Mothering
By Dreaming of Everything
Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist and all of its various incarnations are not mine in any way, shape or form.
Author's Notes: I am a mangaverse person, so this will follow manga canon, or what's known of it. However, it should be fairly easy to follow even if you're an anime-only person.
This is dedicated to those two people I was talking to about this in a FMA Livejournal community (I've forgotten the name of it, I'm afraid) who liked the idea, and encouraged me to write it. You've probably forgotten, but I haven't! (Although I have forgotten your names/your online handles. Sorry…)
oOoOoOo
Lust, after all, is just a desire for sex; the primary function of sex is to produce babies. Lust herself has no children, but she can't help but mother anyways. It's very much a part of her, the flip side to her sin. The love of a mother's love is an intrinsic component of what she is, who she was made to be.
Lust is barren. She is not human, not even properly alive, so she can bring no life into this world. Some hidden and long-denied part of her regrets that, but she refuses to give it much thought. Maybe if, one day, she regains her humanity.
But the instinct is still there, and the desire to care, to look over someone who can't do it themselves. That desire manifests around Gluttony.
He isn't an obvious choice. Not what you think of when somebody says 'child.' But he needs her, and so Lust needs him. It tests the limits of her temper—constant reminders for even the most basic things—and his behavior improves glacially, if at all, but she continues to do care, to mother.
Her fellow homunculi had dismissed it as a momentary whim at first, another quirk—and they have a lot of quirks, between them.
But it doesn't pass. She gets angry, but she never harms the homunculus. She never turns him away, not when he really needs her, as much as any of them are capable of needing anyone. And it begins to seem like she needs him as much as he needs her.
Their relationship is not sexual in nature, baffling their siblings. She's Lust, the human perversion of carnal desires, the sin who does anything with anyone.
Gluttony doesn't follow her just because she gives him food, even though he is the personification of gluttony, and he matches his sin so much more closely than the rest of them do. Sometimes it seems almost as if the two things—Lust and food—are equally important to him. Every so often, one of the other sins will toy with the idea that she is what is most important to him, but then they dismiss it.
He is a child, and she is a mother, and it defines who they are.
They are nearly always together. Mother and child, protector and protected, even though he needs no protecting, being who he is, what he is, and she rarely, if ever, protects.
She is colder than a human would be in her ministrations, their interactions, but their relationship is a bonfire compared to how their siblings treat each other, with disdain and hate and worse. They are somehow more than homunculi, in this, when it is the two of them, forming some sort of bond that they should be incapable of, because they have no souls. Father dismisses it as a momentary thing, perhaps an imagined bond, because they can not form a real one; it is inconceivable, impossible.
Lust just heaves a sigh or raises a witheringly expressive eyebrow, maybe gives out a threat, depending on her mood, when someone confronts her about it. No one dares talk to Gluttony, always hungry for flesh, no matter whose or what it is, and if someone is bothering the two of them, Lust and Gluttony, Lust will usually allow Gluttony to eat whoever it is, so they are left alone by whatever human associates, and their siblings leave them be, largely, because Lust has rationalizations—all carefully formulated beforehand—and they're the only ones with a truce that's more than tenuous, making them a powerhouse in the political terms of their familial machinations.
Many people consider it a gross parody of mother-son relationships when Gluttony asks permission before he devours someone alive, endlessly and mindlessly hungry, or when Lust wipes away the blood (human or otherwise) that has gotten onto his face. Their siblings, the other homunculi, snort or laugh or sigh when they are around—at least until Lust's temper snaps—amused or exasperated by how the stern, immovable Lust, who had and has no patience for incompetence, put up with the questions and the clinging and the occasional mild disobedience with badly faked ill-humor and what seems to be an endless ocean of patience. They are amazed at Gluttony's unflinching, unquestioning acceptance of the rules Lust makes him obey, even when she orders him not to eat something, someone—at least, when she is definite about it.
Not that they care, particularly. Lust holds all her siblings in varying levels of disregard, and Gluttony notices nothing besides Lust and food, and they are homunculi. They are hardly human.
Lust hasn't realized that she needs Gluttony to define her (because Lust is a sin, her sin, who she is, and motherhood is what lust leads to, so she needs to be a mother) and Gluttony has realized that he needs Lust, but he doesn't know why, doesn't need or want to know why—blind faith is enough for him. (And there is no reason, other than that he is young, and he is not as soulless as they say, because he loves Lust, needs her, she is his focus and center and he is the one who defines her, but she makes him who he is as much as he does her, even though she's not his sin, not even the not-sin her sin encompasses, like lust and mothering, desire and parenting.)
Lust won't realize, because she thinks there is no humanity in a homunculus, no virtue in sin and no love without a soul. Gluttony has half-realized, but doesn't need to and doesn't want to, so he probably won't, not fully.
But it is enough. Lust loves, and Gluttony loves back. Protector and protected. Mother and child.
Sins.
It is enough; comprehension will not change that.
It is enough, sins and sinners that they are. Inexplicable love is enough.
--End--