A/N: Just a little something I came up with last night when I had insomnia for my best friend in the whole wide world, Penny, who was also awake and looking for entertainment. Of course, she went to bed before this was halfway completely, but I finished anyways. So... Enjoy.

Disclaimer: I own no rights to FullMetal Alchemist or any canon characters related within. I gain no monetary rewards for the writing of this fiction, nor do I expect any.

I said, 'Grandpa, what's this picture here?

It's all black and white and ain't real clear

Is that you there?'

He said, 'Yeah I was eleven.'

Grandpa Elric never liked to talk about his past much. In fact, this was something that us grandkids were usually very happy about considering just about every other elderly person we knew enjoyed nothing more to impart their 'wisdom' upon us whether we want to hear it or not. Because of this, Grandpa Elric was our favorite all time Grandpa by consensus. Even the cousins who weren't really related to him would perk up at the thought of heading over to his house in the sticks for a visit. Besides, he could do alchemy. In our young minds, not boring us half to death and the ability to create cool things out of seemingly nothing was the equivalent of the coolest thing ever.

So there we were again, my parents quibbling on the front steps while Grandpa Elric watched on with a small smile on his face. It was the same, old fight they had every time we came out here. Mom tired and worn out from the long train ride and wanting nothing more than to go to her room in order to rest before bringing out her latest research project and Dad angry with her for not taking the time to enjoy being with us and with Grandpa.

"Edward." Grandpa's soft voice filtered into the argument before it could get too far out of hand. Dad looked over at his father guiltily, but there was never judgment in those milky grey eyes. Never anger, always a quiet understanding. I shuffled around anxiously as Dad matched that understanding gaze in his own strikingly blue eyes. "Might I suggest that the both of you go and get some rest. Unless something has changed dramatically from my day, those train benches are not the most comfortable. I can watch after young David for you."

Dad grinned and Mom sighed, but they both nodded their heads in acceptance and with a hardy hug from my father they were both off into the large confines of the house. I was left behind to stand awkwardly with the baggage, trying to ignore my parents bad behavior.

"You've grown again, David." Grandpa Elric apparently didn't feel the embarrassment of the situation the way I did. Of course, he never had. Dad had once told me that Grandpa was used to defusing arguments and looking out for people who didn't know enough to keep their mouths closed. "You can leave the bags out here for now. I'm sure your parents can come back and get them once they are done resting. Please come in, there are a few rare pieces that I have managed to get my hands on since you were last here."

I couldn't help but grin and dash up the porch steps and into the porch behind him. Grandpa Elric also had the most amazing collection of alchemic artifacts I had ever seen. Journals and books and sheaves upon sheaves of papers containing complex arrays and theories. And the pictures! There were tons of them. Pictures of famous alchemists, of wondrous accomplishments, of towers and bridges and buildings that had been created from nothing more than a few stone blocks. And as he would show me all of these things, he would teach me about alchemy. About its principles and its meanings and everything it could do for me once I got a better grip on it.

"Grandpa Elric?" I questioned as I followed his slightly shuffled gait up the stairs. "Where are we going? Your study is downstairs."

He chuckled lightly but continued his upward journey, through the corridor that held the room I would be staying in and past where my parents were probably still arguing behind their closed door. "I think I know where my study is, David. What I want to show you is in the attic."

I flushed deeply and watched in barely hidden awe as Grandpa reached up and pulled on a cord hanging from the ceiling, allowing a set of stairs to drop down and settle onto the floor. I had never been in the attic, not that I hadn't thought about going up there many times, but my parents had always been there to tell me no. There were 'things' up there. Dangerous 'things' that I shouldn't be touching. Alchemic knowledge I didn't need to be knowing. Government secrets that I shouldn't know existed. Artifacts that were in no way acceptable for a young boy's curious eyes and wandering hands.

"Dad said I'm not allowed to go in the attic." I mumbled under my breath as Grandpa began making his steady way up the stairway. "He says there's bad stuff up there."

