Title: If

Disclaimer: I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist. Hiromu Arakawa does. If I did, random stuff like this would happen and ruin the plot.

Plot: It's awfully angsty (this chappie anyways) so bear with me. Basically, Envy's been in love with Ed since second grade and Ed (the #1 clueless guy on the planet) doesn't have a clue. When they're forced to work together on a project their senior year, Ed finds himself facing some assumptions he's made his entire life.

WARNING: YAOI, which means BOY X BOY, just FYI. If you don't like it, don't read it. I don't want any flames about it being yaoi. You were warned.

Please read and review! I don't care if you tear it apart. It'll make me feel better about my horrid idea if I know that someone out there cares enough to rip it to pieces.

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One

Envy

People say that love at first sight doesn't exist. Honestly, the ones spouting crap like that are the type who have never experienced love themselves, so how would they know? I can tell you here and now that love at first sight is quite real.

Flash back to second grade. My family and I had just moved to this pokey little town in Montana from New York City, and though Lust was let down at the loss of her super shopping malls, the rest of us found the change remarkably refreshing. I remember my oldest sister, Sloth, having to drag Wrath and I inside to eat dinner.

Just about everyone here lives on a farm, and we're no exception. Okay, so we don't have the actual food farm part, but we do have tons and tons of horses. Horses are just plain cool. I know I sound like those ditzy horse-freak girls, but it's the truth. I love horses. They're big and beautiful and strong… but I'm getting off topic. I was simply thrilled to have this much space when we first got here.

We just barely made it into the South Pueblo School District, and the bus ride takes hours because everyone lives on farms with so much space in between them. So anyway, we had to get up at five in the morning to be ready to leave by six. School starts at seven thirty, and our bus arrives at seven twenty so we're always running to get to class on time. I mean, it could go so much faster, but the stupid bus driver refuses to go above forty miles an hour, or even less, sometimes.

But anyways, it was the first day of second grade and it's much easier to get to class on time in elementary school. I just trooped straight over to Ms. Keiser's room—number 314, incidentally. I remember everything about that year.

I told the teacher who I was and got my seat assignment. She stuck me near the back where, if I proved disruptive, I couldn't possibly interrupt class all that much. I stuffed my backpack under my seat and leaned my head forward on my desk, oblivious as only a seven-year-old can be to the stares I was attracting. Yes, even then… let's just say that I am (and was) unique.

And then he walked into the room.

Even in second grade he was short. Probably about half a head smaller than I was, though his blonde antenna made up for most of the difference. His eyes were big and golden and innocent and made just for melting any heart, anywhere. His skin was lightly tanned and flawless. He had a kind look on his face as he listened to the porky boy in class, the one that nobody likes.

Edward Elric.

I fell in love with him instantly.

You know that feeling when you understand that there's only going to be one person for you, ever? Well, maybe you don't. But that's how it was for me—I've never even looked at anyone else. There's only him.

It's been a long time since second grade. I was lucky enough to get him in my class for third grade, too. I'm not stupid—I knew it wasn't normal for one guy to like another, so I never said anything. It took my own family two years to figure it out, and I think that Wrath still doesn't have a clue, despite the innuendoes Greed tosses around. Fourth grade was the worst, because he was in the class next door. I forced myself to learn to deal with it. I had kept my distance before then anyway, but now I put as much distance between us as I could. I learned to endure the ache in my heart, and it's a good thing I did, too.

Middle school was torture—it's hard to look at someone you almost never see. High school has been slightly better, though just yesterday I realized what is wrong with my stay-back-and-wait plan.

My senior year is already a quarter over. And once this year is done, he'll go off to college in someplace like Oxford, and I'll never see him again.

Truthfully, I locked myself in my room yesterday and refused to do anything, whether it was eat or do the laundry like I was supposed to or finish my homework. I wouldn't even come out to brush my mare, Demeter.

I'm paying for all of that today, but I don't care. I'm in the midst of a panic attack. I deserve some space.

The bus arrives at its usual time, but unlike all those years ago in second grade, only my brother Wrath and I get on. Greed and Lust are home at the moment, but that's only because my older brother is taking a year off to see some of the world before college. He's going to Spain in a week, and Lust is starting her exchange program there around the same time. They're twins, so I think it's appropriate, even if they're nothing alike.

