rey meustrus
Sponsor
This is my first fanfic. This is also my first story on this topic ever. And this is the first time in like 10 years I've posted anything like this on a web forum. I promise it's better than that crap that is most likely gone forever and good riddance and I don't think anybody here was ever on the old LRPGM where I did that sort of thing.
Anyway. This is a Full Metal Alchemist fan fiction. I would really appreciate constructive criticism on the storytelling as I don't feel very good at writing.
You Can't Transmute Happiness
a Full Metal Alchemist fan fiction by meustrus
Equivalent exchange. Today I’ve studied alchemy for three years and everything comes back to that one principle. The idea that every action carries a cost equivalent to its force.
So what value do those three years have? Three years I have now toiled towards my goal. My mother still thinks of this as my way into a successful life as a state alchemist. But who will want me after what I plan to do? After they know what I truly am?
I only hope I can disappear for a while. Three years…with any luck, my three years of toil will grant me three years of bliss before I have to return and explain myself.
Here’s looking forward to the next full moon. It’s taken three years of study, but I’m finally ready.
- - -
Ms. Crusoe was pretty harsh today. She caught me studying the components of the human body and then I was in for it. I can’t even count the time she spent chastising me.
Human transmutation is the one greatest sin of alchemy. I know this. I certainly don’t intend to bring anybody back to life or anything. But how am I supposed to explain what I’m doing?
Tomorrow she plans to keep me busy all day tending the gerbils. I’m supposed to learn the inherent value of life. Like that will help me appreciate my own any more. I’ll have to buy the materials later.
- - -
What fortunate little things. Look at these creatures; their existence is so simple and they live to be themselves.
I gaze past their cages into the streets outside the window. The people of this town are much the same. I watch them move, men and women to their own rhythms. Their gait. Their smiles. The way they pause to chat and don’t even think about whether the way they move is right or wrong.
The door chime rings.
“Hey Ms. Crusoe!” says a familiar boy. “You get any more of that sugarcane in? Fifi can’t get enough of that stuff!”
“Not yet,” she says from behind the counter. Ms. Crusoe may be a great teacher of alchemy, but most of the time she makes her living with this pet store. Sometimes we get exotic creatures from faraway lands. The last one came with a few shoots of sugarcane as a treat from its native land. Unfortunately it passed away from the climate around here. Ms. Crusoe saved some sugarcane for alchemical study, but this boy bought most of it at a discount for his pet rabbit.
“Well, let me know if you ever do. See you later.” As he turns around he almost doesn’t notice me. “Oh, hi Lloyd.” I get only a brief look at him before he walks right on out the door. His friends are waiting outside for him, and once he’s back outside they walk on down the street smiling and arguing and jumping around like normal boys.
I wonder if he knows how lucky he is.
- - -
I don’t have much time left before the full moon and I don’t want to have to wait until the next one.
Today is my day off studying. Ms. Crusoe has set me up with a local group of teens to play soccer and today they’ve gotten together with some other groups for a little light-hearted tournament. I actually kind of like the game. Well, except that my team never passes me the ball. But sometimes the other team doesn’t know that, and I can make a convincing run and distract their defense so someone else can bring it up the middle and shoot.
Not today though. “Hey, Brad, can I catch up with you guys later?” I ask.
“Huh?” he says, like he forgot I was there. “But we’ll be one short!”
“Forget about him,” says Luke. “We can win without him.”
Brad doesn’t like the team to be split up. “Hey, don’t be a dick. This is a team sport.”
“But he’s always hogging the ball anyway,” says Andy. Oh sure. If I give the ball to you I’ll never get it back. You’ll just lose it to the opposing team.
Pretty soon most of the team is arguing. Most of them arguing that I don’t matter. A few of them sticking with Brad that there’s no point playing a team sport if the team is never all in one piece. I take the opportunity to sneak away.
