Chapter Text
Trisha is sick as long as anyone’s known her. She’s sick when she meets Van Hohenheim. She’s sick when they fall in love. She’s sick when they fail to conceive, blood and guts trailing down her thighs.
“Give me my son back,” she says. Her voice would be hoarse even if she hadn’t been screaming.
Hohenheim is a Doctor as long as anyone’s known him. He’s been one since Xerxes, since he decided it was the only way to equivocate for the deaths of his countrymen. He’s seen miscarriages happen to other people. Trisha Elric is just another person, but when she refuses God he’ll refuse Them with her.
He cleans up. She passes out. He carries her to their bed, covers her in their sheets, heads to his study. The Elric house is silent for months.
It’s broken when Trisha— who forgets when exactly she sat down at the kitchen table but she hasn’t moved for at least an hour and hasn’t eaten anything either— hears Hohenheim calling her name from the basement, yelling that she should “Come down, Trisha, you need to see this!”
Hohenheim’s hair has gotten long, tangled, matted. She loves his hair, braids it for him in the mornings, trims it every third Saturday. It’s been nine and her scissors rust in the bathroom drawer.
His hair is bloody now. So’s his arms, chest, and legs. He’s kneeling in the middle of a chalk circle— she recognizes the symbols for water, for electricity, and gets lost in the red pools that cover the rest of it. She’s already thinking of chemicals, of starches, of what it’ll take to get the blood out of the floor.
“It’s him, Trisha,” Hohenheim says, and at the epicenter of the dark stains is a wad of blankets. It is silent in his arms, silent when he hands it to her, silent when she brushes the fabric away to see the bright red face and golden eyes. “It’s our son.”
The townspeople have always known the Elrics as odd. Trisha has a northern accent, and Resembool is the southernmost town in Amestris before Ishval. She is beautiful, kind, and living with an unmarried man much older than she. Hohenheim has a weird name and weirder alchemical hobbies. He helps his neighbors make fast repairs, and populates Dolan’s bar almost every weeknight. When he is not drinking, he is “researching”— a word that makes Miss Pinako groan and buy him a pint anyway. They are harmless— good neighbors!— but weird.
Hohenheim hasn’t been to Dolan’s in what Dolan himself calls “forever,” and so when he finally gets to showing up he gets his first pint on the house.
“I missed my favorite regular,” Dolan says. “Miss Pinako’s been drinking double to make up for your time off.”
Pinako lifts a glass about as big as herself, nods her head, and then finishes it off.
“You’ve shrunk,” Hohenheim notes.
“Not my liver,” Pinako counters. “Also, you’re paying.”
“Hey now,” Hohenheim holds up his empty palms. “Go easy, I have another mouth to feed.”
The bar, full Monday through Sunday and humid with noise, goes quiet until it doesn’t. Then it’s loud with “Damn, Hohenheim!” and “You better buy Trisha a ring quick, huh?”
Pinako comes to their doorstep a day or two later with her son and daughter-in-law, and Trisha has so rarely seen her in the daytime that after two years of knowing her she only just realizes Pinako’s eyes are green. They are staring heavily at the baby in her arms. “Um.”
“You miscarried early during your last pregnancy. I treated you,” Urey Pinako says from behind his mother. “You definitely couldn’t have had a baby.”
“Um,” Trisha echoes.
The Rockbells sit at a newly-transmuted side of their kitchen table, with newly-transmuted chairs and newly-curious eyes. Hohenheim and Trisha sit at their normal, coffee-stained seats with the latter still holding her son.
“Trisha and I—” Hohenheim chokes. Trisha lost our first and he could’ve been beautiful and this isn’t him but he is ours just the same and you can’t tell anyone please—
Trisha shakes her head. “I’m too sick to carry full-term. Hohenheim made him. His name is Ed.”
Urey’s wife coughs. “Hohenheim did what?”
“Hohenheim is an alchemist. He is capable of a great many miracles. He gave me my son,” Trisha says. Trisha is very Northern in the way she speaks and expects to be understood. Pinako is very Amestrian in the way she beans Hohenheim with a wrench.
“Human transmutation is alchemy’s biggest crime, you dumbass!” Pinako yells. “Anyone who thinks about it long enough will remember Trisha hasn’t been pregnant long enough to have a kid! If we reported you to the government, you’d be arrested at the least and your kid would be taken and experimented on!”
A knife lands on the table, central to Pinako’s seat. “It’s a good thing you won’t say anything then,” Trisha says, tucking her arm back under the table.