Wrath, who is too clueless to figure out what's really wrong with me, does have enough sense to see that I'm upset.

"What happened this time?" he yawns, sliding down in his seat. We're the first stop, and we always sit together near the back. There's more room to sleep and do homework back there. "You haven't been this emo in years."

"I'm not emo," I reply automatically. Okay, so maybe I am, just a little. But I don't go around wearing black and cutting myself or anything crazy like that. I hate pain.

He snorts. "Of course you aren't."

"You're being nosy," I tell him briskly as I pull out my AP Calculus work that I hadn't done last night. "Nosiness isn't becoming of a junior."

Wrath is immensely proud of his status as one of the almost-kings of the school. I don't understand it. I can't remember being all that thrilled to be a junior… except that AP classes start that year. Yes, I know I'm obsessed, but Ed is a genius, so he's in all of those, and since there isn't that large of an AP group I was guaranteed to get at least three classes with him. I did, so junior year turned out better than any of the ones before it except second and third grade. Hell. That sounds really miserable when I think of it like that. But to get back to the point, I wasn't glad to be a junior for being a junior's sake. Wrath is. It's incomprehensible.

"It isn't?" I swear, the boy is downright dense sometimes.

"Of course not," I sigh. I scribble down an answer to the first math problem and put him on disregard. If he says anything to my comment, I don't hear it.

The bus slowly fills up around us as the yellow rectangle on wheels trundles its way past field after field of tall grass. There are some animals out this early, but I only spare a glance for the horses. I really should have gone to see Demeter yesterday.

I shove my calculus back into my bag and dig out the next undone subject. Wrath's friend Lee finally gets on the vehicle and the two of them are free to chatter, leaving me alone. I am happy for this—Wrath's jabbering in my ear is really annoying. I tug absently on some strands of hair that slipped out of my ponytail, chewing on the end.

I miss the rest of the stops, so absorbed am I in finishing up the paragraph we were supposed to write for history, that had in reality been due yesterday, but I'd managed to wrangle an extra day out of the teacher. He won't be pleased when I turn in something I concocted on the bus to school, especially half-asleep as I am. That'll probably earn me another lecture. Damn.

Being in love sucks. The only time I'm ever happy is when I can at least see Ed. It's just pathetic, and Greed and Sloth have both expressed the opinion that it's unhealthy. Then again, Sloth is so demure and withdrawn that she probably can't pull off my kind of obsession, and Greed's a, well, greedy idiot. He doesn't understand love. I feel bad almost instantly about thinking that about Sloth, but with Greed, it's just the truth.

Gluttony's in love with food, enough that he's a celebrity chef on the Food Network, but that doesn't really count. Pride's in love with power, money, and prestige. Dante, my dear old mum, is in love with herself. Lust has had a turbulent history, involving at least three boyfriends over her senior year alone, but personally, I think that she'll go to Spain and meet some Spanish guy who's just as passionate and fiery and violent as she is. They'll date for five years and get married, buy a boat, and sail the world, while he earns billions of dollars by being CEO of an online company, and she makes billions of dollars from all of her scientific discoveries. Yep. That's the future I see for Lust.

I know that Wrath has his eye on at least two girls, both of them younger than he is, because he's said so at the dinner table (well, only after Greed goaded him into it). He'll have the only normal life out of all of us, I think. Wrath will get married to his college sweetheart, a nice girl from a nice Midwestern family, and they'll have the average two point five kids, the white picket fence, and the dog. His kids will have several billionaires in their list of aunts and uncles (Pride, Gluttony, and Lust come to mind. Greed, as the leader of a powerful crime syndicate, will be up there too). That leaves Sloth, who'll have won at least three Humanitarian of the Year awards and have saved an endangered species or two, as well as solved the starvation problems in Africa, and me. Well, let's see… my dating history is nil, I'm gay, and I've been in love with the same person since elementary school. Somehow, my prospects don't look so great.

Well, we're almost at the school, and I've wasted ten minutes of my time brainstorming futures for my family. Wonderful. Just wonderful. I hastily slap a few concluding sentences onto my paragraph and put that away, too. My Government work is just going to have to stay undone.