"Anything can be bad if one doesn't understand it. It's in knowing why the bad things are so bad that you gain the knowledge to overcome them." Grandpa answered indulgently, never once pausing in his climbing. He reached the top and turned around giving me a wink before gesturing that it was my turn to make the climb. "Don't worry, I won't let all the dusty books bite you."

I scowled at my own childishness. I was thirteen, darn it! I shouldn't be afraid of what was in the forbidden attic. Besides, Grandpa had given me permission, and he was going to be there with me. Mentally cursing myself the whole way I up, I followed sticking my head up into the dusty space nervously, as though I expect all those bad things my dad had warned me about to attack without warning. All I saw was a bunch of trunks and some furniture covered in smudged sheets.

"See, nothing for you to be worrying about." Grandpa had made his way over to one of the trunks and was now rummaging around inside. "My son, while being a remarkably intelligent man, has never been truly comfortable with what I used to do, not that I can blame him. Just because it is something I love, does not mean that alchemy is for everyone and he is right in one respect. It is very dangerous."

I made a weak sound of agreement and wound my way through the piles of junk to make it to his side, nearly knocking over a stand with a worn, red duster hanging on it in the process. "Grandpa, why doesn't Dad like alchemy?"

It was a question I had been dying to ask for ages. Ever since I was old enough to understand what the flashes of light that Grandpa used to make us toys and to repair whatever we managed to break during our play was, I had my father there to tell me that it was nothing for me to be meddling in. I didn't know why, but I did know that it didn't seem fair. Other kids got to learn alchemy, and most of them weren't even very good at it. Not that I was probably any better, but I didn't know that. Couldn't know that because I had never been allowed to try.

"Because he knows what it can do to a person." Grandpa paused and glanced over at me, sighing softly as he turned back to what he was doing. Finally pulling out a thickly bound book and closing the trunk with a loud clack that echoes in the humid air. "He knows what it did to me."

Normally an old person saying something like that would have been cause for me to run for the hills. In fact, it was such a knee-jerk reaction to run away from the tales of the elderly that I couldn't quite keep a grimace off my face, something Grandpa saw and shook his head at.

"What's wrong?" He asked gently as he took a seat on the trunk's lid. "Was it something I said?"

I shifted nervously from one foot to the other, instantly guilty. "Well, it's just that now you're going to tell me some tale from your glory days, aren't you? You know, where you had to walk eight miles to school, in five feet of snow, uphill both ways."

This time Grandpa laughed, a full and happy sound. Not his usual chuckle or horribly hidden snicker at something insulting Dad would say that would have Grandpa going all misty eyed right afterwards. I couldn't help but offer up a small giggle of my own. It was infectious.

"I would say that we might have had a bit of trouble with that if it had been the case." Grandpa sighed happily and handed the book out for me to take and I did. "As you can see from the pictures in there, I wasn't exactly tall, that came much later in life… To my brother's intense dismay, I assure you."

"You had a brother?" My eyes widened involuntarily in shock. I had never heard about Grandpa having a brother. In fact, I had never heard anything about Grandpa other than he was a crazy old man more interested in his arrays and theories than in having a normal life.

"Yes, I had a brother. And a very famous one at that." He waved a hand excitedly to cue me to open the book. "Go on. I know you want to."

I did as I as I was told, mainly because I did want to open it. The leather bindings creaked and there was a puff of dust that rose from the first page, but other than that there was nothing else to testify to how old the book must have been. Just like all of Grandpa's texts and journals this was surprisingly well preserved.

It was a photo album with shiny sleeves and only one picture on the first page. The picture was in black and white and slightly yellowed around the edges and showed two young boys firmly wrapped in the arms of an older woman. All three were smiling at the camera, though the taller one did have that look of mild discomfort that came with every family photo in the back of his eyes, and there was a an air about him that said he would have preferred it better if the woman wasn't cradling his head like she was.

