concoursec | First principles! (backdated to a couple of days after Holi)

Entry tags:

First principles! (backdated to a couple of days after Holi)

Characters: Edward Elric and Rapunzel
Location: Library
Rating: PG for mild language, probably nothing else.
Open/Closed/Finished: Closed
Summary: Apparently Rapunzel gets alchemy lessons now! Alchemy lessons are cool. Ed getting over himself long enough to actually be helpful? Less so.

The stack of paper on this table wasn't the thickness of a regular textbook, but it was certainly dry enough for at least three. In the figurative sense. In the literal sense, the ink was still damp on a few of the more intimidating diagrams he'd drawn, so Edward had laid those pages out over the rest of the table for the time being.

He fidgeted with a corner of the closest one until his wrist twinged painfully enough to make him stop. ...Hopefully she wouldn't ask for more notes. He would've - even for a basic grounding in the theory, he'd glossed over a lot of details - but then, he obviously didn't need the things. The thought that he might have brought too many notes and not prepared to do anything with them had yet to cross his mind.

Nothing to do but wait, until either she showed up (who knew how often she checked her computer?) or he got bored. Hell, the latter was starting to happen already, so he wouldn't be here too long.

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"I don't always let others make decisions for me!" Rapunzel exclaimed with a small pout and frown. After all, leaving the tower and getting Eugene to help as her guide had been all her idea and decision, which her "mother" had been vehemently against.

"Equivalent Exchange? I don't think I had heard of that, no." So it would be right back to the basics here. Have fun with this, Ed. She is the most clueless, but hopefully her enthusiasm will make up for that as she tucks some hair behind her ear and scoots a little closer.

Ed pretended not to notice the frown, although the fact that his own grin had degenerated into something closer to a smirk probably gave him away.

He reached over to pull a few pages off the stack, thumbed through them to check they were all relevant and shoved them along the table towards Rapunzel. Sure, at this stage they were probably only going to confuse things, if his questionable handwriting hadn't accomplished that already, but he'd be damned if he couldn't look prepared.

"You've heard of it now," he said, leaning back in his chair and looking distant for a moment. "Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange: to obtain, something of equal value must be lost. Everything costs something. That's not only true in alchemy, it's a rule for everyth- a lot of things," he corrected himself, barely skipping a beat. "If you understand that, really understand it, you're already better than some people who call themselves alchemists. The rest is just decoration."

As examples of said decoration, he gestured at the pile of notes. Then he winced slightly and rubbed his left wrist. Stupid thing. But if he was pausing to do that, he figured he might as well wait a bit longer in case she had a question or something.

"To obtain, something of equal value must be lost...." Rapunzel thought about that for a moment. She supposed....in some ways, that was true. Her elation and freedom at leaving the tower had been at the cost of knowing she betrayed Gothel at the time and disobeyed her. To buy something you needed to pay for it, and to get money one needed to work. Unless you were a thief like Flynn but somehow that seemed more an exception to the rule.

"I think I get it." She was about to continue when she looked to him and noticed his wince. "Your wrist....it's hurt?" Rapunzel bit her lip, already reaching to gather her hair to him, practically instinctively by now.

Oh, she noticed? Then obviously he needed to feign ignorance. He backed away as much as was possible without falling off his chair, which wasn't very far.

"It's fine! Nothing wrong with it! I guess I need to start writing longer stuff like this more often, huh?"

He could also have done with not landing on that wrist after falling out of the sky last weekend, but Rapunzel didn't need to know that.

"If it hurts, I can help...." Rapunzel exclaimed, trying to look serious and determined. If she could help heal him, then she wanted to, if he would let her. She had been getting plenty of practice after all, by helping at the clinic not to mention all the times back home she had sung to Gothel not knowing that she was simply being used.

"If you'll let me." Because she noticed he backed away. But if she could spare him even a small amount of pain she wanted to help.

She'd have to be a bit more determined than that. Ed clung to his pretense like it was a lifering. The fact that he couldn't swim only made the comparison more accurate.

"Seriously, it's okay! Look." He gave her a quick left-handed wave. See, the pain really was nothing - he just didn't appreciate anybody making a deal of it. Yeah, that sounded plausible. "I've had bigger problems, I can live with some tiny ache. Don't you want to save your freaky magic for someone who's actually hurt?" The last part came out a little more emphatically than he was intending, but what the hell.

"It's not like my magic fades and has a limited number of times I can use it, you know." She had used it practically daily since Gothel kidnapped her, via Gothel singing to her or herself singing the incantation.

"I just want to help. You are hurt, even if it might not be too bad. You're still in pain and I can help. But if you're going to be stubborn about it, then maybe I won't heal you and you can explain the other Laws. Equivalent Exchange was the first, right? So what about the other ones?"

"Yeah, well, thanks for the offer," Ed told her, while inwardly he breathed a sigh of relief. Who said stubbornness never paid off?

He was about to start expounding on the other laws - extensions of the First Law, really - but then what she'd said finally registered with him. No, he wasn't letting something like that slide. Some things were important. "Forget them. If you're not sure what equivalent exchange means, it's a waste of time. Everything has a cost, remember? I don't care if it looks like magic, you're thinking like a scientist. Maybe you don't know what the cost is, but it's there."

"I think I get it though. I mean, it's like, when you buy something, you have to pay for it, and to get money you have to work, right? To get something you have to earn it somehow." At least, that's what it had seemed like to Rapunzel, but she could be wrong, given how limited her knowledge of the world was in a lot of ways. And she knew there were usually always some exceptions to the rules, like Eugene. Her hobbies were mostly of the creative arts types but she had managed to figure out enough in astronomy by herself to chart stars that she saw from her tower. She could figure this out too. With Ed's help.