The bus pulls into the parking lot, and people rouse their sleeping friends. We all gather our stuff and shuffle off the bus, most of us yawning hugely. I was too upset last night to get much sleep, so I'm part of that category. I wish school were over with already… except that this is the only place I get to see Ed. That thought makes my heart leap and my stomach start to feel queasy at the same time. I'm happy when I'm around Ed, but simultaneously I feel sick that my time is running out. There's also that nagging feeling that I've done something wrong or forgotten something terribly important, which I hate. It makes me twitchy all day. Damn.

Students flood into the school and my bus herd follows them. It's warmer inside the building, and immediately Wrath and I part; his locker is located near the cafeteria downstairs, while mine is by the upper entrance to the library. I know. Our school might be small, but we have a kick-ass library. It's two floors and has, like, ten different sections. Okay, so I'm a nerd and I like books. Big deal. Books are like horses—you can never have enough of them.

I shove half of my textbooks into my locker and haul out my stuff for first period, the one dumb-kid class on my schedule—Acting and Theatre III. Yes, they actually spell theater with the "r" and the "e" mixed around, like the Brits do. I'm a great actor and a perfect mimic, or so I've been told. Well, it's the one thing I've got going for me, so I'm not complaining. I know people say that actors are dumb, but hey, I'm smart, right? Besides, I decided not to trust what "people say" a long time ago. In second grade.

Right away I have to turn from my locker and almost run to reach the theater, which is located next to the cafeteria. I make it with a minute to spare and find my usual seat among the red velvet chairs. Hey, I don't know what they were thinking. A ginormous library and this sweet theater? The huge high school down the way, General High School, has us beat by easily a thousand kids, and they don't have either of those things. South Pueblo High School only has eight hundred kids and we get both. I laughed at some kids from General for this at a football game once, and walked away with a black eye for my trouble. But since they ended up with some pretty serious bruises all over their arms and chests, I think I got off lightly, even if I got five detentions from the principle for beating them up.

For any of you wondering, I fall shy of six feet by a fair bit. I'm not big or burly—I only weigh about a hundred and fifteen pounds, and for a year in there somewhere the school nurse was convinced I had anorexia nervosa and was starving myself. No, I like my three square meals too much to quit eating them, thank you very much.

Acting class is a cinch, as usual. We are doing Shakespearean monologues; I got Hamlet's little "what is man?" soliloquy, but it isn't that hard. We practice them in class, and I already have over half of mine memorized. The bell rings as I listen to some kid butcher one of Romeo's long-winded descriptions of Juliet. I don't have a problem with Shakespeare—I just think Romeo and Juliet is retarded.

I snatch up my bag and head for my locker. After disposing of my acting materials in favor of AP Language Arts, I feel the first stirrings of excitement, tinged with worry. Ed has this class too, even if he never looks at me. But what if he isn't here? I push that thought away. There's no reason for Ed not to be here. He's healthier than anyone I know, including me. I've been sick more times since second grade than he has.

I needn't have worried. Ed is already there by the time I enter class, and it's like some great weight has been lifted from my chest. I sigh, enjoying the freedom of unobstructed breathing, and go to take my seat at the back of the room. I feel much better now, even bordering dangerously on happy, just looking at the back of Ed's golden head.

But did I mention that Ed hardly even glances my way? I don't think I have to—it's pretty much a given. If he did, I'd be happier. But he doesn't, and what looks I earn are usually ones of irritation when I say something particularly stupid. I'm in love with him, and he doesn't think I'm even worthy of his almost boundless kindness. He's nice to everyone—the jocks, the nerdy girls, the plump kids, even the freakishly PMSing perfectionist chicks—except me. I love that he's so kind and thoughtful, but it tears me up inside when I wonder what I'm doing wrong. I don't know who to be other than myself, despite my acting abilities, and I guess that myself just isn't good enough for him.

No, I order myself sternly. Don't think about this. It'll only make you feel worse. Just enjoy being in the same room as Ed, being able to see him. Enjoy having that stupid weight off of your chest, because soon enough it'll be there permanently.

Like I need a reminder that my time with Ed, which had once seemed so eternal, is ticking to an end with every twitch of the second hand on the clock. Blinking back a few rebellious tears—what is wrong with me? I don't cry. Not usually, anyway—I pillow my head on my arms and exhale, mentally preparing myself for the lecture Mrs. Thompson is getting ready to launch into, and silently savor being able to see Edward Elric.

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And that's not depressing in the slightest. Ah, well. The second chapter will be up the moment I have time to finish writing it....

Thanks for reading this far! Review please!