"Are one of those boys you, Grandpa?" I asked breathlessly, more excited by this glimpse into his past than I was willing to admit to. Grandpa just smiled as he always did and nodded. I turned another page to see the same two boys, this time more serious, a harder look in the taller one's eyes and a more rigid stance to their postures. I looked up again to see him watching my progress intently. "Really? Is one of them really you?"

"Of course, son. That's me right there." He pointed at the shorter boy. "That's me when I was eleven, and that is my brother, Edward at age twelve. This is right before we attempted to do something that changed our lives as we knew it."

I stared at him in shock and wonder, silently encouraging him to go on with my eyes. My wild, golden eyes that he had always loved, that he would always give in to, whether it be for the last cookie or for him to show me the next piece of forbidden knowledge when it came to the art of alchemy, an art that I was by no means allowed to study.

He smiled down at me and patted the trunk next to me, watching as I nearly fell over myself to sit down.

"It all started when I was just two years younger than you…"

Times were tough back in thirty-five
That's me and Uncle Ed just tryin' to survive
A cotton farm in the Great Depression

"No, it really started years before that even, with the death of our mother. My brother, Edward, and yes you're father is named after him, it wouldn't have been right any other way. In any case, Brother hadn't taken her death well, neither had I, but he had never been the kind of boy to just sit back and let life take its course. He was always out to change things. It was what made him Ed."

"We had only dabbled in alchemy before that point, making simple things such as toy horses and such. We were self-taught and motivated by Brother's insatiable need to be the best and to make those he loved happy. It always made Mom so happy when we would bring her gifts, little things that we had made with our talents, so when she died Brother's next logical step was to use alchemy to make her happy again: by bringing her back."

Here I gasped loudly and Grandpa looked down at me indulgently. "Yes, David?"

"But that's bad!" I curled my hands into fists at my side. "Everyone knows that. It's human transmutation. A taboo. Nobody's ever survived."

"You're right." Grandpa agreed and stroked his chin thoughtfully. "It was a taboo, and no one had ever survived, not at that point, but Brother was determined and his enthusiasm has often been described as a tangible thing. It was easily caught by me. Would you please turn the page?"

I stared at him as though he had lost his mind but I complied, glancing back down at the book and becoming riveted by the picture that stared back at me. A suit of armor, the same taller boy from before this time scowling and trying to position himself so that the camera had a hard time of seeing his right side, but there was no hiding the glint of silver where his arm should be.

Grandpa winked and continued his story.

"And that is us when he was thirteen and I was twelve, right before we ran away from everything we had ever known."

"We went out and found a teacher long before this picture was taken, never once telling her exactly why it was that we were so desperate to learn alchemy. By day we were her students, training our minds and our bodies for the taxing art of alchemy. By night we were students of different kind, pouring over biology texts and stumbling through notes we had found in our father's study. Looking at the work of a dead man and trying to do the impossible."

"Brother was a genius, even then. He has often been described as a prodigy, an alchemic runaway train with more force and power than had ever been seen before, and they were right. He was. I may have helped him draw up the arrays we needed and I may have been right there with him while we went through tome after tome in search of what we needed to know, but he was the driving force. He was the will to go on even though the odds were stacked against him. I have been called a genius, too, and I am, in my own way, but there had never been and will never be another Edward Elric. He was a shooting star in a world that wasn't quite ready for him."

"To this day I could still tell you the exact biological components for the average adult human body. It was drilled into our heads in those days, and it didn't take long for Brother and I to finally come up with something that was deemed workable. We wasted no time in gathering the ingredients necessary, but then something went horribly wrong. It is not just enough to have the materials for the body. Without the soul it is nothing anyways, but the soul… That was a price we were not prepared to pay."

"Equivalent exchange." He paused and I tore my eyes away from the picture in front of me. "You know what it means, don't you?"

"Yeah, sure." I muttered, not quite sure where this was headed. "It's the basic principle of alchemy. Something cannot be gained from nothing. The whole has to be equal to the parts. It's why when you fix our broken toys you can only make them the way they were before. You can't make them bigger or better."

