Celebrate FMA

Title: Our Lights Yet Shine
Series: The Shortest Day
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood/manga
Author: Batsutousai
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Spoilers, loneliness, warzones
Summary: A companion piece to Candles to Light Your Way: How Team Greedling, Team Mustang, Lan Fan and Fu, and the group in Liore celebrate the last winter solstice before the possible end of the world.

Disclaim Her: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Arakawa Hiromu and various publishers. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
The poem is The Shortest Day, by Susan Cooper, and doesn't belong to me. (It has become nearly synonymous with the season, for me, and I've started thinking of this series by the poem's title, so I couldn't not include it.)

A/N: Last year, I had the urge to write something about the FMA characters celebrating the winter solstice following personal losses. This summer, it occurred to me that I'd rather like to do a fic covering everyone's final solstice before the Promised Day (except Roy and Gracia, since they were in CtLYW), and anotherfmafan gave me an excellent excuse to do so, with her Days of Yore event on LJ.
I wanted to get this piece done for Yule, but I procrastinated by watching Daredevil, and then my mum took the whole week off (we celebrate the solstice), so writing time was a bit scarce. Still, at least I got this done for the chat? ^^;

Team Mustang is kind of grouped together, despite being spread out, because it made more sense to me to break them into one group. Also, their experiences are all rather short, comparatively. Sorry/not sorry?

I'd intended to include a couple of other groups – Alex and Olivier, Scar and Marcoh, May and Envy – but I was struggling a bit with a couple of them, and coming up on my deadline, so I scrapped them. Maybe next year. ^^; (Oh, Merlin, did I just suggest I would write another piece to this set? *flops*)

For Lan Fan and Fu's section, if you're reading on AO3, tumblr, or LJ, you should be able to hover over the hanzi and a transliteration and a translation will pop up. (It's not for everything, just proper titles and the food. And the greeting. I did not use it for their given names, mostly because I was having a terrible time finding something for Lan Fan. If someone has hanzi for her, please feel free to share.) For those reading on FFN and dA, I left it in English, so feel free to disregard. :P

You can also read this at Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.Net, or deviantArt.

Following the fake cute, the fake cut, the fake cut~

(We may need a character tag for general cast. ^^; *is a problem child*

Title: Candles To Light Your Way
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood/manga
Author: Batsutousai
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Spoilers, canonical character death, grief, new beginnings
Summary: Five times when tragedy left them dreading the longest night, and the people who reminded them that the sun would always rise again.

Disclaim Her: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Arakawa Hiromu and various publishers. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
The poem is The Shortest Day, by Susan Cooper, and doesn't belong to me. (It has become nearly synonymous with the season, for me, so I couldn't not include it.)

A/N: In the Cowshed Diaries in the twelfth volume of the manga, Arakawa Hiromu answered a question about whether Christmas (and Valentine's Day) existed, saying, no, because Christianity had never really emerged. Which, well, I have some questions about that, because variations on alchemy have existed longer than Christianity, certainly, and the general idea behind FMA is that alchemy became more important than science, but their technology isn't too far off from what we had in the early 20th century, so the advent of alchemy must have been a fair bit more recent than when it first became a thing (and canon suggests that was maybe when Father came? So...early 1500? Maybe as early as the 12th century, which is when it really came into common knowledge in our world), which means there's some variation of Christianity – or Judaism, more likely – somewhere, even if it isn't prevalent in Amestris.
Tangent, sorry.

Anyway, I think about that answer of hers all the time, because my sister and mum are both European-pagan (and I'm an atheist), so we celebrate the winter solstice, or Yule. Which, way older than Christmas, and variations of it existed throughout Europe (which is, supposedly, the conglomeration of culture that Amestris is based on), though the most recognisable today is, I believe, from the Germanic and Nordic cultures? (Don't quote me on that.) It's recognising the longest night/shortest day, at the core, but there's also a sense of the passing of the old year into the new, a time to reflect on what has passed and sort of have hopes for the future.
And so I've always had a sort of...assumption, I guess, that Amestris might not have Christmas, as we think of it, but it's very likely they have something. And because Arakawa-san is Japanese, and likely force-fed Christmas through western commercialism, I shouldn't expect her to know enough about where the customs came from to say, 'Christmas, no, but they do celebrate the rebirth of the sun after the longest night, in a manner that wouldn't be completely foreign to you'. (Even if that part of me that lives with paganism hates that she didn't know.)

I happened to read an article a friend reblogged on tumblr on Saturday – I lost the page, or I'd link it, and I'm too lazy to go hunting for it – about trying to fit our modern Christmas traditions into fantasy and sci-fi settings. And I get a lot of what the author was saying, even if it was sort of only side-ways applicable to FMA? But it got me thinking that, maybe, it could be fun to do a holiday fic and post it for Yule, if my muse would behave (which he did, he gets fudge).
Which left me with the question of what to write. And then Mum and I watched Home, so this is maybe inspired, a little bit, by the loneliness that Tip felt after everything was ripped away from her, and the Christmas gift that she carried with her the whole way.

Long A/N is long. Sorry.

You can also read this at Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.Net, or deviantArt.

Follow the fake link~ (It's a 2-parter because looooong, fyi