The Price of Life [Fullmetal Alchemist]

Chapter Thirty

Promised Purgatory

"I'll lay your bones into the earth & you will haunt my head no more."
-la dispute

•••

The sun sets.

Ed, having heard enough from the man who had forsaken him, walks back to the house where he told Sonia to head over to. He saw Sonia's smiling face in the window disappear as she went to open the front door for him.

"I've never been in countrysides, only passed by on trains. I think I could get used to this country life," she says with her take on a southern accent. "The sunset was so beautiful with no buildings to block it out. Did you see it?" Ed doesn't laugh or respond and instead walks past her into the house.

"What wrong? Did something happen?"

"It's nothing," he dismisses, going into one of the guest rooms that he's stayed in every time he came back home to Resembool.

Sonia doesn't think much of it - visiting her mother's grave isn't ever pleasant, either.

The moon suspends itself high that night; Sonia finds herself gazing at it longingly.

'It's getting late,' she muses, 'I should say good night.'

She leaves her own guest room and ventures out into the hallway, trying to remember where Ed quartered himself. She knocked then let herself in. Ed was lying on his stomach, writing in his journal. He closes it and puts it on his nightstand next to the lit lamp.

"What is it?" He sounds a bit annoyed, but she approaches him anyway. "Well now is good a time as any... I wanted to say good night. And..." she swallows her pride. "Thank you."

Edward is taken aback by her sudden gratitude and looks away, a pink tint over his cheekbones.

"Don't sweat it," he mumbles.

"No really, I mean it. You-" she cuts herself off as a sinking feeling forms in the base of her stomach. She immediately twirls around. Ed gets up next to her and puts a hand on her shoulder in concern.

"That feeling... It's returning." Her vague explanation leaves him with even more questions. She brushes off his arm and quietly creeps into the hallway, where the feeling gets stronger.

Peering into the dining room she sees Pinako talking to a man with a golden beard and long pulled back hair. His glasses rest on the bridge of his big nose. He speaks, but Sonia is too terrified to listen to anything other than the buzz of what feels like millions of people talking all at once.

Ed pulls her back closer to the bedroom door by the crook of her elbow. His cold automail is enough to put her back into reality.

"What the hell are you doing?" Ed whispers to her angrily.

"Ed... can you tell me who that is?" Her voice shakes.

"Why does it matter?"

"Edward. Who. Is. He."

He rolls his eyes in exasperation. "That man left me and Alphonse when we were kids." His fists clench. "Left my mom to die alone." He inches closer to the dining room.

"Is it possible that he..."

"Sssh, I'm trying to listen."

"What they transmuted..." is heard clearly, "Are you sure it was their mother?"

The alchemist gasps, and it takes everything in him to not let his entire body go limp.

"Fuck," he whispers under his breath in realization. He storms into his room, slamming the door behind him. The light emitting from his room into the hallway turns off, and Sonia is left alone in the darkness. She eventually goes to her own room, the dark feeling somehow lulling her to sleep.