His eyes lit up with pride. He had taught me that. "Correct. There is a price for everything, but what is the price for a single human soul?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. A lot?"

He ruffled my hair and I squirmed. "More than a body, more than a leg. Funny, it only cost him an arm to retrieve my soul and to attach it to the armor, but it had cost us so much more to fail to find our mother's soul. This is why your father doesn't want you to study alchemy. This is why he looks away every time I fix a toy or make you children something to play with. He knows what it did to me, what it did to my brother. Do you know who my brother is now? I'm sure you've heard of him."

I shook my head vigorously. The thirteen year old glaring up at me seemed familiar, but it was hard to place it. Like a half-remembered dream.

"My brother was Edward Elric: The Fullmetal Alchemist."

And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should have seen it in color

"You have his eyes, you know." Grandpa went on after my shock had subsided enough for my breathing to return to normal. Dad had told me that I had famous people somewhere in my family but I had never expected this. Everyone knew who the Fullmetal Alchemist was. He had saved the country from corruption, almost single handedly exposing the military for what it was and then helped to build it up from the lowliest peon up to the new Fürher to make it what it was today, a group of government agents out to help the people, not enslave them.

"I have what?" I asked hurriedly, hoping against all hope that I had heard him correctly.

"You have his eyes, that unmistakable gold." He smirked then and tugged on a lock of my dark bangs. "But not his hair. I guess you take after your mom's side in that respect. I can't tell you how many times I came this close to just hacking his golden hair right off of his big head. It was always tangled, always dirty, caught up in the same braid every single day. It was a fight just to get him to bathe much less brush it, but I couldn't really blame him. He was just like that. He was so caught up in fixing what he had done wrong, in fixing me, that he really shouldn't be faulted for smelling a bit on the rank side from time to time, not that I could smell him back then. Thank god for small favors."

"But our textbooks always said that he was a great hero, immaculately groomed and well dressed in his trademark red coat. Whirling from one town to the next, outing corruption and bringing about peace." Grandpa laughed then, another big, hearty one and I stared at him in confusion.

"Well, of course your history book would say that. It also says that he was tall and dapper and never said the wrong thing to anyone ever, doesn't it?" He asked, a twinkling of something closer to happiness than I have ever seen before in his eyes.

"Yeah…" I mumbled.

"Forgive me for what I'm about to say next, but your textbooks are very much in the wrong. Brother was a little shit, pardon my language." I gasped and Grandpa flipped to the next page in the book, a newspaper clipping in which the headline was something about a bridge collapsing somewhere in the South. "He did that, I can't even begin to remember why, but I do remember the townspeople were not pleased. He fixed it in the end, but they were about ready to run the both of us out of town. He was a short, arrogant little shit that didn't know the meaning of 'shut the hell up'."

"But…"

"Oh he matured out of it, though he never did get very tall, but you wouldn't say that to him, not if you enjoyed living… Or hearing for that matter." Grandpa flipped another page to a set of three pictures. "There really aren't a lot of pictures of us after that bridge fiasco, mainly because Brother hated having his picture taken, but most of that changed after he got my body back."

"You really were just a soul in armor, weren't you Grandpa?" I asked timidly as I studied the new pictures in front of me. The one on the top left had Grandpa in his armor along with his brother, now looking a lot older than just thirteen and a group of men and one woman, all in military uniforms, and all of them looking rather uncomfortable at having their picture taken.

"Yes, I was, though obviously that was fixed."

The second picture was in the upper right-hand corner and it showed one of the military men from the picture before, a dark-hair man who was smirking and holding a file folder just out of reach of a spitting mad Edward Elric. I pointed at it and sent my grandfather a questioning look.

"Ah, and that is Colonel Roy Mustang: The Flame Alchemist. Or, well, he was a Colonel back then. I think you know him a lot better as Fürher Mustang." Grandpa steadied me with one wrinkled hand to my back as I really was in danger of falling over backwards in shock. "I know, he was a bit of a pompous ass back then… Well, he was always a pompous ass even afterwards now that I think about it… He was just more reserved in public, which is why he got to be Fürher and my brother had to settle for heading up the Committee for Alchemic Advancement. Not that he cared. He hated being in the public's eye."

