hands over her head, not knowing why this guy was attacking her. I think she had Downs Syndrome too, so I feel extra horrible about it. Oh god, I… Oh, I know, I know. I’m a blubbering mess. I don’t-
-Here, take this, blow your nose, take your time.
-We don’t have any time, and I’m sorry you have to see a grown man cry right now, but I.. I just can’t believe I would do something so awful. I think that’s what really scares me about dying, I’m not sure if I’ve done anything good enough to get into heaven. If I spend eternity being punished for that, I’ll understand. I actually might understand it less if I get into heaven..
-That’s pretty rough, I’m sorry that you have to deal with that.
-Thanks for listening to me, and thanks for the handkerchief, but that was the least sincere thing I have ever heard in my life.
-And? We’re dying, and you want me to be sincere? Shouldn’t you want me to be genuine, don’t you want to see who I really am, instead of some fake.. Do you want to die alone?
-Well mister sincerity, what’s your story then? Whats your deep secret, huh?
-Hahaha
-Why are you laughing?
-I just never thought I would talk about it, and I’m not sure if I will. You see, this might just be a bumpy ride, and-
-Fuck fuck fuck fuck, oh no, oh no… Phew, that was really close.
-Okay, okay. We are probably going to die. I guess I’ll talk, and I’ve always wanted to tell somebody this anyways. Maybe its a good thing if I die, well not for me, but for other people.
-Why would that be?
-Well, I really want to kill somebody. I always have and I always will.
-What?
-Don’t give me that look, and please don’t interrupt me. After that little dive I’m not sure if I’ll be able to express myself in time, so Travis I need you to be a sport and shut the fuck up. You shouldn’t be surprised anyways, just look at how little I care about us dying. All I care about now is saying what I need to say, not the fact that we’re all about to turn off. Anyways, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to kill somebody. Sure, everybody thinks that at some point in their life, but for me it seems like it might be more grounded in reality. Some days its all I think about, and I have a lot of stuff planned out. I think I’d be good at it.
-So you’re saying you’re some kind of serial killer? This is the person I’m dying next to?
-Well, I haven’t killed anybody, so I’m just a normal guy at the moment. Okay, yeah, its my fault, my thoughts are all pretty scattered, but I’ve never been able to talk about this before. So, you ever watch horror movies and see all of the twisted things that happen on screen, and wonder how somebody could be so messed up? Yeah? Well, when I see those kinds of people, I just understand them. I see myself on the screen, and I can relate to those characters in a lot of ways. I root for them, they become my hero’s, and sometimes.. Like when I was younger, when everybody was crushing on movie characters, the ones I fell in love with were always psychotic killers, women who buried people alive or bathed in young girl’s blood. Its always been hard for me to understand how any of that could be dark for people, and when I would see those movies in theaters, and I saw the audience’s reactions to what was happening on the screen, I realized I was different.
-Well, yeah… that’s-
-I said not to interrupt. Most of my fantasies have been centered around that, all of the awful things I could do to people, and its gotten to the point where its what I think about when I go to sleep. Its not really a sexual thing, but I only want to say that because I’ve seen that implied a lot, and that’s not how it works for me. And it wouldn’t take to long for me to commit the act, because I’m not getting younger, and its kind of like.. Well. Right now its like I’m dying a virgin, I’ll never know what it will be like to be on top of somebody, crushing their throats, watching the life leave their eyes.
-So uh..
-What now?
-Well, wait, let me get this.. Uh, so you’d strangle people?
-Yeah, any other way is much too impersonal. I believe that if you really want to take somebody’s life, you have to really own up to it and commit to it one hundred percent. In a way I don’t like guns because of that, they just made the act of killing so impersonal. All you have to do is point and shoot and the person is on the ground, bleeding to death, or already dead. There’s no sport in it, its like cutting corners. A cowards way of killing. I don’t know, I feel like at a time where people get so removed from it, I would have to make up for it somehow, like overcompensate, with strangling. Although, I’d also want to get to know the person first too, that’s another way I’d have to do it. No strangers for me, not like that pussy Son of Sam. I would probably break into-
-What the fuck
-people’s houses, when I know they’re alone, pull a gun on them, but only so that I could tie them up. Reservations aside, they are amazing for intimidation, or at least from what I read. I would tie them up and make them tell me their life story, pretending that if they were able to be fully honest, I would let them live. I figure its a strange enough proposition that they would have to believe me, and if they know anything about self defense they would be familiar with the tactic of personalizing yourself with your captors, but I would be the exception. After I would get their story, I would-Oh, hey. I guess we’re not dying after all.
-But.. What the.. What are you-
-Oh, ignore all that, I was just fucking with you.
-What?
-I wanted to freak you out before you died, I just like to scare people. Oh, don’t look at me like that, I write horror novels. See this book I’m reading? The Interview Killer? Here’s my face on the inside, I was just using the plot of my book to mess with you.
-What?
-Oh man, I really did a number on you, didn’t I?
-So, I just opened up to you, and you returned it with-
-I thought we were dying, it didn’t seem like there was a point in anything I did. Yes, another rum and coke please.
-But-
-Okay, I admit that it may have been a dick move, and I apologize. Now, to make it up to you, what if we share a cab outside of the airport, we go to my hotel room, and I’ll tell you something personal, to make it up to you.
-But why would we have to-
-My wife is waiting there, and she is an avid collector of wine. She probably has a nice bottle, and it would be my way of apologizing.
-Uh
-Come on, what are you worried about?
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