Laughing softly, as the humid air trickled down their entwined forms. Their arms lay across each other’s backs like wasps stings, their eyes half hooded and shining as they danced the slow dance that came at the end of every life. There were questions. No answers. They existed, always had, always would, but it wasn’t nearly enough for the doubt burning like acid through Edward’s body.

His little brother was dead. Alphonse was dead. And yet he held him in his arms, stroking his matted hair away from his laughing eyes, cradling his skeletal form as they danced on the edge of an endless sea. Al still sung under his breath, like he always had. His arms folded exactly into his, the same way they had done when they were both little.

But his smile, and his eyes, spoke of dazzling days of darkness Edward had never known. The sand crunched under their feet. The moans of the wind whipped past them like fleeing soldiers, surrendering to the battle the brothers posed.

“This isn’t possible.” Al’s eyes crinkled – two tiny creases on the edges of his flashing grey eyes, bronze glinting in their depths as his nose scrunched a little.

“Anything is possible…in an endless dream.” His voice echoed with uncertainty and possibilities, and he lowered his head shyly as black vines twisted under his skin.

“The mind can create-”

“What the body can destroy. Brother, have you ever relaxed, one day since…since then? I’m so tired, and your screaming keeps me up at night.” Edward’s own lips twisted as he pondered the simple, pained words spilling from Al’s cracked and bleeding mouth.

“You’d rather have me forget about you?”

The reproach and freezing anger filling that haunted visage was enough to make tears well in his eyes, and he sighed silently as he buried his head into a cruelly exposed and bruised shoulder. “Then what should I do, Al? I don’t…I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Just dance with me,” Al whispered, and the tides rushed in to claim them both. Washing around their ankles and shins, foam sparkling with the light of the place that separated them.

“Dance with me, and forgive me for what I’ve done to you.” Al’s voice creaked with need and sorrow – but his eyes spoke of endless hatred, of the rush of blood and pain and fear that had separated both at the last moment, of the men who had torn them apart.

“You haven’t done anything…” He sobbed then, feeling the sound echo like dry gunfire in his throat; it ached as he tried to restrain his fear and pain, the feelings inside already exposed and visible on his little brothers face. Alphonse had always been far too sensitive to his moods. Far too ready to soothe what should have been left to burn and destroy.

“Then neither have you, Brother. Just dance. Dance with me.”

He didn’t know when it changed, from slow and resentful, to lying on that horribly smooth and cold sand, feeling it rub against his side as Al caressed his cheek. Hooded silver eyes gazed at him thoughtfully, and Ed shuddered as bruises shifted under white skin, like behemoths from under a pale sea. They surged in the angelic and skeletal face, eyes empty and yet so full of the essence of Alphonse it was all he could do to watch him with eyes he wanted to tear out and bury in the sea. Set awash on the iron hard earth.

“I thought we were dancing,” he whispered, feelings his breath catch and quicken, hating and loving and thrilling in the secretive smile that stole over those eternally youthful features. Not sadistic. Not tormentingly. There was only simple love and eagerness in the wraith-like face, and he wept inside as Al made him dance with him, endlessly, on the bone white sands.

“We are.”

He should have never have told him, what he felt, the lust-ridden creature that lurked inside him. Even in death, his corruption had turned his little brother from a cherished dream into a tortured, twisted nightmare. If this was a dream.

But dreams were supposed to end. This one never did. This was as far away from a dream as the Gate is from heaven, but it was the sweetest torment that hell could have ever produced for him.

From ache…to ache…to ache. His breath ripped subtleties from the air he couldn’t share with Al, his panting breaths and hurried whines the only thing combating the endless swish of water against the shore. He burned inside, with the sin and sheer pleasure that the somehow familiar flesh could give, and if fires burned inside of Al they turned his bones to cinder dust. He beat useless fists upon that frail body as he surged into it, screaming his agony out as his brother smiled at him serenely, cradling his sweat soaked form. His gentle kisses turned Ed’s heart inside out. His stifled delighted laughs made him weep, silently, into the chest his forehead had sought instinctively when the passion was spent and only the dread remained.

Taut skin underneath his own flesh didn’t sweat. Didn’t beat with the everlasting heart their mother had given him. Al’s eyes, tinged with the darkness of promises lost, reassured him as smooth, icy hands closed around his throat in a loving embrace.

“Dance with me, Brother.”

“Oh Al….please…just do it…”

The lights beckoned, and the sea coursed over them as the darkness began to steal the last of what had been Al – the caring, sweet, laughing boy who had died for earthly sin. For his brother. And it concealed from the world the love that coursed between them, like the rush of blood through an immortal heart, and Edward finally smiled as he sank into it gratefully, with the one person he truly belonged with.

“Dance with me….forever?”

And Edward’s last words resounded through the thing that might have been the youngest Elric, through the boy that definitely was Alphonse, through the cherished shadows that cradled their eternal bodies as they sank beneath the swelling waves.

“I will. I promise.”