Damnant quod non intellegunt

Title: Candles To Light Your Way
Series: The Shortest Day
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.

( Part One )

Part Two

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