Happy Halloween! Anything full metal alchemist?
Pretending to be a boy is the easy and obvious thing to do.
Mustang already thinks she is one - apparently the paperwork he'd found on her had only called her Ed and he'd decided that was short for Edward. It's not like there was anything feminine about her while she was lying in bed trying not to bleed to death.
The military might agree to take a twelve year old boy, but will never consider the same for a twelve year old girl. It's safer, too, for people not to know what she is.
"I don't like this, Sister," Al says as she transmutes a heavy coat to wear over her thick leather pants and chunky boots. She almost cuts her hair, but their father had long hair, and she's already lost two limbs. If her hair is what gives her away, then clearly she has bigger problems.
"Remember that it's Brother once we get on the train to central," she warns.
He can't make facial expressions anymore, but the mulishness to his silence is easy for her read. She's his big sister, after all. “It’s just until we get our bodies back, Al. It’s fine.”
“Won’t it bother you to be called a boy?” he asks. “It would bother me to be called a girl.”
Yes. “Not really. It’s just temporary, and you and Winry and Granny know. It’s fine.”
Eden isn’t looking forward to it, but her brother doesn’t have his body because of her. She has to fix this, and whatever it is she has to do in service of that is what she’ll do.
~
They get to Central and meet Mustang again and his office and Maes Hughes and his very nice wife and no one even bats an eyelash at calling her a boy, or when Al calls her Brother, or at referring to her as Edward. She can at least tell them she goes by Ed, which is true.
The physical that disqualified Al might be an issue except she’s twelve and they don’t ask her to take her boxers off. Standing there shirtless feels weird, even though her chest is completely flat, but they’re more interested in her automail than in questioning her gender.
She’s dubbed the Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist, and the victory is bittersweet for more than one reason.
~
Sometimes, in the beginning, when they’re far from central she’ll take down her hair and transmute a dress and just go out and be a girl for a little bit. Soon, that becomes too risky, because she’s so well known, because Al makes her identity obvious.
Al stops calling her Sister except when they’re in a room alone and she tells herself it doesn’t bother her.
When she’s fourteen, the jokes about her voice not having dropped yet start at around the same time as she starts having to bind her chest to keep it looking flat. The baggy jacket worked for a while, but now she needs an extra step. She’s fifteen when she really starts to hate it, when her chest is large enough that flattening them constricts her movements and makes it so she can’t expand her lungs fully. It’s too much of liability. She wears a sports bra and gets a baggy tank top and saves the binding for when she has to report into Mustang.
Nearly three years of no one guessing anything and then they’re in Liore when Rose takes one look at her and says, “I thought the Fullmetal Alchemist was a boy?”
“I am a boy,” she says, but it comes out awkwardly, because she’s never had to say that before, never had to try and convince someone before. There’s a little spark of pleasure at Rose just looking at her and knowing, but it’s drowned out by the terror at the possibility of being found out.
Rose frowns, but then her face clears as an embarrassed flush rushes across her face. “Oh! I didn’t know that you were – uh, right. Sorry, I – yes, um, of course, you are definitely a boy. My apologies!”
Wait, that’s not what she – oh fuck, whatever. It amounts to the same thing, she supposes.
Then she’s too busy chasing after this fake priest and Rose is furious at her and Ed is pretty sure she’s going to get murdered by this whole town at one point, but it works out, more or less. The town is sort of a mess, but there’s no more fake priest offering false hope and false gods, so that has to be good, right?
Rose is tear stained and empty and she’d known that Ed was a girl. “Hey,” Ed says softly, “it’s going to be okay. You can rebuild.”
“Rebuild what?” she hiccups, trying to contain her sobs. “We’re in the middle of nowhere and no one cares about us and without those miracles, fake or not, people will be hungry!”
Fuck. This isn’t Ed’s problem. But she wants to help. She wants to help Rose, who’s nice, and pretty, and saw her. “What if there was a river around the city? Then you wouldn’t be in the middle of nowhere and you could grow something or catch fish, or whatever.”
“The river isn’t anywhere near here!” she shouts.
“It could be,” she says and now Rose is staring at her and Al is sighing.
She’s the Fullmetal Alchemist. What’s one river?
She and Al take the train to the nearest branch of the river, marking off what they’ll do on the map and debating circles and Al doesn’t say a word about this being a waste of time, but he wouldn’t. He’s usually the bleeding heart between them.
They buy two boats, split up to each take it to a bend in the river that almost no one uses, and get to work. It takes almost two weeks to push the new bit of the river near Liore and she meets Al in the middle, the two of them connecting the new river right outside of city gates.
They go back to Liore, to tell Rose and everyone else what they’ve done, and they find something they hadn’t expected.
That damn priest is back.
The ensuring fight nearly kills her and she was certain it actually would, but the strange creature literally slithers away from her rather than killing her. It at least proves to the people that that thing isn’t a prophet, although it does leave a large portion of the town destroyed.
They can rebuild closer to the river anyway.
Ed is broken and bruised and Rose is tending to her and she tries not to think how she’s going to write any of this up in a report.
“What’s the river called?” Rose asks as she checks on the stitches she’d made. She’s not as good as Winry, but she’s not bad either.
Ed bites her lip to distract herself from the pain of disinfectant on her wounds then says, “What? I don’t know. Whatever you want.”
“You made it,” she says stubbornly. “You should name it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she insists, wincing as Rose rubs some sort of salve into her many bruises, sliding her hand beneath her sports bra to get the one that’s all along her side and her ribs. She’s probably broken at least one. Then, without thinking, “Eden. Call it the Eden River.”
Someone should at least get to use her name if she can’t.
Rose pauses, staring at her, and Ed looks down rather than meeting her gaze. “Ed,” she says gently, “please don’t take this the wrong way, and I promise I won’t ask again, but – are you a boy?”
She should say yes. Even though Rose had guessed right the first time, she should say yes, and protect the same secret she’s been protecting for the past four years.
But it’s been a really long couple of weeks.
“I’m what I have to be,” she says, shrugging even though it hurts.
Rose smiles at her, warm and pretty and ugh, why does she have to be so pretty? This is so unfair. “In this room, all you have to be is yourself, Eden.”
She can’t help but return Rose’s smile. She hasn’t been able to be herself in a long time.
~
Ed is sixteen and has just received a summons from Mustang, who apparently hadn’t been satisfied with her initial report of Liore and had finally tracked her down after months of dodging him to demand she return to Central, which is annoying as shit. She’s finally found some books that even sort of explain what that creature in Liore was, and now he wants her to come back? What a waste of time.
“Um, Sister,” Al says and Ed automatically looks around, but they’re completely alone in this corner of the library, “do you think, now that you’re enlistment age, that you might tell them truth?”
She stares. “Why would I do that?”
“Well, we haven’t been back in a long time, and you look a lot – especially this past year, you know?” She continues staring, because she does not know. “Most people see what they expect to see, but you might have to – I don’t know, do something, if you don’t want them getting suspicious.”
“Why would they be suspicious?” she demands, baffled.
Al groans and throws up his hands. “Because you’re older and you look like a girl, Sister! You’re not a kid anymore, and they’ve known us for years, and they pay attention to stuff.”
This is a serious problem that she has to deal with.
Which she’ll do as soon as she can make herself stop smiling.
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