Urey and his wife check up on Ed, declare that he is a healthy child, if a little on the small side— and haven’t you noticed Trisha hiding out lately? She’s very sick, and not even married. You can imagine the kind of stress she’s under.
Winry comes soon after, and although Ed grows slowly (a symptom of his early birth, of course) and is far too smart for his age (a symptom of being Van Hohenheim’s child) he acts like a normal kid with her. Alphonse comes later, when Hohenheim wakes to harsh metal pressed to his neck and electricity crackling and “Make me another.”
It’s how he knows Trisha loves him. If she didn’t, she would not have used a dull knife, and there would be blood instead of bruises.
(The problem is that he leaves. The main events are unavoidable, there was nothing Hohenheim could have done that would have saved her, but they only could have known that if he was there.)
“Why are you sick, Mommy?” Alphonse asks. He has his father’s gold-metal eyes, just like Ed. His hair is slightly paler, slightly more genetic variation, slightly more human.
Trisha sighs, and slightly more concise than when Ed asked years ago, she answers. “In Drachma, we are required to spend at least five years in the military. I was very good at my job, and the scientists wanted to make me better. Instead, they did this. I met your father while searching for the cure. He’s a very good Doctor, and one day he’s going to make me better.”
Ed huffs, six years old looking like four and still the biggest brat Trisha’s ever met. “He better hurry up back here then.”
He doesn’t— in fact, nothing is as slow as the years in which Trisha wastes . She loses her fingers, so she grips with her fists. She loses her legs, and then her arms. And finally, once the epidemic hits, her life.
What happens in the meanwhile isn’t important. They raise themselves, they go and live with their (terrifying) teacher, they learn the secrets of alchemy as if they too were born into a cycle and not made into suffering, and they bring their mother back to life— for a moment.
The thing in the circle is living torment, and it’s dying as Alphonse is ripped away, as Edward is bleeding out— they bring their mother back just to watch her sons die.
Ed saves them both, somehow, but it costs Al his body and Ed two of his limbs. They don’t grow back like they should, likely because of divine influence. It’s not that they’re missing anything, it’s that the things that were before simply don’t exist anymore.
“Why not our souls?” Ed asks the open air. The citizens of Xerxes were infinitely more valuable than their physical forms.
“Because they would have wanted that,” Al answers. Truth takes equally, but never alleviates suffering— all their multitudes of souls want to be free. Truth wouldn’t dare do them that much of a favor.
It’s only after the worst day of their lives that they meet the worst people in the world.
“Wow, you guys are stupid.”
“The fuck are you?” Ed yells from his wheelchair.
The dark haired, leather clad intruder in their kitchen laughs. “Haha, the baby said fuck. Man , you guys are messed up, huh? What kind of homunculus brings their fake mom back to life. Did you actually care about her?”
“How the fuck do you know about us—“
“Of course we love her!” Al says from his tin prison. “Who the fuck is a male stripper that broke into our house to ask about her! Get the fuck out of here!”
“ Wow does your voice not suit you.” Ten points to the stripper! Al is under thirteen years old and over six feet! Of course it’s weird! But fuck that guy anyway, Al curses when he fucking wants to curse, and right now he fucking wants to curse. His brother is in a wheelchair, so protecting him is priority, but he also needs to beat the shit out of this man who just called his mom fake and get him out of their house. It’s a multi-step problem.
The stripper straightens up, waves the back of his hand in front of their faces— ouroborus, the same one Ed and Al have hidden on their bodies (in Al’s case, it makes up his blood seal). “You can call me Greed, and to answer your questions… well, a little lizard of mine saw your tats while you were fucking around with hoses in Dublith. Kind of embarrassing for you, if you were trying to keep those secret.”
Fuck how hot Dublith is, also fuck how tempting sprinklers are. Ed growls. “What do you want from us?”
“What do I want?” Greed laughs. “ Everything, I want money, I want power, I want booze, I want— well, you two are a little too young for that part. Losers. But what I want from you is to know how a homunculus can have both alchemy and human emotions.”
Al moves to stand in front of his tiny, wheelchair bound brother who was even still trying to climb out of his Granny-issued prison to fight this guy. “Why should we help you?”
“Easy,” Greed explains, “you come with me, and I tell you what’s going on with this country. You really need to keep up with the family drama, cousins.”
“Excuse me?” Ed screeches, finally falling out of his wheelchair.
And that is how Ed and Al meet their new favorite relative, for the definite worse of the Amestrian government.