Daydream [Open]

[Alphonse Elric]

Tick, tick, tick, the sound of the classroom clock keeping it’s time, the drone of the teacher as she read aloud from a Latin textbook, the sound of pens moving against paper as the class full of children wrote down notes, it was all white noise to him. Alphonse shifted in his seat, leaning against his desk as he moved his pen over the page of his workbook he had open, moving it slowly but expertly as he proceeded to draw rather intricate looking circles. To anyone else, they were perhaps doodles, but to him, they meant something, to him, it was alchemy, transmutation circles, something he hadn’t been able to use since coming to this world, and something he admitted he missed. It had been two years, two years since he had followed his brother through the gate, it had been foolhardy perhaps, after all, he hadn’t known what he would find once he got there, but he had told himself, that if he got to stay with his brother, then it would all be worth it in the end. There were a lot of things he’d had to get used to, especially when they had been in Germany, he couldn’t say he had learned an awful lot of the language, but he’d learned enough to be able to at least partially converse with someone. Since moving here though, he had found things to be much easier, seeing as how everyone seemed to speak Amestrian, which he found himself being grateful for.

Things had been good for a while, better than he could have ever hoped for, but, it was when Edward started changing, that things had begun to get worse for the younger boy, Alphonse wasn’t sure when it had started really, it had happened so slowly, that at first he had merely put it down to work getting him down, but when Edward started ignoring him on occasion, and it started to take a lot of effort to get him to talk, the younger boy knew there was something more than merely work fatigue going on. Pausing in his drawing, Alphonse frowned deeply, he’d heard him cry at night sometimes…heard him shout, he didn’t know what was going on, and he’d tried to get him to talk, but he seemed to keep pushing him away. It was getting to the point, where nothing that he did seemed to get Edward’s attention, he’d even tried getting himself into trouble at school on more than one occasion, but that hadn’t worked either, all it had gotten him was a mild reprimand and a smack across the knuckles from the teacher.

Alphonse sighed as he continued to doodle in his workbook, it had been some time since he’d had any interest in the lesson that he should have been paying attention to. It wasn’t that it was boring…well maybe it was a little boring, but it was more that he deemed it rather pointless as a subject, who really needed to learn Latin anyway? It was supposedly one of those ‘dead’ languages, the ones that no-one spoke anymore and yet here he was sitting in a classroom being taught it, the whole exercise seemed rather futile, and he felt that it was wasting both the teachers time and the students. Alphonse leaned back from his desk with a sigh and tapped his pencil upon it a couple of times, glancing up at the window, watching the rain slowly slide down the pane, leaving a trail of droplets behind it like some strange watery slug. Why did it seem like it was always raining here? It wasn’t that he minded it too much, but he couldn’t say he appreciated walking home from school in it, especially since most of the time he neglected to bring a coat with him and it was becoming a bad habit.

Why did he have to go to school anyway? He wasn’t really a child anymore, though he admitted physically he was, it took a little getting used to when he got his memories back on the way through the gate, but he had adjusted quite quickly, it wasn’t that much of a difference after all, it just meant that he knew more, which was probably why he found himself wishing he was somewhere else right now. The sound of the teacher coughing brought his attention back to the classroom and he looked to the front quickly, thinking that she had perhaps noticed his limited attention span today, but as it happened she had merely cleared her throat and soon began reading from the text book in her hand once again, leaving Alphonse to dwell on his thoughts some more as he propped his cheek up on his left hand, staring off into space.