As I’m just leaving earshot, I can just barely make out Brad saying, “Oh great. Well, who else wants to leave? You knuckleheads…”
- - -
“Hi Lloyd. Picking up more supplies today?” I often buy nutritional supplements for the pets at the store. Today, though, I’m not buying for the store. “Uh, yeah,” I say. “I need some charcoal, some protein supplements, some distilled water…”
“Woah, slow down there. One at a time please.” I buy what I can here and go around to the other shops I know will have the ingredients I need.
When I’ve got them, I make my way home.
- - -
Is this really what I want?
I’ve never felt quite right in myself. I’ve spent my life so far trying to fit in, trying to be the boy that I’m supposed to be. But when I look at the other boys, they just seem to know how to act. They don’t have to try hard to be what the other boys expect them to be.
I never used to notice. I just assumed everyone was being told not to be such a girl. I heard it so much and I thought I heard it said to everyone. Childish insults aren’t very creative after all, and what’s worse to call a boy than girly? But that changed when I met Astrid.
It was late afternoon and I was on my way home from playing by the creek. When I got back to the road, there was a girl sitting in the grass nearby, crying her eyes out.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. She didn’t move, like she couldn’t hear me. So I moved closer. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
Just then she turned her head up for only a second before she brought it back down. Then she looked back up at me and almost fell backwards, still sobbing.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
After a bit, she started to talk to me. Through her receding tears she explained that the other girls had made fun of her for the way her hair was braided. “They know it isn’t a knot, it’s a braid! Why do they keep calling it a knot anyway?”
“I think your braid is pretty,” I said. “Are you headed home? Would you like to walk with me?”
She was everything I was not. She was emotionally frail. She was vulnerable. She was sweet and innocent. And when I got her to laugh, she had the most earnest smile. Here was this girl who was just bawling about the most petty teasing and she was completely comfortable in herself.
Is that why I want to change? Because she, of everyone I had ever known, was actually comfortable in her own skin? I’ve never met anyone else who lived so much by the heart. And I want that kind of existence for myself.
Maybe this isn’t the only way. I know that’s what Ms. Crusoe would tell me. “Every speck on this planet is what it is. Its existence is meant to be. You must not use alchemy to fundamentally alter that existence.” But how do you know that the speck is meant to be a speck and not a banana? Wouldn’t the puddle in the street be happier if it could join a pond in the countryside?
The history of our humanity is in changing the arrangement of our existence. We move stones from the hills into town. We smooth them out and bind them with grout. We fashion them into a street. Did the stones in the hills want to be made into a street? Or would they rather have been made into castle walls?
I had always believed the stones could learn to be happy as either one. But Astrid was clearly happier being a girl than I was being a boy. It didn’t matter that the other girls were cruel or that she wasn’t allowed to play soccer with the boys. Well, it did, but not for long. But for some reason everything I have ever been told I can’t have has meant more to me than the things people want me to be.
Is that all it is? I want what I can’t have? I want to be cute but boys must be tough. I want to be silly but boys must be serious. I want to be happy but boys must be ambitious.
Well, I’m being ambitious. And I’m deadly serious. And nobody better get in my way, because when the full moon comes tomorrow I will finally get what I’ve wanted for these past three years.
No. Not three years. I’ll get what I’ve wanted all my life.
- - -
Midnight approaches. I’ve brought the ingredients and the special tablecloth out under the moonlight. It’s a beautiful clear night.
I unfurl the tablecloth onto the ground to reveal my work. Inscribed is the five-point transmutation circle that will alter my body. I lay out the ingredients I will need.
Equivalent exchange. I know that these mere chemicals cannot possibly be equivalent to the happiness this should bring me. The happiness it must. Because if this can’t make me happy, nothing can.
The chemicals are not the only offering, however. I accept that some parts of myself must be given up to the transmutation. I am glad to get rid of them. But knowing how little it means to me, will it be enough?
