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To Ed, there had never been something wrong with him, not in the way the old folk in town liked to whisper about when he was little and first declared his name was what was wrong, when he didn't know how to say it.
"She's an odd apple from an odd tree," they'd say, hands over their mouths like it made it any harder to hear. "Her whole family's wrong in one way or another. Her father was such a kind man, until he walked out. Did he not want to raise such a weird kid?"
He wasn't one to disrespect the dead, but the best of the flowers he brought to the graveyard in Resembool were very carefully placed only on the graves of those who called him Edward.
To Al, he liked to think he'd always been brother somewhere in the muddied knees and torn dresses of the years between Al's birth and their mother's sickness.
It had been terrifying to watch their mother collapse, and then when she whispered to him that as Al's older sister he'd have to watch him and the house-
He had to correct her. It wasn't loud, or rude, or snappish, or brutish, or any of the hundred of other ways he'd have expected to say it. It was quiet, barely audible, as he explained why he'd tried to discard his name the year before.
She hadn't really understood - he could tell, from the lost look in her eyes - but she cared so endlessly and infinitely much, and with one shaking hand on his head, the other wiping a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth, she smiled and called him Edward.
He would deny crying for the rest of his life.
Al was concerned when Ed left the room with red eyes and a fistful of used tissues, asking if their mother was still sick or, god forbid, getting worse.
Edward just shook his head, biting back the urge to shake his hands in excitement.
It was harder, when she died, and he had to explain to his brother in trembling words why she had left the house to her two sons.
Alphonse had simply gripped his hand, standing with him in front of her grave, and told him that, really, brother, they need to go inside before they catch a cold.
It made it a little easier to bear, when Granny just squinted at him every time Alphonse called him brother and Winry called him Ed, before she called him a reckless little girl. Regardless of that, she gave them her blessing to learn alchemy with the tall, stony woman who rolled into their small village and swept the two boys off their feet with her alchemical prowess.
Izumi Curtis was a storm, in all the best ways, and Ed couldn't help but admire her no matter how often they clashed.
"If you can't draw perfect circles while running from a housewife, how can you expect to draw them when you need to use them to help people?" She'd cried, flinging knives at the brothers' skidding feet, unheeding of their yelps. It seemed, often, that she genuinely wanted them dead, reunited with their mother. Yet, just a few hours later, she had quietly coached him through vocal exercises to help lower his voice when it was Al's turn to help Sig in the shop. "If you aren't comfortable in your body," she'd murmured, hand on his shoulder, "then you cannot use it to its fullest extent. Do not fear what make you different from others, use it. Embrace it, Edward, because you are nothing other than yourself, no matter your voice or appearance. You are always you."
The soft moments, hidden away from the world that was out for the brothers' blood, meant everything to Ed and Al.
By day, the Curtis's customers watched the two boys run through the streets, papers covered in equations and circles and symbols fluttering to the ground behind them as Izumi cackled madly, following close on their tail.
By night, she wordlessly spread salve over Alphonse's injuries and wrapped them in bandages, leaving them on the ground by Ed's head. He pretended to be asleep, too prideful to admit needing help from the person who gave him his bruises and cuts, especially in front of Al.
And then, after an eternity, but far, far too soon, they went home.
It was with furtive glances and muttered plans that they gathered what they needed, behind Granny and Winry's backs.
It was with blood and tears and screams that the consequences hit them.
Hit Alphonse, because he always got the short end of the stick when it came to Ed's own fuck-ups.
What was an arm and a leg to your entire body? All but two of your senses? Being mistaken for a girl in comparison to having your childhood taken because who really believed it was a young boy in the armour and not a man with a high pitched voice?
…In a way, Mustang was like Izumi. In a very twisted, warped, and distorted way. Even though both of them would punch him if he said it out loud.
He couldn't help but see it everywhere, though it pained him to admit it at times.
