The Empath Alchemist {Edward Elric X Reader}

Prologue

Empathy- the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position

Empath- a highly sensitive individual who has a keen ability to sense what people around them are thinking and feeling

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Empathy had always been such a strange concept to little (Y/n). Ever since she could walk, before she even understood the idea of sentiment, the emotions of those around her were always much too easy for her to detect. Much too overwhelming. Having been raised by a poor family, there was always some kind of wavering aura of sensitivity that was quite impossible for the toddler to ignore and not to feed off of.

She couldn't remember much of anything from the time she spent with her mother and father, only the feelings. The hope, the desperation, the fear, the anguish. That's all she could ever see if she lost herself deep enough inside of her mind. Just the swirling mixture of colors representing the only memory of her parents that she had left. No faces, no voices, just poignant colors.

Then again, she had no real reason to truly remember her parents in great detail. The child had only been five years old when they died of a cause that she had yet to understand or even be aware of, leaving her behind. Leaving her confused, adrift, afraid. She was only five when she had been found on the verge of starvation and dehydration in the middle of the desert, ratted clothes dusted with a hot layer of sand and small body depicting no signs of consciousness.

(Y/n) had always been a mystery to those who had fortunately found her before it was too late. And when she finally woke in an unfamiliar place and on an unfamiliar couch, she saw them again- she felt them again. The colors of kind strangers.

Four years later, after she was brought back to a state of health and after she was adopted by a man of the military, she occupied her time by studying. Having been raised in an environment that heavily supported the use of alchemy, (Y/n) could only ever focus on learning all she could about this branch of philosophy- this extraordinary form of power that the kind people around her often embraced. Maybe she had been inspired by her legal guardian, or the idea of growing up to become knowledgeable about something she hadn't been aware of before.

No.

It was the pure feeling of adrenaline and pride that ran through her veins when she transmuted her first cement boat. It was the usefulness she felt when she learned she could use this power to make something of herself. It was the hope she felt for her future when she dreamt of a life spent protecting others with a power that she independently learned to control. (Y/n) grew up having and knowing very little, she had been so frail and so dazed. All she knew was emotion, all she knew was to feel. If she could take her greatest strength and weakness and use it to live up to the life that was given to her and to understand the world around her, to make people feel less frail and less dazed, then that's what she would do. And she would do so with alchemy.

The young girl sat silently in a pile of books residing in the Central Command Archives, completely mesmerized by the text before her. She had buried herself into the pages and pages of alchemic history and technique, every word and phrase the textbooks had to offer engraving themselves into her brain. She was only nine, but her heart had been set on taking this information to become one of the military's state alchemists, just like her guardian. (Y/n) was willing to do whatever it took to ensure and manifest this path before her, even if it meant stowing herself away into the library from sunrise to sunset. Not that she didn't like the research. In fact, she found herself looking forward to these consuming hours each day.