Feet

Title: First Principles, chapter 1 (Feet)
Author: ForestGlenny (WhiteRabbit)
Genre: General/Romance
Rating: G
Warnings: Fluff, silliness, could be construed as mild elricest (!)
Summary/Notes: I am working on a series of short FMA pieces, of which this is the first. All of the shorts fit under the general heading of "First Principles" and will be posted as one story on ff.n. Pairings, ratings and genres will all vary from story to story.

I. Feet

     Ever since he was a child who tried not to think about his father, Ed had practiced alchemy with his hands. They were good hands, when they were both flesh and blood, with lovely, smooth pink skin and shiny fingernails. Ed loved drawing the circles on the floor and laying his pink hands against the cool wood or stone or dirt and then feeling the power flow through his body, serving to change the latent material into something useful.
     Al worshiped Ed's beautiful hands. They were always soft, even when his brother developed callouses in the summer months from the rope swing. Al's hands didn't hold so much power as Ed's. Alchemy to Al was a mental exercise, about control, cause and effect. It was not something to be done “by feel,” which was how Ed handled things.
     Al took for granted, too, that alchemy was made for hands, and most specifically Ed's. But Ed wondered sometimes, why alchemy could not be made for feet. One day, feeling more than a bit foolish, he drew his circle on the floor, sat, and placed his feet at the edges, treating them as he would treat hands. He imagined forcing the power in his arms through his body and to his feet, which were equally soft and pink, when they were clean. Ed did not believe in discrimination of any sort, so surely hands and feet, with their equally important purposes, were equivalent in the eyes of alchemy.
     It felt very strange. His power had to travel much farther from its source to his soles, and it did not flow naturally. He felt it leave the place he imagined to be his heart, felt it start for his arms, but he forced it towards his feet, so it journeyed through his stomach, leaving him vaguely nauseous, past his belly button to split reluctantly and flow into his legs. When it reached his knees, it hesitated. Ed frowned. With a groan, the power moved on, reaching the tiny arteries of his feet and making his toes tingle. It was a strange feeling to have power in parts of his body that had never met the power before. He smiled triumphantly, but then the power fizzled out, too weak to leave its confine of flesh and blood, and the whole effort was seemingly in vain.
     Ed flopped backwards to the floor, thankful at least that Al had not been there to witness his defeat.
     In his shadowed corner, Al smiled.
     Years later, when Ed's soft, pink skin was marred by metallic appendages, Al thought of the feet he personally no longer had.
     “Why did you give up on your feet, brother?” he asked as Ed ate. Al, realizing that the question was a total non sequitur, prepared to expand upon his query, but Ed shook his head.
     “I never really gave up. But I can't reliably clap my feet together.”