The moon is nearing its peak above me. Take a deep breath. This is it. No turning back now.
Place my hands upon the circle.
Light the spark.
Offer myself to be transformed.
Sparks. Flashes. The transmutation is begun, and…the pain! The agony! The world spins around and…
- - -
I awake in a place of whiteness. Nothing is here.
Well, almost nothing. As my eyes come into focus, I can see a vague outline of a being in front of me.
“Ooh, look what has come to me now! A scared little boy who doesn’t want to become a man!”
“Where…where am I?” I squeek.
“Don’t you know? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This is where the answers to your humanity can be found!”
“But…” I say, “shouldn’t I still be in the field? Shouldn’t I be a girl now?”
“Oh yes,” says the being. “You would think that. But it isn’t that simple. Heh heh…didn’t anybody tell you not to mess with human transmutation?”
“What?” I almost shriek. “That wasn’t human transmutation! That was just…”
“A little tweak?” says the being. “Oh no. It’s not that simple. You see, in your ambition you tried to give yourself a womb. And a womb has eggs. You didn’t think you’d get away with creating thousands of little human potentials, now did you?”
“So open up your mind now. You’ve opened the gate. You wanted to know what it would be like to be yourself, didn’t you? Well now. You’ll get more than you ever bargained for, and all you have to lose is your manhood! That’s a lot better than most people get off, you know. Now open up and see the Truth!”
- - -
I’m back in the night. So much to see. So much to know. I understand now, better than I ever did, the true beauty I was trying to accomplish. And I understand the beauty I could have been as a man had I been able to accept it. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t accept it. And now I can’t be anything.
I reach down to feel. It’s gone. And there is nothing in its place.
I wish I just could have been happy, but I know I couldn’t. And while this new existence isn’t what I wanted, well, it’s not really any worse than was my old existence.
Well, except for how I’m going to explain this. I can’t. I will have to run away like I planned.
I suppose it might have mattered if I really had any friends.
I wish I could talk to Astrid. But it was too late for that the minute I started down this path. My life is out on the road now. Somewhere no one knows my face.
I’d say I can never be whole again, but I was never whole to begin with.
Anyway. This is a Full Metal Alchemist fan fiction. I would really appreciate constructive criticism on the storytelling as I don't feel very good at writing.
You Can't Transmute Happiness
a Full Metal Alchemist fan fiction by meustrus
Equivalent exchange. Today I’ve studied alchemy for three years and everything comes back to that one principle. The idea that every action carries a cost equivalent to its force.
So what value do those three years have? Three years I have now toiled towards my goal. My mother still thinks of this as my way into a successful life as a state alchemist. But who will want me after what I plan to do? After they know what I truly am?
I only hope I can disappear for a while. Three years…with any luck, my three years of toil will grant me three years of bliss before I have to return and explain myself.
Here’s looking forward to the next full moon. It’s taken three years of study, but I’m finally ready.
- - -
Ms. Crusoe was pretty harsh today. She caught me studying the components of the human body and then I was in for it. I can’t even count the time she spent chastising me.
Human transmutation is the one greatest sin of alchemy. I know this. I certainly don’t intend to bring anybody back to life or anything. But how am I supposed to explain what I’m doing?
Tomorrow she plans to keep me busy all day tending the gerbils. I’m supposed to learn the inherent value of life. Like that will help me appreciate my own any more. I’ll have to buy the materials later.
- - -
What fortunate little things. Look at these creatures; their existence is so simple and they live to be themselves.
I gaze past their cages into the streets outside the window. The people of this town are much the same. I watch them move, men and women to their own rhythms. Their gait. Their smiles. The way they pause to chat and don’t even think about whether the way they move is right or wrong.
The door chime rings.
“Hey Ms. Crusoe!” says a familiar boy. “You get any more of that sugarcane in? Fifi can’t get enough of that stuff!”