Ed opened his mouth to start enumerating all the ways that Rapunzel was mistaken, and found that he couldn't.

Was it his fault she didn't get it? Not because he'd never tried this teaching crap and the conditions weren't ideal, although both of those were true - was it just that he didn't get it, even now? He remembered thinking he finally understood, but, well, here he was. Here he still was, despite his best efforts.

On the other hand... she'd wanted to learn the theory, that was all he'd agreed to. It didn't matter if the theory was wrong. Did it?

He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and rallied, hoping she hadn't noticed his expression cloud over for a second there. Which was about as likely as her not noticing that he'd hurt his wrist, but hey, maybe she was more distracted this time.

"Let's leave money out of this, okay? It'll just complicate things. An exchange isn't like a transaction, anyway. You're not paying for the process, it is the process. So when you do... whatever it is you wanted to do, you're losing something. You don't know what it is, I sure as hell don't - could be you gave it up a long time ago." Kind of like his own 'superpower'... wait, no, he'd decided not to distract himself. Back on topic. "But it can't be unlimited. That power has to come from somewhere. And that's equivalent exchange."

Rapunzel was confused, frowning a little but willing to listen as he tried to explain and help her understand. She paused for a moment, considering what he had said.

"So it's different. Different to my hair, at least. I don't need to give up anything to heal someone if they are hurt. And it's different from the magic they are teaching us here. So, the thing you give up to do the...um, transmutation, that's the exchange?" she asked, trying to get her head around it as she ran a hand through her hair absently.

At this point there was a loud creak, and a couple of the loose pages of notes fluttered to the floor - sudden but not particularly mysterious, because Ed had just slammed his automail fist onto the table. "No, it's not different! Show me it's different!"

When he heard how that actually sounded, he looked away and quietly let his arm drop.

"Yeah... yeah, that's what happens in a transmutation. I mean, the material matters as well as the amount, but it's just another kind of value if you think about it." There, calmed down. As if the outburst hadn't happened.

Rapunzel started at the sudden outburst, biting her lip an lowering her gaze a little when he slammed his fist on the table. She was about to ask if he was okay but it didn't seem to take long for him to calm down, so she left it.

"So, you need to have the right amount of materials. I guess that would make sense. You can't fix or make something if you don't have enough of the materials needed, right?" That was easy enough to understand, at least.

"Right, you can't fix anything," Ed said, a little indistinctly. Maybe he wasn't totally calmed down yet.

In lieu of adding anything else - if it was just the one time, there was a better chance of her dismissing it as a fluke, not a show of actual vulnerability - and as a way of avoiding eye contact, he reached down to pick up the pages he'd knocked off the table.

But then he did find something else to say. "Sorry."

"It's...it's okay. I guess I just...wasn't expecting such a reaction. But it's okay. I know you're trying, and I don't mean to be frustrating..." Rapunzel tried to reassure him, running her hands through her hair as she reached to tidy the notes a little while he was picking up the ones that fell off the table.

Having restored the notes to their rightful positions, which was to say slapped them unceremoniously onto the table in front of Rapunzel, Ed tried to smile. "Don't worry about it. Everyone's gotta start somewhere. It's just..." Well, he could vent. He'd done it on less provocation before. He exhaled slowly. "You might even be right. It might be different. I wish it wasn't, but what do I know? Not like the universe gives a damn. Any of the universes."

Rapunzel was quiet and just sat listening as Ed spoke. "Well, I'm willing to try understand what you mean. New discoveries happen all the time, right? So what we consider fact now might not be as we learn more. But that does not mean what we believe as true now holds any less meaning."

She tried to reassure him and cheer him up, though she couldn't be sure it would work or not. If he really did seem down she could always just offer to take the notes and read through them, asking any questions she had later if he would prefer.

"That's -" true, actually. Not bad for someone clueless. He shrugged; if it looked half-hearted, it was mostly because he was still sparing that left wrist. "It's one thing to rewrite an old theory. Another when you're naive enough to think it'll somehow never get old."

But this lesson had definitely gone off the rails by now. What could he do except pick a random direction and push? Uh, metaphorically. "So... what next? Any other questions?"

"Oh. Um, well....do you think, if I read through these notes and maybe ask any questions I might have as they come up?" since he seemed kind of tired and she didn't want or mean to frustrate him or anything so perhaps a break would do him some good.

What, did she think Ed couldn't teach the rest either? He could teach the rest! They were smaller concepts! But... probably not until he was feeling a bit less distracted, to be fair. "Okay, do what you want," he told her grudgingly. "I'll probably still be here."

He stood up to leave, and paused. "You can figure out where these loose pages go by yourself, right?"

"Okay. Um, just to be sure though, if you could help me make sure it's all in order?" Because the topic was not one Rapunzel was too familiar with, she might not have necessarily understood if the pages were not in order after some had fallen off the table and all. She was happy to leave Ed be for a bit and read in her dorm to give him some time to hopefully calm down a little.

"So you can't, is what you're saying."

Ed fought to stop himself from glowering too obviously as he started slotting the by now mostly dry pages back into the paper pile. She'd get the wrong impression.

When the table was almost clear, he picked up the remaining loose sheets, eyeballed them one last time, then crushed them into a ball more violently than was strictly necessary. "There. That's all of them."

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First principles! (backdated to a couple of days after Holi)

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BY THE WAY if you get some random person trying to add you on Plurk in a few minutes, it's meeee |D

Oh, okay then. :3

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