"You knew the Fürher?" I squeaked out around my suddenly dry throat.

"If the Fullmetal Alchemist was my brother, wouldn't it also stand I would know Roy as well?" Grandpa sighed wistfully. "And just knowing the two of them together was more than enough to keep my hands full. Roy liked nothing more than to bait Brother until it looked like they were going to kill each other. Ed hated him… Or more like hated his attitude. I don't think that after awhile he had much objection about who he was."

I glanced weakly down at the last photo on the page, one with Grandpa Elric lying in a white bed, looking just like he had in the picture where he had been eleven with his brother, who still looked very much like he did in the picture where he was being taunted by the future leader of the military. Grandpa looked worn out, as did Edward, but there was something utterly peaceful about them despite their obvious exhaustion.

"And that was taken only hours after Brother cracked the code and got me my body back. Of course my body hadn't aged wherever it had been taken, but he had kept his promise, he had gotten it back for me. He would never tell me the price he had been forced to pay to do it either. No matter how much I begged and pleaded with him, he never once let slip what he had promised to that infernal Gate…" Grandpa glared off into space for a second before I gained the courage to nudge him gently on the shoulder. "Hm, don't tell your father I mention the Gate either. He'll make sure that you're never allowed to come over anymore. And don't ask me about it either. I'll tell you everything you could ever want to know, and some things you never wanted to know, about it when you're older."

I nodded solemnly to show that I wasn't about to betray him and he went on. "Brother never did get his arm and leg back like I promised him we would do, but that didn't seem to matter to him much after I returned to normal. The automail was never very comfortable to him and we could all tell that as he got older it started to take its toll on him, he had gotten it put on at a remarkably young age. Most people either wait until they are much older or never get the surgery at all because you can't use anesthetics because of the nerve conductions. It was never really meant to be put on a child who was only eleven, and it certainly wasn't meant to have been used the way Brother used it. He got into more fights than should have been humanly possible, but he never once complained and it was almost like the automail became a part of him, and the pain didn't seem to matter that much anymore."

"But Grandpa…. The Fullmetal Alchemist…. He died, didn't he?"

Grandpa's eyes got that far away look again, the one he would get when Dad said stupid things or overreacted about nothing. He leant over and turned the page again and I stared down in awe at a large picture of Edward and Fürher Mustang, both wearing full dress uniform and both with their chins held high, staring out a floor length window and down onto the city below them.

"You're right… He did die, but it was the way he would have wanted to go."

"He died to save me."

This one here was taken overseas
In the middle of hell in nineteen forty-three
In the winter time you can almost see my breath
That was my tail gunner ole' Johnny McGee
He was a high school teacher from New Orleans
And he had my back right through the day we left

"What happened?" I got out around the lump in my throat. "I mean, I know what the books say. That he died a war hero and saved thousands, if not millions of innocent lives in the process but…"

"Oh, the books were right about that one." Grandpa suddenly became much more focused and he tapped the picture in front of me twice with his index finger. "This picture was taken right before the final attack on Central when the Drachmans attempted to invade. Ed was to be the main defense, a job he took with pride, but both Roy and I didn't want him to do it. In fact, we both begged him to stay well behind our troops where he could act more as a support unit than anything else, but he knew better. He knew that him going ahead and causing the destruction he had been so famous for in his youth was the only hope we had of winning. So he went, and he never came back."

"My brother was many things to a lot of people. He was family, a friend, a lover, and a whole lot more, but he was also a weapon and he knew it. There were very few people who could stand their ground when he was intent on tearing it out from under their very feet. The sheer force of his alchemy made everything else pale in comparison." Grandpa's voice was cracking now and he seemed to be having some issues keeping his face straight so I avoided looking at him and turned my attentions back to the picture. It may have been in black and white but there was no mistaking the determination and the courage in Edward Elric's eyes… Or the fear. It was a strange thing for me to think, but I couldn't shake the idea that my great uncle had known before he'd even left that he wasn't going to be coming back, that this was one sacrifice he was going to have to take the brunt of on his own.

