ALPHONSE ELRIC, DISTRICT THREE

I lay awake at night and I listen to my heartbeat ticking like a clock. I know it's not really a clock in there, Ed told me that it isn't. It ticks though. tick-tock, tick-tock it goes. I guess it's just because the rest of me is metal I assume that I'm all metal but Ed says that I shouldn't make assumptions. It makes an ass out of you and me, whatever that means. Sometimes I think that Ed needs to follow her own advice because she jumps to conclusions a lot. I think she forgets sometimes, she gets excited, that's alright. I like to see her having fun.

Sometimes I think that I stress her out a lot by being me so if she can be happy than I can be happy too.

My heart isn't a clock, it's real. It's one of the only bits of me that still is. It gives me the most problems too, I still have to take pills for the surgery performed on it but I don't think it's even fixed. It hurts a lot, nestled there in the wamrth my rib cage makes. It aches. Ed says that it'll stop hurting soon, that the surgery must have been painful but the surgery was a while ago, a long while and I don't think the hurting is going to go away. I know why it's aching, it's because of Mom but it wasn't even her fault.

A lot of me does tick, like clockwork. I'm a boy of cogs and metal and rust. If I lift up my shirt, you won't see the metal because it's hidden by skin pink and twisted by scars. It's inside my stomach from when the serial killer started taking my guts out, before Ed got there. Before that he cut off my arms and sawed off my left leg too and Ed says that she thought I was dead but I wasn't because I held on because I knew my big sister would save me and she did.

We couldn't save mom though. After he cut off my arms, he cut off her's too and then her legs and then her ears and then her lips and then he opened her stomach and took everything inside out and she died when he took her heart out and I couldn't move because my arms were gone.

Sometimes I wake up at night and I'm screaming and screaming and Ed's at the desk with the lamp still on and I don't know what time it is but Dad would have said that she was burning the midnight oil. She puts the music box on then, the one Dad gave to Mom before they got married and it looks like a carousel. It turns, ran by the music box and it always puts me right back to sleep even when my bones are shaking and I'm feeling limbs that aren't even there anymore.

My limbs are made of metal too. Ed and Win made them for me, so that I can walk still and do useful things like open soup cans with the swiss army knife built into my arm. It doesn't keep people from staring, we can't afford to make the prosthetic as good as the Capitol makes them. They're only shaped like real arms and a real leg and they have fingers and toes. I can move the fingers, they're connected to my nervous system because Ed and Win are really smart. My toes don't move very well but Win is working on that. My metal arms start at my shoulder on my left side and just under the shoulder on my right.

My leg starts at my hip.

When the killer cut them off, before Ed chased him off, before she saved me, he used a saw for half of the work and then tore the rest of the way. The sound of my flesh tearing apart is still in my head a lot and I wish I could get it out but I can't. Ed says it's because it was traumatic and I wish it wasn't, I wish it was just gone. I'm good at remembering though and that's my downfall I guess. I wish I wasn't so good at remembering. Out of the two of us, I remember things best, like birthdays and allergies and memories that I'm never one hundred percent certain that ever happened.

Me and Ed like to build things. That's why we're friends with Win who's a mechanic but also a really good builder. Win is our mechanic, when I need a tune up or when Ed does on her arm and leg we always go and see Win. Plus, Win's the reason we started building too, years ago. They make bionics together, machines that move and work like clockwork all on their own. That's what our legs and arms are but we control them.

I do it too, Ed says I'm very good but when I'm meant to be making important things I get distracted and make chickens instead. I like chickens. I like to make sculptures too from twisted pieces of metal but Ed says they aren't very helpful. Sometimes when we're out doing our other job, hunting down the guy who killed mom and other criminals, I like to leave small pieces of scrap metal I've shaped laying around the district.

