InuYasha Fan Fiction / Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ In Pursuit of the Green Dragon ❯ Breakthrough ( Chapter 14 )

Tokyo, May, 1925

One week.

It had only been a week since Brother disappeared down the well, whisked away to God-knows-where…or when.

But to Alphonse, it felt like much longer. The well had gone dead after that, the mysterious pulse entirely vanished.

As each day passed, and Alphonse found himself no closer to discovering the secret to reactivating the well, the tension in the Higurashi household had grown until the air was thick with unvoiced expectations that hung like smoke in the cluttered rooms.

Temporarily freed of obligations to give lectures and teach classes at the university, Professor Higurashi had retreated to his study, where he spent long hours consulting his extensive library of English and German scientific publications and papers, and scribbling neat columns of Japanese characters on vertically-ruled paper, interspersed with equations.

It was obvious that the Professor was avoiding dealing with his troublesome houseguests, thought Alphonse in a fit of irritation as he stared at the alchemical symbols he had sketched on a piece of paper.

And it was really too bad the Professor's library didn't include any alchemy texts.

Sautter's treatise on manipulating earth elements would have been particularly useful in his efforts to revise the transmutation circle originally created by the Thule Society. Instead, Al was forced to rely on his memory (luckily, he had a good memory) of some of the more obscure materials he had studied in preparation for the State Alchemist's exam.

As threatened, Ikeda came every morning to question Alphonse about his progress in reawakening the well.

And without fail, every afternoon, Alphonse was dutifully marched out to the well-house, where he spent futile hours on his knees at the bottom of the well, tracing and re-tracing his revisions to the transmutation circle.

Kagome, who always busied herself with cooking or cleaning during Ikeda's visits, trying to stay out of the policeman's sight, would watch Al leave the house with a yearning, hopeful look that he felt tingling between his shoulderblades.

He wanted to live up the mute expectation in that gaze, wanted to make her smile.

Wanted to offer her the hope of reuniting with her friends and family.

But not matter what he tried, each attempt at starting a transmutation flickered out, and the well remained stubbornly inactive. The earth at its bottom turned pale gray with chalk dust, and Al's throat grew dry and choked with it. He began to taste chalk with every meal.

It was the taste of failure.

And with every failure, Ikeda's expression grew more and more sour, and Professor Higurashi's grew proportionally more anxious. Kagome lost a little more of her cheerfulness, becoming sadder, and more silent.

That was the worst part—disappointing her.

In the evenings, they would all sit together in the living room and drink tea, making strained conversation. Even the boys were not as exuberant as they had been upon their older brother's return.

Ikeda's relentless scrutiny was wearing on all of them. As were the days that passed without sign of Ed's return, or any sign that the well had ever opened a portal to the past, as Kagome insisted it could. Ed's disappearance weighed heavily on Alphonse's mood, as did the policemen stationed at the doors of the well-house.

And Alphonse was facing one additional difficulty: he couldn't stop thinking about Kagome.

By the morning of the seventh day, he found himself envying his brother's single-mindedness. Alphonse had always secretly felt that he was better-able to enjoy life with his balanced approach to work and leisure, whereas Brother seemed happiest when he was obsessed with a problem to solve.

But now, with Ikeda expected at any moment, and his thunderous disappointment at yesterday's failure still hanging in the air, Al wished he had some of Ed's focus.

Especially when his attempts to recall one of Sautter's more complicated equations kept getting sidetracked by a vivid daydream where Kagome came into the room to serve him tea, and ended up sitting on his lap, those long, daringly-exposed legs of hers pressing against the outside of his thighs. He could almost feel the soft pressure of her lips against his own, and the soft resilience of her breasts, pressing against his chest…

As if summoned, Kagome entered the living room, bearing a tea-tray, and Al jumped guilty. He scooted closer to the edge of the low table, praying it would hide his lap.

He had read all about hormones and their effect on the human body while he was still imprisoned in the armor, but the reality was somewhat...different than he had expected. And a hell of a lot more embarrassing, even worse than his voice breaking at the most inopportune moments.

On Professor Higurashi's advice, Kagome had stopped wearing the scandalously short shirt and sailor blouse that she insisted was her school uniform. Instead, she alternated between a soberly-colored kimono that had belonged to Professor Higurashi's wife, and the red-and-white bell-sleeved, flowing-trousered costume of a Shinto shrine maiden.

She had obviously just completed her duties at the shrine, and was clad in the red-and-white outfit, her abundant hair tied back with a white ribbon.

"Al-kun!" she said, with obviously forced cheerfulness. "Have you had breakfast yet? I've brought you some tea. How—how is it going?"

He held his breath as she leaned over his shoulder, acutely aware that—oh, God, her breast was actually touching his shoulder!—and studied the drawings spread out in front of him.

