Alphonse loves his mother.

They'd both loved their mother, naturally, as children do. He loved her warmth, the way she'd hold them close on sad days, the way she'd wave and smile as they ran off to play on good days.

Even now, unable to feel anything, lacking anything inside, he swears he can feel his heart contract a little when he thinks about her. He'd thought enough time had passed to let go, he had.

When he'd seen Clara taking care of patients, he'd felt the same thing, a warmth spreading inside his armour, like he might actually live again. Sometimes he wants to tell his brother, but worry stops his tongue. His brother worries too much, his brother would misunderstand. He can't share this.

Besides, he still remembered his mother as alive. He'd only caught a glimpse of what they'd brought back, but he knew his brother had seen more, that his mother was dead to his brother.

He feared that if he mentioned anything, his brother might want to try again, to bring her back, just for Al's sake. He tries sometimes to keep his brother from feeling such guilt, but it's no good. His brother has his eyes focussed on the future, held there by the past, so he couldn't see, not really. Not often.

He'd seen his mother in the Fuhrer's secretary, heard her voice, and told his brother. And Ed had said he was imagining it.

It was just an illusion.

It wasn't real.

He had felt the warm feeling stop, withdraw. He hasn't felt it again.

Alphonse just wishes he could feel again, feel warm again.

He wants to go home.

***

Edward hates his father.

He knows Al disagrees, and good for him. At least Al never tried to argue with him about it, though - never. Just made a little uncomfortable noise and moved on.

He doesn't have words for how much he hates his father, so he doesn't try.

He hates his father the way he hates his mother's tears. He hates his father with fingers balled into fists - flesh, automail. He hates his father with a sharp metallic tang in his mouth, his stomach clenched tight, his brows drawn down.

(He was thirteen when he looked in the mirror and found his first wrinkle, an anger line between his brows. He remembers touching it, feeling the ridges his flesh had formed into after such long habits of frowning, and wondered if his father has one of those, or if his father just never cared.)

He blames his father and himself in equal measure. It was his father's fault his mother had died like that, so unhappily. If his father had been there when she collapsed, he'd have known what to do. What could two kids do, too young for their voices to even have started to change? He'd done everything he could to get his father home, wrote to everyone, used logic and thought and blind will and it didn't help. His father never came.

And his mother's last words to him equated him to his father.

Al was right; she'd loved their alchemy so much because their father had been an alchemist. We're your sons, he'd wanted to shout at her more than once. Not his! But he'd held his tongue because she'd loved his bastard father so much, and now he couldn't ever tell her.

So it was his father's books he'd gone through to raise her from the dead, his father's words he'd read, his father's designed he'd implemented, and what came back?

He was sure his father must have hated his mother.

Fists clenched, metal taste in his mouth. His leg and shoulder ache. Al is a silent bulk on the other side of the room.

He'd find the Philosopher's Stone, get them fixed. Fix everything. Do things his father could only dream of. Prove they weren't alike.

And that would show him, wouldn't it?