“Not yet,” she says from behind the counter. Ms. Crusoe may be a great teacher of alchemy, but most of the time she makes her living with this pet store. Sometimes we get exotic creatures from faraway lands. The last one came with a few shoots of sugarcane as a treat from its native land. Unfortunately it passed away from the climate around here. Ms. Crusoe saved some sugarcane for alchemical study, but this boy bought most of it at a discount for his pet rabbit.
“Well, let me know if you ever do. See you later.” As he turns around he almost doesn’t notice me. “Oh, hi Lloyd.” I get only a brief look at him before he walks right on out the door. His friends are waiting outside for him, and once he’s back outside they walk on down the street smiling and arguing and jumping around like normal boys.
I wonder if he knows how lucky he is.
- - -
I don’t have much time left before the full moon and I don’t want to have to wait until the next one.
Today is my day off studying. Ms. Crusoe has set me up with a local group of teens to play soccer and today they’ve gotten together with some other groups for a little light-hearted tournament. I actually kind of like the game. Well, except that my team never passes me the ball. But sometimes the other team doesn’t know that, and I can make a convincing run and distract their defense so someone else can bring it up the middle and shoot.
Not today though. “Hey, Brad, can I catch up with you guys later?” I ask.
“Huh?” he says, like he forgot I was there. “But we’ll be one short!”
“Forget about him,” says Luke. “We can win without him.”
Brad doesn’t like the team to be split up. “Hey, don’t be a dick. This is a team sport.”
“But he’s always hogging the ball anyway,” says Andy. Oh sure. If I give the ball to you I’ll never get it back. You’ll just lose it to the opposing team.
Pretty soon most of the team is arguing. Most of them arguing that I don’t matter. A few of them sticking with Brad that there’s no point playing a team sport if the team is never all in one piece. I take the opportunity to sneak away.
As I’m just leaving earshot, I can just barely make out Brad saying, “Oh great. Well, who else wants to leave? You knuckleheads…”
- - -
“Hi Lloyd. Picking up more supplies today?” I often buy nutritional supplements for the pets at the store. Today, though, I’m not buying for the store. “Uh, yeah,” I say. “I need some charcoal, some protein supplements, some distilled water…”
“Woah, slow down there. One at a time please.” I buy what I can here and go around to the other shops I know will have the ingredients I need.
When I’ve got them, I make my way home.
- - -
Is this really what I want?
I’ve never felt quite right in myself. I’ve spent my life so far trying to fit in, trying to be the boy that I’m supposed to be. But when I look at the other boys, they just seem to know how to act. They don’t have to try hard to be what the other boys expect them to be.
I never used to notice. I just assumed everyone was being told not to be such a girl. I heard it so much and I thought I heard it said to everyone. Childish insults aren’t very creative after all, and what’s worse to call a boy than girly? But that changed when I met Astrid.
It was late afternoon and I was on my way home from playing by the creek. When I got back to the road, there was a girl sitting in the grass nearby, crying her eyes out.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. She didn’t move, like she couldn’t hear me. So I moved closer. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
Just then she turned her head up for only a second before she brought it back down. Then she looked back up at me and almost fell backwards, still sobbing.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
After a bit, she started to talk to me. Through her receding tears she explained that the other girls had made fun of her for the way her hair was braided. “They know it isn’t a knot, it’s a braid! Why do they keep calling it a knot anyway?”
“I think your braid is pretty,” I said. “Are you headed home? Would you like to walk with me?”
She was everything I was not. She was emotionally frail. She was vulnerable. She was sweet and innocent. And when I got her to laugh, she had the most earnest smile. Here was this girl who was just bawling about the most petty teasing and she was completely comfortable in herself.
Is that why I want to change? Because she, of everyone I had ever known, was actually comfortable in her own skin? I’ve never met anyone else who lived so much by the heart. And I want that kind of existence for myself.
