Ed reflects on the similarities between Izumi and Roy.
Black hair; dark eyes narrowed consideringly at the world; pale skin; long, thin lips; long, winged brows; round face and pointed chin and high cheekbones. And the name echoing through his mind hadn’t been Roy Mustang, but Sensei.
Back with his teacher again, Al takes up his studies; this time, though, he already knows some things won’t work.
He dreamed of the color, sometimes, nights when he woke up sweating and threw open the window just to look up at the sky and know the whole world wasn’t red.
Al stumbles over the clue to finding his brother that he was looking for, in a way he didn’t expect. (Continued after a seven year hiatus, I recommend re-reading the first two stories in the arc.)
Al picked an easy path, down by the lakeshore under the trees where the light rain wouldn’t get him too wet. Sensei was probably right. His brain felt so full it might spill if he moved too fast, and his thoughts jostled against each other. He was pretty good at modern alchemical codes, but he’d been reading much older texts, and if you went back far enough it was as much philosophy as science and every statement seemed to mean at least three different things at once. Probably more, actually, but he had threes on the brain; it was Trismegistus’ fault. And Salmon’s. Mercury meant spirit meant animal, and where did that get him?