Title: Set to Ringing
Author: Tiamat's Child
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist (manga)
Word Count: 1000
Rating: K
Summary: There wasn't much distance between the two of them.
Warnings: None.
Notes: Spoilers for the Ishval flashback, Chapters 58 to 61. Written for fma_fic_contest at LJ, Prompt 20: "Sidekick". It took second place, and has been cleaned up just a bit since then.

Set to Ringing

There wasn't much distance between them in age. Just the two years, that was all, and sometimes Auntie teased him that that was why his older brother was growing up so weedy, ribs and wrist bones showing through, being weaned too early in favor of him. But Auntie was wiry herself, like all that side of the family, like a whip crack, and they had settled between themselves that heredity was the more likely culprit.

"Heredity is who you belong to," his brother explained. His brother liked words, liked to explain, liked to be listened to. "It is who your family is. Where you come from."

He nodded. "Where you come from," he echoed.

He came from Ishval. He came from Ishvalla. He was of Ishval and God's hands lay upon him. God had taken his people up, held them as a woman holds a nursing infant, set them on their feet and led them by the hand. He was God's. He was God's and he felt it, felt it always, felt it set him to ringing, as if he was the shell of a bell and God was the clapper.

It was his brother who showed him how to listen to God setting other people ringing, though he did not think his brother meant to, or at least he did not know that that was what he was doing. His brother loved to talk. His brother loved to talk of things he knew, though he could keep silent to, and he listened, he listened to him, he had always been listening to his brother, always, and it came to him that God rang in his brother when he smiled, when he looked up over a book, when he spoke of what moved him, God rang in him pure and true.

He listened. He had noticed with his brother first, had understood with his brother first, but when his mother taught them both mathematics, physics, the structures of the universe, God rang in her too. God rang in his mother when she cooked, when she spun about the kitchen floor with her dark hair veiled and her eyes veiling her soul, her soul that wandered amongst the deep structures of the universe, the universe that God made, that God held. God had made the universe and God held the universe, and God had given it to his mother to name a part of it, to name it and describe and make it known.

His mother had been a professor, once. She had taught physics in a big university in the north, far away in one of Amestris's cold, bustling cities. His mother had been a professor and she had learned and she had taught and she was brilliant, he knew, he knew it, bright and high and clear like the night sky, when every star shone clean. "The world changes," she told his brother, when his brother asked her why she had left, why she no longer read papers to rooms full of scientists, why she did not study in big labs anymore, but only in the very little one their father had helped her build at the back of the house. "The world changes and sometimes it's unfair, darling. The important thing is to never stop thinking."

"Never stop thinking," his mother said, and his brother didn't, and he didn't either. He thought and he thought and he thought, and he ran with his brother down the street, until they came near the soldiers that were always about, young men and women with no family in Ishval, young men and women with strange colored eyes, blue or brown or green or black, not red like his, like his brother's, like his mother's, and his father's, and Auntie's, and the baker's, and the butchers', and the young priest's who taught them their prayers. Then his brother shouted, "Slow down!" and caught him up and took him by the hand and they both went by the soldiers at a walk.

He was not much afraid of the soldiers. They had always been a part of his life and some of them smiled and most of them were younger than his mother, were younger even than the young priest who taught the children at school. But he knew it was better to walk past them than to run.

He did not speak to the soldiers to find out what made God ring in them. It was better not to speak to soldiers.

There was not a great deal of distance between him and his brother in age and there was generally not a great deal of distance between them in space. They did not read out of the same primer in school, but they sat on the same bench because they were both so tall that no one else could see over them. They walked from school to home together. They ran the errands their mother gave them, shared the burden of the water from the well, split penny candies, worked the garden, always near by and sometimes closer, when one was sad or both were angry and they fought.

That was the way it was until the day he realized what made God ring in emhim/em and went running, running, running to the temple because he had to tell someone, he had to know how to become what he knew now he had to become.

On the way back, he stopped by the bakery. "Why look," said the baker, "it's the shadow alone. Where's your brother?"

"At home," he said. And then, after a moment of consideration. "I'm going to be a priest."

"Are you now?" the baker said. "There's a decision to celebrate. Take a sweetbread home to your mother, love."

His brother was standing at the garden gate when he came down the street, and he ran to him in the lengthening light, his face brightening as the burden of fear fell from it.

Their shadows met, and merged.