"He was only twenty three. Twenty three years old and he gave his life so that I wouldn't have to fight, so that thousands of soldiers never had to go to the front lines, so that thousands of families didn't have to be torn apart by war. He saved my life, and he saved theirs and he never looked back." A droplet of water appeared on the back of my hand, wobbling wildly in the dim light of the attic before slowly rolling off my knuckles and away to land on the dusty floor, leaving a trail of wetness in its wake. "He was a hero, in more ways than many people knew, but he was more than that, too. He was a man and a prodigy until the day he died. There aren't many people who can take on a whole army and win after all."

"It hurt when he was gone. No one said it much, and least of all said it to me, but I knew." Grandpa took a deep breath and when I dared to look at him again his eyes were dry and his expression was as calm as it ever was. "It was there in every moment I spent in Central, in every look I shared with Roy or with our friends… The other military people in the other picture. The sun would rise and set and life would go on. More alchemists would be born and more geniuses spawned. Alchemy would ebb and flow the way it always has and maybe someday even Ed would be forgotten, but we knew that nothing could take his place. Alchemy lost its best practitioner that day. I still remember what Roy said to me, years later, on his deathbed. He looked me dead in the eye and he smiled and then he said something that has stuck with me until this very day forty years later. He said…"

"'There might be other geniuses, but there will never be another Edward Elric.'"

I fought back my own tears. Decades later and here I was mourning for the great uncle I had never known. I sat upstairs in a dank and gloomy attic with my grandfather and I let his grief wash over me, just as fresh as it had been over half a century ago when alchemy had both lightened and darkened his life. The balance between both equally maintained. To make something you must lose something. To gain you must first sacrifice. The whole is always equal to its parts.

Equivalent exchange. Just as much a part of life as it was of alchemy.

"He was right. Some might have said he was giving up. That sixty was too young for a man like him to just slip away for no discernable reason other than sheer exhaustion, but I knew better. He gave something up on that day, too, something that no one but himself knew." Grandpa turned the page once more and I was now looking down at the death announcement for the greatest alchemist ever known. Edward Elric: The Alchemist for the People. "I couldn't fault him for it either. It was virtually impossible not to love my brother after all, bad habits and everything."

I ran a shaking finger over the picture in the obituary, one with Edward once more glaring at the camera, not the strong man depicted in some of the other photos but the determined boy he had once been. Angry and scared and unsure of nothing other than his impossible task, the insurmountable odds.

And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should have seen it in color

A picture's worth a thousand words
But you can't see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color

"It scared him." My voice sounded so young and useless even to my own ears and I found myself wanting to eat my words before they'd even really been said. But they were out there now, nothing I could do would bring them back.

"What did?" Grandpa asked, unable to keep the curiosity out of his voice as he reached a soft hand under my chin and tilted my face so that he could see it. "What scared him?"

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes before answering him. "Everything… Everything scared him."

There was a long silence after my words, a silence in which I was terrified to break. Who was I to be saying things about Edward like I had known him? Until right now I hadn't even known he was related to me. He was just a faceless figure I had to memorize to pass history. My Grandpa's hand released my face and I quickly bent my head and waited for him to say something to make this humiliation pass. He didn't.

But he did place something in my hand, something round and cool. Barely daring to breathe I cracked one eye open just enough and I nearly fell back for the second time that day from shock, for there in my hand was something I had never expected to see.

It was silver and very well kept. A muffled ticking sound came from it and I ran my thumb wondrously over the embossed chimera on the front. The crest of the Amestrian army. The chain rested heavily against the side of my hand and I inhaled one shaky breath as I beheld something that I had been dreaming of every since I was old enough to know what alchemy was.

