Written for week 101: "masks" over at LJ's fma_fic_contest.
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The wrinkles in her face were becoming more pronounced with every passing day. Dante sometimes felt that she could stand in front of the wide mirrors in her dressing room and watch the lines creep into her skin, watch gravity pull at her, dragging her youth and beauty down to the ground. This face she was wore was not her own. It was simply the mask Hohenheim had left with her—a parting gift from an indifferent lover.
When she'd watched his back fade into the forest beyond their grand home, she hadn't realized what he'd taken with him.
Surely, she had the right to anger, to bitterness? She was decaying, hardly even human. Dante had only her memories to keep her warm and only the barest hint of a future to keep her hope intact. The Stone was gone, and with it, her beauty—and her life. Dante sat in her home, surrounded by nothing, and wondered if there was anything else missing, anything else in her life that Hohenheim had torn from her.
It wasn't until her apprentice brought her the paper from a neighboring town that Dante realized exactly the extent of Hohenheim's crime.
"A birth," she murmured.
Izumi set the tray of tea down on the table, looking over her master's shoulder. "A birth? Where?"
"Resembool," Dante said, her lip curling. "The Elric family welcomes…" She didn't need to read any further. The image alone was enough, a scholarly man with a serious face, his arm around a petite woman with a gentle smile. Their son, a young boy. Edward.
"A baby," Izumi said, a rare note of tenderness in her voice. "How nice!"
"Oh, yes," Dante murmured, snapping the paper. Izumi started, knocking the little table and sloshing tea from the cups.
"Master?" she asked warily. "Is something wrong?"
"Not at all," Dante said, fixing her face into a gentle smile. "I'm just reminded that I have no true children of my own. A woman of my age…"
Izumi's face softened. "Children sound nice, don't they?"
Nice, that wasn't the word Dante would have used. She thought of her son, their son. She thought of his grave and what Hohenheim had created from him.
This child was not her child, wasn't even Hohenheim's true son. He was merely a spare, and if she knew Hohenheim (she knew him as well as the moon knows the Earth), he would cast this new son aside as easily as he did the first. No attachments, no affection.
A spare. Dante paused. "Perhaps," she murmured. Perhaps this mask she wore was not as permanent a stain as she'd once believed.
Running a soft, wrinkled finger over the surface of the image, stroking a line over the bundled baby, Dante's smile widened. This boy would fix his father's mistakes. The sins of the father are, after all, the sins of the child.
She would not fade away. She would not die. Dante hummed a tender, maternal sound, and shoved her finger through the image, ripping straight through Hohenheim's pride and joy.
When Izumi asked after her again, staring with shock at the ripped paper and the torn image of a happy family, Dante merely waved her tireless pupil away. Alone again, she lifted a hand to her soft, deeply lined face and felt the burning certainty that this was the end of her dismal segue into humanity and the beginning of her true forever.