Maybe this isn’t the only way. I know that’s what Ms. Crusoe would tell me. “Every speck on this planet is what it is. Its existence is meant to be. You must not use alchemy to fundamentally alter that existence.” But how do you know that the speck is meant to be a speck and not a banana? Wouldn’t the puddle in the street be happier if it could join a pond in the countryside?
The history of our humanity is in changing the arrangement of our existence. We move stones from the hills into town. We smooth them out and bind them with grout. We fashion them into a street. Did the stones in the hills want to be made into a street? Or would they rather have been made into castle walls?
I had always believed the stones could learn to be happy as either one. But Astrid was clearly happier being a girl than I was being a boy. It didn’t matter that the other girls were cruel or that she wasn’t allowed to play soccer with the boys. Well, it did, but not for long. But for some reason everything I have ever been told I can’t have has meant more to me than the things people want me to be.
Is that all it is? I want what I can’t have? I want to be cute but boys must be tough. I want to be silly but boys must be serious. I want to be happy but boys must be ambitious.
Well, I’m being ambitious. And I’m deadly serious. And nobody better get in my way, because when the full moon comes tomorrow I will finally get what I’ve wanted for these past three years.
No. Not three years. I’ll get what I’ve wanted all my life.
- - -
Midnight approaches. I’ve brought the ingredients and the special tablecloth out under the moonlight. It’s a beautiful clear night.
I unfurl the tablecloth onto the ground to reveal my work. Inscribed is the five-point transmutation circle that will alter my body. I lay out the ingredients I will need.
Equivalent exchange. I know that these mere chemicals cannot possibly be equivalent to the happiness this should bring me. The happiness it must. Because if this can’t make me happy, nothing can.
The chemicals are not the only offering, however. I accept that some parts of myself must be given up to the transmutation. I am glad to get rid of them. But knowing how little it means to me, will it be enough?
The moon is nearing its peak above me. Take a deep breath. This is it. No turning back now.
Place my hands upon the circle.
Light the spark.
Offer myself to be transformed.
Sparks. Flashes. The transmutation is begun, and…the pain! The agony! The world spins around and…
- - -
I awake in a place of whiteness. Nothing is here.
Well, almost nothing. As my eyes come into focus, I can see a vague outline of a being in front of me.
“Ooh, look what has come to me now! A scared little boy who doesn’t want to become a man!”
“Where…where am I?” I squeek.
“Don’t you know? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This is where the answers to your humanity can be found!”
“But…” I say, “shouldn’t I still be in the field? Shouldn’t I be a girl now?”
“Oh yes,” says the being. “You would think that. But it isn’t that simple. Heh heh…didn’t anybody tell you not to mess with human transmutation?”
“What?” I almost shriek. “That wasn’t human transmutation! That was just…”
“A little tweak?” says the being. “Oh no. It’s not that simple. You see, in your ambition you tried to give yourself a womb. And a womb has eggs. You didn’t think you’d get away with creating thousands of little human potentials, now did you?”
“So open up your mind now. You’ve opened the gate. You wanted to know what it would be like to be yourself, didn’t you? Well now. You’ll get more than you ever bargained for, and all you have to lose is your manhood! That’s a lot better than most people get off, you know. Now open up and see the Truth!”
- - -
I’m back in the night. So much to see. So much to know. I understand now, better than I ever did, the true beauty I was trying to accomplish. And I understand the beauty I could have been as a man had I been able to accept it. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t accept it. And now I can’t be anything.
I reach down to feel. It’s gone. And there is nothing in its place.
I wish I just could have been happy, but I know I couldn’t. And while this new existence isn’t what I wanted, well, it’s not really any worse than was my old existence.
Well, except for how I’m going to explain this. I can’t. I will have to run away like I planned.
I suppose it might have mattered if I really had any friends.
I wish I could talk to Astrid. But it was too late for that the minute I started down this path. My life is out on the road now. Somewhere no one knows my face.
I’d say I can never be whole again, but I was never whole to begin with.