After a moment of fighting for control, he dared to turn his head, and looked at her profile, so tantalizingly close to his face.

"I—" He swallowed, hard. "I'm sorry, Kagome-san. These should work. I don't know why they're don't—"

He bowed his head, feeling every bit as helpless and as frustrated as he had a year ago, with blood pouring from his hand and a clock he couldn't repair on the table in front of him.

Her next words made him forget him his despair, and even the deliciously uncomfortable feeling that her proximity induced in his chest—and in parts further down.

"It's probably because you don't have a jewel shard. That's how I've been traveling to the past."

"A jewel shard?" Al repeated. "What's that?"

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you about this before," she replied, her large brown eyes serious.

She knelt at his side, hooked one finger under a silver chain hanging around her neck, and fished up a tiny glass bottle that hung like a pendant under the blouse-like layers of her shrine-maiden's clothing.

Two tiny, glowing splinters of rose-colored crystal rested on the bottom of the vial.

Al reached out a cautious finger, and felt a sensation like an electric shock as his fingertip touched the vial. Startled, he jerked his hand back as a ripple of gooseflesh moved up his arm.

"You can feel it, too?" Kagome asked, excitedly.

Al nodded, and reached for the vial again. This time, he didn't pull away at the sensation, though the skin of his hand began to prickle, and the fine golden hairs on his forearm stood straight up, as if pulled by static electricity.

Power radiated from those tiny splinters. A different kind of power than the one he had used back home to channel transmutations, but power nonetheless.

"Can I try something?" he asked, his mind racing with sudden possibilities.

She nodded, and he flipped over the sheet of paper he had been using, and sketched a simple transmutation circle on the back.

He looked around for something suitable--and disposable--to use for his experiment, and swiftly snatched a handful of rice crackers from Kagome's tray.

Placing these in the center of the circle, he looked at Kagome, who was paying rapt attention to his preparations.

"If you'll just lean a little closer," he said, without thinking, and felt his cheeks grow hot as her shoulder pressed against his upper arm. "Uh, that is--I meant to say, `closer to the paper,' Kagome-san. Try to get the crystals as close to the circle as you can."

"Ah, excuse me, then, Al-kun." She smiled up at him, her big brown eyes sparkling with good humor, and his heart began hammering in his chest.

She caught the dangling vial between her fingertips, and uncorked it. Carefully tipping the vial over the paper, she tapped the bottom gently, teasing out one of the shards. It landed on the outer circle of the transmutation circle.

"Perfect," breathed Al, momentarily forgetting his embarrassment.

He closed his eyes, picturing what he wanted to do--understanding, decomposition, reconstruction--and pressed his fingertips against the array, seeking the energy he had felt earlier.

The transmutation sprang to life under his hands with a rose-colored blaze that made every inch of his skin prickle fiercely.

"Wow," said Kagome, as he reluctantly released the energy--oh, how he had missed being able to do this!--and opened his eyes.

A tiny--and fully edible--toy horse stood where there had previously been a pile of rice crackers.

Al grinned at her, feeling more hopeful than he had in days. "Well, I guess that proves that your crystals are indeed the key to all of this."

She nodded. "I think," she said, her brow furrowed a little. "That whatever happened to your brother--and to me-- was because Inuyasha and I happened to be traveling through the well at the same time that you were trying to open it."

"I think you're probably right." Al sprang to his feet, nearly upsetting the tea-tray in the process, eager to try out this new possibility. After a week of frustration and setbacks, he felt invigorated "Which means, we need you in the well to activate it. Now, we just have to find a way to get past the guards..."

Kagome paused from where she was carefully transferring the shard from the paper back into her vial. "I don't know," she said. "I don't want to get Uncle Souta and my other uncles in trouble…what if that horrible Ikeda-san finds out?"

Al blinked at her. She was missing the point, wasn't she? His every nerve screamed to act now, and not delay his reunion with Brother a moment longer. But he didn't want to hurt her feelings.

"Ikeda," he said, as patiently as he could, "wants me to reopen the well. He wants that dragon."

"I-I know. And I want to see Inuyasha…and my other friends again. But…" her voice trailed off, and she bit her lip. Al saw that her fingers were clutching the tiny vial of jewel shards.

He tried to suppress the pang of jealousy at the way she said Inuyasha. She had told Al that he was a friend.

Only a friend, Al told himself. Only, seeing the expression on her face, he wasn't sure if he believed it.

"Why don't we tell Professor Higurarshi our news, and see what he thinks, okay?" Al suggested.

Of course, the Professor would be overjoyed at his news, especially given how antsy Ikeda had been getting over Al's continued failure to reactivate the Gate—or whatever it was—at the bottom of the well.