It was in the squared set of their shoulders, the way their eyes narrowed when they spoke down to you or got frustrated, the way they wore their facade as a shield - Izumi hiding her skill by claiming to be no more than a housewife, Mustang pretending to be a simpleminded flirt so no one thought to look any closer at what he did.
It was in the near-silent ways they showed their care; Izumi's carefully guided lessons and steady hands, Mustang's single, sharp nod when Edward corrected him after he said the wrong name, changing his papers without prompting, never mentioning it again no matter how heated their arguments.
"Brother," Alphonse had asked one day, sitting across the room from Edward's bed in the inn where they were spending the night while waiting for the train. "Can I ask you a question?"
"I think you just did, Al," he'd replied, chuckling, trying to break the heavy mood before it could really settle. It hadn't worked. "...What's up?"
He'd grown nervous when Al had shifted, armour clanking loudly.
"Do you ever wish you'd done it? Do you still want to?"
Ed's heart had climbed up his throat, pounding in time to his growing headache.
"Done what?"
"Change… Change your body, or your voice, so it feels more right. So it… So you wouldn't…" A louder clank, and a shriek of metal on metal. He had thrown his arms in the air, despairing his inability to find the proper words. "You know what I mean, brother! Don't be like that!"
"Sorry, sorry," Ed had said, the cold steel of his automail hand on his face enough to make him open his eyes and face his brother. "I won't… I thought about it, I'll admit. When we first started searching for the stone to restore our bodies, I… Ugh. I wanted to make mine right."
Teacher's words had echoed in his head, then and now and forever and always.
"But you won't," Alphonse had finished, with all the surety of a king decreeing law, like it was one of the fundamental rules of existence. All is one, one is all, and Edward was too chicken to change himself. "Because… Because…" A beat of silence. "Okay, brother, I'll admit I don't really get it."
Edward had huffed a laugh, tugging his blankets up over his shoulders. He would catch up on the lost sleep on tomorrow's train. "Something Teacher said to me, once. I am nothing other than myself. I want to make me, me. No matter how long that takes, how grueling it becomes… I want to make myself into who I will return to the earth as, and I want to do it with my own two hands. No cheating."
"Alchemy isn't cheating, Ed," Alphonse had reminded him, chided him, gently.
"This kind is," Ed had grumbled, arms crossed.
And so, hastily transmuted binders and carefully timed use, courtesy of Alphonse, was what he'd made do with for his years in the military.
Even after everything they'd discovered and lived through, as mundane as pie at Hughes' house, as painful as being impaled by a rusty pipe, as crazy as the promised day-
Ed stood by what he said.
No cheating.
His father - Hohenheim, bastard, dad - seemed to understand, though he looked sad when he'd trudged off to what Edward eventually discovered was his death. Even if the people of Xerxes, his people, were willing to help him (and wasn't it crazy to think that there had once been a time and culture where being like him was normal and accepted? The Xerxesian people thought of it as the brain being put in the wrong half of the body when the perfect being was split. The Ishvalan people held a similar sentiment, albeit one much more akin to Edward's, in that you build the body Ishvala gave you with the hands Ishvala gave you, and no one is allowed to judge that) Edward just… Couldn't justify it. He couldn't use other people for his own gain, to cheat.
Hohenheim confessed with a smile that his own soul was the only one left, and then, softer, more tinged with guilt, added that he was glad he would be able to see Trisha's grave again.
Now, Edward was left just past a crossroads, his brother's frail, thin, real hand clutched in his own, weakened and atrophied but once again made of flesh. The decision had already been made long before he'd arrived.
Steady, with the hands of the people who brought them there, the brothers moved to make their own future with shaking hands and no cheating - even less so for Ed, now.
But that was fine - Alphonse would transmute him a binder whenever he asked.
Besides, he'd picked up sewing recently, from a kind old woman and her wife that he'd run into on his way back from seeing Al off at the Xingese border, in the Youswell mining town.
He could make them with his own two hands, though they'd be a little rough around the edges.
Still fit him perfectly.