I like our other job a lot because people give me looks during the day on account of the fact that I'm mostly metal and I like to wear t-shirts and shorts. When we do our other job though people just get scared when they see Ed and I because we're starting to get a reputation around the District's underworld. They call her fullmetal because of her arm and leg but a lot of the time people think it's me because she's so short and I've got a lot more metal than her.

(Ed doesn't like being called short so don't do that probably.)

I'm good at fighting because Ed and I train all the time. We spar and it's fun. Win has worked really hard on our metal bits, making them strong. When I'm fighting I can't even feel the drag of my metal because it's so light and durable. It just makes me stronger, even Ed can't beat me a lot of the time. We end in ties a lot and it makes me proud because even though I was too little and weak to save mom I'm a lot stronger now and I can help my sister. I can protect her.

My body hurts a lot a lot of the time and Ed is always saying that she's going to get us our bodies back and I always smile and nod but I don't know what she means. I saw my arms and my organs on the kitchen tiles and I don't think that those can come back to me, I'm pretty sure all that stuff is rotten by now, this is my body now. My body is clockwork and I can't taste anything anymore either; an after effect of the heart surgery. I can smell perfectly fine but tasting anything is a whole other story. It's meant to go away after awhile, my taste buds will come back they say but they haven't yet.

I just want to taste Ed's dessert surprise that she dies with seven layers of berries, cream and chocolate because that was my favourite thing in the world and we have a frozen dinner still in the freezer that mom made but I don't want to unfreeze it until my taste buds come back. We're saving it for later.

People always think that Ed isn't even my sister because we don't really look alike. I have mom's eyes and she has dad's eyes. I look like mom did and she looks like dad. Mom and dad looked very different and Ed says that's because they were different races but I never used to get what she meant by that because it's not like they were running. I know I hate it though when people say that we don't look alike. I hate it when people get surprised that we're related because Ed's all I've got, she's my big sister. I'm always afraid that they'll take me away from her. I don't want them to take me away.

No one else understands.

I don't feel well a lot and Win says that's my body trying to deal with itself because a lot of my vital parts are machinery now. On days when I don't feel well I'm supposed to take it easy and rest but I hate that because I don't want to hold Ed back and I don't want Ed to go out without me. I know she needs to be alone sometimes but I get scared when she's gone too long and I have to bolt everything shut and hide under the covers sometimes because I'm scarred the murderer is going to come back and finish what he started. I don't want Ed to get home to another dead body and being torn apart bit by bit really hurts a lot.

I don't want Ed to think I'm a scaredy-cat but I think she sort of knows because she never is gone for long no matter what. I love Ed a lot not only because she's all I've got left but because she's my big sister and she's so involved in my life that I would be half a boy without her. She's my hero because she's so strong and brave. I want to be just like her when I grow up but I'm afraid that I won't be able to ever be as good as she is. She's just so good. She seems rude and quick to anger but she's always taking care of people and she cries when she can't save everyone or she just gets really angry like she did when mom died.

(Don't tell her I told you she cries sometimes.)

I don't just cry sometimes though I cry a lot when I don't even mean to cry. Sometimes tears just leak out and I think that's just from the dull thud thud thud of pain coming from my heart and sometimes from my limbs too. Sometimes I do mean to cry though and it's good because I am good at crying. I didn't used to be so good at it but I never had so much practice before. After mom died and after the killer came I can't stop crying. I miss dad too but Ed gets mad when I talk about dad because dad walked out on us and I don't think Ed has forgiven him.

I think he probably had a good reason for it so I just miss him a lot. I miss a lot of people and things. I miss mom and grandma who passed away of old age and I miss when we were a full family instead of just Ed and me. Well I guess there's ducky too but he doesn't count as a person because he's a cat. Ducky has a bionic leg too, we found him in a dumpster where some teenagers had dumped him after torturing him.

So it's Ed and Ducky and me and that's all.

It's very lonely sometimes.

It hurts.

Everyone here is ready to go
It's been a hard year, and I only know
From down this low
It's only up we go, up we go