It was a state alchemist's watch.

"Open it." My grandpa's voice was just as soft and quiet as it always was, but there was a tone of force to it and I complied, once more gasping out loud as I read the rough inscription within. "Tell me. What does it say?"

"Don't forget: Three, Oct., eleven." I murmured, wrestling my gaze away from the sight in front of me to look at my grandpa again. He nodded.

"The day we burned our house to the ground so that we could go chase a shadow, to chase a legend. He got this watch not even a few days before. The youngest state alchemist in history." Grandpa was smiling again. "He never had been one for conventions. He had been scared then, always scared. Terrified that he would wake up and that everything would have been a dream. That he would wake up and I would be missing and he would be alone again with nothing but his overwhelming guilt to keep him company."

"He lived with that fear his whole life. Alchemy was his gift, but it was also his curse." Grandpa reached out and closed the watch with a muted click and wrapped my hands around it. "He lived his life by its rules, by equivalent exchange and no matter how many times it betrayed him, no matter how many times it levied prices he could not afford to pay, he showed them his middle finger and took another step anyway. But he never stopped being afraid. That's what made him so different, so utterly amazing. Everyone called him fearless, but he wasn't. He merely acted it anyways, never letting the fear stop him from getting what he needed. That is the way he became such a great hero. He did what needed to be done but he never once let the price get out of his sight. He never made the same mistake twice."

"And that is why the rest of us went on after he was gone."

This one is my favorite one
This is me and grandma in the summer sun
All dressed up the day we said our vows
You can't tell it here but it was hot that June
That rose was red and her eyes were blue
And just look at that smile I was so proud

At his urging I tucked the watch into my pocket despite my protests. The whole time he just sat there smiling, saying that his brother would have wanted me to have it, that I was going to be a great alchemist, too someday. I didn't have to heart to contradict him, and I took the watch.

He reached out and flipped through the album again, coming to rest on a picture of a beautiful woman in a white gown and veil, her long, light hair piled into a mountain of curls at the back of her head and two long strands hanging down on either side of her lovely face reaching down to the bouquet she clutched at her chest.

"Your grandmother." Grandpa stated without any prompting. "She was always so beautiful, and very opinionated, even then. She was the bane, and part of the joy, of my brother's existence, but they always remained friends. No matter how many time she beat him upside the head for constantly damaging the automail she made for him. I don't know what I ever did to make her love me, but I am forever glad that she did. We saved each other back then."

"She looks happy." I sat enthralled as the picture radiated joy from deep within. All the vibrant colors it was missing didn't seem to matter. You would have to be blind not to see all the happiness locked forever behind a thin wall of plastic.

"She was." Grandpa agreed. "Your Grandma Winry was always more expressive than the rest of us. If she was happy, she was happy. If she was sad, she was sad. You always knew it when she'd had a bad day, or a good day. After living with Brother and his temper tantrums and his withdrawing into himself whenever there was something bothering him for so long she was a breath of fresh air, even if she did tend to get a bit violent from time to time."

"Your dad got his eyes from her." Grandpa added and I blinked in surprise. "I know you were very young when she passed on, but she had the very same crystal, clear blue eyes he does. She loved him so much it hurt sometimes. It always made her proud that he became an engineer, even though it broke mine. And she loved you very much."

"Dad always used to joke that you won Grandma's love in a fight. Did you?" I asked.

Grandpa laughed in response. "In a way, I guess I kind of did. Winry was our childhood friend back way before everything my brother and I went through. Back then there was a rumor going around here that we both wanted to marry her. Back then my brother and I settled all disputes pretty much the same way from whose turn it was to set the table to who was better at alchemy (that was always Brother no matter how many times I beat him into the ground). I always won, of course."

"So one day Winry told us that she heard a few of our other friends debating on which one of us she was going to marry and that led us to fighting as usual since Brother was never one to back down when proving he was better than everyone was on the line." Grandpa rolled his eyes. "He was difficult even as a child. Well, we fought and I won, though, now that I think back on it, he didn't seem to be trying his hardest. I always knew Winry loved him in a way that she would never be able to love me, but over time that love change into more of a sisterly feeling, much to my relief."

