mikkeneko

Two more alter!drabbles. I think I'd really better stop. >_>;

First one is funny, takes place in Dublith, after "The One That Got Away".

"Wait! Don't kill him!" Ed frantically interposed himself between Sig and the unconscious Masuta. "It's not what you think, really!"

Sig said nothing, of course, but the gleam in his eye and the crack of his knuckles told a different story. Ed gulped and hastily tried to explain. Sig might not be as violent as his wife, but Ed had absolutely no desire to get on his bad side. "He didn't mean any harm by it, really," he said. "The flowers were just a get-well present for Sensei. She was sick yesterday, and Masuta was concerned."

"Concern or not," Sig growled dangerously. "I simply mean to remind him that whatever Izumi was to him in his world, in this one she is my wife."

"It's not like that!" Ed waved his hands around expressively. "That was a misunderstanding. In the other world, Izumi wasn't his girlfriend, she was his, was his..."

Sig's brows drew down. It was like watching a thundercloud roll in. Ed searched frantically for a compromise. He couldn't let Sig kill Masuta, but he couldn't just bring up that painful part of Izumi's family memories again. In this world, Sig and Izumi could never have children. How cruel would it be, to show them the child they could have had, in another world, another time?

"...sister," he finished hastily. "Your brother-in-law."

"Is that so?" Sig looked fractionally less menacing. Edward breathed a sigh of relief, and started babbling.

"Well, of course. Wouldn't you have guessed? I mean, just look at the, um, familial resemblance between them. Their coloring is almost identical; their eyes and hair are the same. And, uh, the, uh, shape of their eyes is the same. It makes perfect sense that they'd be siblings, right?"

"So it does," Sig rumbled, slowly relaxing, and studying Masuta's face with a less homicidal eye. "And they are even around the same age. How appropriate."

Ed nodded vigorously, on the inside collapsing with relief. A part of him noted the irony, that three members of the household now had three completely different visions of how Masuta and Izumi were related.

Well, as long as it meant that neither he nor Masuta would be kicked out into the street, he didn't care what stories he had to make up, he decided firmly. Still, he almost snorted at the ridiculous notion.

Siblings, indeed. As if.

Second one I don't like half so much, and I expect it's not canon. But I found myself wondering about this moment.

It was his own mistake, Masuta realized afterwards, an error in thinking. He'd had to remind himself so many times, since coming to this world, that the people he saw here and the people he knew from his home world were unconnected. He'd taught himself to distance the two in his mind, to always remember that no matter what it looked like, there was no link between the people here and the people there.

So it hadn't occurred to him, chatting with Alphonse and Edward over breakfast that morning, that there was any reason not to mention Hohenheim.

He'd just been recounting the story of his time at the University, and the first lecture he'd attended with the notable guest professor, when the clatter of falling silverware caught his attention. Alphonse had dropped his knife and was staring at him, eyes round.

The boy leaned forward, eagerly, all his attention suddenly fixed on Masuta. "You knew him?" he said excitedly. "Father? You knew him?"

"No," Masuta started to explain, automatically, "this wasn't --"

And then it hit him, with an ugly shock, that it was. Hohenheim might have lived in his world before Edward appeared, but he didn't doubt that Edward was truly his son. And if Alphonse was his brother, then that meant this boy was just as much Hohenheim's son as Edward was. And the unhappy shocks kept piling up one after another, none of them new revelations but only old information coming to new light; that Alphonse had never had a chance, as Edward had, to get to know his father; and that now he never would.

He heard a sound, and turned in his chair to see Ed, standing frozen in place with a plate of pancakes in hand. He looked as though he'd been struck, or fallen hard.

"Brother!" Alphonse turned round in his chair, anger edging into his voice again. "You didn't tell me! Why? I know you've never cared about Father, but I did! Didn't you think I had a right to know?"

"Excuse me," Ed muttered. He whirled around to drop the plate on the counter, and Masuta could see his hands were shaking. He turned and strode out of the room, his ponytail swinging behind him.

His first thought was worry for Edward. His second was that Edward was the worst kind of coward; because here he had left him, in the room with Hohenheim's son and a plate of half-eaten pancakes, and no choice but to be the one to turn Alphonse's confused hurt into another kind of hurt entirely.