Sometimes Al dreams of women, with long flowing dark hair and sad, distant faces. One is his mother, not his mother, whose fingers are cold and damp to the touch, and she seems to reach inside of him, curling her fingers around his heart and pulling it out to show him. Whenever she did, his brother would scream no don't touch him leave him alone, but whenever he turned, he'd always be alone.

Other times, the other woman is there, her dark mouth pulled into a pout, her red eyes distant. She never touches him, only skirts around him, and even when she her eyes meet his, she's looking through him. Sometimes she weeps, and blood gathers in the corners of her eyes and overflows, running like scars across her white skin.

"Who are you?" he finally asks her, following her across a blackened plain. It was once a desert, but there are huge burned craters where the grains have been melted to glassy black, and it crackles loudly under their feet. "Who are you? Do I know you?"

She does not turn. She clutches her shawl tightly around her bowed shoulders and moves faster, until Al loses track of her and comes to a stop, standing alone. And even if they're in a desert it's cold, the wind cutting through the thin cloth of his shirt and carving goose bumps out of his skin. He wakes and finds all his blankets kicked to the floor and his breath steaming faintly in the air. When he sits up and presses his hands to the glass, it's snowing outside.

These are more gaps in his memory, more clues to the four years he's missing. When he tries to ask questions, Winry will look to Rose and shake her head, and find some way to avoid the question. I wasn't there for much. You should ask your brother.

But his brother isn't there, though the years trundle past. Every turned corner is a dead end, every path ends abruptly; there are a thousand and one roads, and none of them go anywhere. A few times, he catches himself thinking that maybe his brother is just a figment of his imagination, something and someone he dreamed up to keep him company, in the lonely time after his mother's death. He is always horrified by these thoughts after they pass.

Al studies alchemy voraciously and dreams of these women, and of men -- in the blue uniforms of the Amestris military, swathed in the robes of an Ishbarite refugee, and flashes of one dark-haired figure who shrieked poison as he drove his fist through -- his fist through --

Al can never remember the rest. When he wakes, shivering and sick to his stomach, he feels he's glad for that.

But the woman lingers, like a bitter ghost. Sometimes he swears he can hear her voice, low and husky, rising and falling in familiar cadences. It drives him crazy, listening to her, never quite able to make out her words, and finally he corners Rose when Winry isn't there to hush her, and asks.

Rose looks at him with her mournful eyes, then bows her head. "She wanted to be human," she says softly. "So much that she defied the person who gave her life, so she could die like a human."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know." Rose's knuckles are white from pressure. "I don't know. I only remember a little, myself."

Al looks at her a moment. "But she died?"

"She died." Rose's voice grows softer. "You were there, and your brother, too. I remember someone saying."

When she says nothing more, Al turns and walks off, into the fields. The corn has long since been harvested, the wheat stored away, but there are still long, dry strands of grass that remain. He picks these, and there is a memory: his brother doing the same, waving the grass around like a switch and laughing, like nothing in the world could ever touch him.

After he has enough, he goes down to the river, to his "argument place," and sits down. For a moment, he feels strange: he hasn't fought with anyone in a long time, and it seems the place no longer remembers him.

He's an alchemist, though, and he knows better than to believe in silly superstitions, or old wives' tales. He stares out at the dark surface of the river; it hasn't been cold enough these year for the water to freeze over, but it moves sluggishly, twigs bobbing their slow steady way downstream.

"I don't believe in ghosts," he says. He believes in monsters, because he's seen them -- he has remembered the horrific, rotting, inside-out creature that had meant to be his mother. "But, if you're listening ... I can't help you. I don't even remember half of what I was. I don't remember you at all."

He tosses his braided creation into the water, and watches it be swept away.

"And if you see my brother," he says, "please tell him to hurry home."