"Did Great Uncle Edward get to see your wedding?" I asked next, a small part of me needing to know the answer. Grandpa's smile stretched out to reach both corners of his face.

"Yes he did, and that was a day I will never forget." Grandpa sobered up a bit for a moment. "But he never did get to see his nieces and nephews. Your dad is of course named after him. And your Aunt Gracia was named after the wife of a good friend of ours. Your Uncle Maes was named after a friend, too. In fact, there isn't a single one of my children who isn't named after someone important in my life at some point or another, with Winry's approval of course. I never could get her to approve the name 'Roy', but I let that one go. It wasn't very wise to argue with her."

"Who am I named after?" I asked eagerly.

Grandpa shrugged. "I'm not sure. Your father and I had a bit of a falling out for a long time. I wanted him to learn alchemy, to follow in his uncle's footsteps and he didn't want to. I told him everything, of course, and he decided that the risk was never going to be worth the gain. Unfortunately we argued and he left. It wasn't until I heard about you being born that I came to him to apologize. It wasn't like me to let things rest the way they did for so long, but I was weak. All I ever wanted for your father was for him to be happy…. I just went about it the wrong way."

"It's okay. He still loves you." I said and I sat still while he hugged me. "Are there any more pictures?"

"There are tons, all right there in that book, and some more in this trunk." Grandpa looked thoughtful for a minute. "In fact, this whole attic is full of junk. You're going to be here for a week. How about you help me clean it up some and organize everything? I promise that you can keep anything you want as payment. Sounds like a deal?"

"Yeah!"

That's the story of my life
Right there in black and white

And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should have seen it in color

A picture's worth a thousand words
But you can't see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color

"Dad! Dad, Aunt Elysia's here to see you!" At the sounds of my father's voice we both jumped. And I hugged the photo album tightly to my chest. "Dad!"

"We'd better go down. We wouldn't want your parents looking for you next, would we?" I nodded and quickly got to my feet, reaching out to help him to his as we made our way to the stairs. "David, I want you to know that everything I have told you up here is to be our little secret. Someday I will tell your cousins the same thing, but until then you must keep it to yourself. We can't have them being jealous or something."

I shook my head. "No, Grandpa. It'll be our secret."

He smiled tiredly and gestured for me to go first. "I trust you."

And I found that I liked being trusted. I liked the way he looked down at me with kindness and understanding and complete and unreserved faith. I could now see why he had never once told a story about the olden days. I could now see why he had never wanted to, and even though a small, immature part of me was protesting at having to sit still for so long that day, that part was very small and very far away.

Maybe I had even grown up a bit.

It took him longer going down than it had going up and I had to lift the stairs back into their original position for him. We made our way down the hall in comfortable silence, with me peeling off for a second to stow the album in my room, meeting him in the foyer where he was greeting the old lady that lived down the road.

"Elysia! To what do I owe this pleasant surprise?" Grandpa was smiling still, but it wasn't the same smile he had shown me in the attic. That smile had been easy and open, this one was the same vacant grin he always wore, but there was something in his eyes that hadn't been there before, that peace I had seen in the picture of him in the hospital room. The peace I had seen in the picture of him with his mother.

"Oh, Alphonse, you know I can never stay away from you for long, and Edward, Maria! My this is a surprise. How have you been?"

The adults quickly said their hellos and they made their way to the kitchen to continue their conversation leaving me behind. Grandpa was the last to go and at the very last second he turned around and gave me a wink.

Fingering the watch in my pocket I winked back at him, knowing that there was a lot more for me to learn in that attic, and leaving me itching to begin.

If I was going to be the second greatest alchemist the world had ever known I was going to have to get started as soon as possible.

After all, there would never be another Edward Elric, but I was now determined to be the next best thing.

You should have seen it in color