tuAN: I still don't own FMA. It belongs to Arakawa and the person who came up with the separate plotlines in the first anime.
Well, another character study about a villainous first anime character who gets little attention :D Except Sloth is not so bad in my opinion, and she turns around…well…here goes. ^_^
"Forget the things you thought you knew
We'll make a very good girl of you…"- Rasputina, 'Girls' School'
La Llorona is a legendary spirit, fated to wander the waters of Earth before reaching heaven. Searching for her children, she may kidnap other children who wander near her and bring them to their end in the water with her, although some say she saves children. Legend has it that she wails as she waits in the dark for those who will unknowingly come to her.
To an observer, it would be easy to assume that Sloth only stayed loyal to Dante's plan because she didn't know where else to go. She supposed that was true, but she realized there was more underneath the surface. She was the only one that realized. It was her burden.
There was the obvious explanations, and less obvious. Though it would be hard to correctly guess what they were, she had her reasons. Even though she wasn't always sure what those reasons said.
Sometimes she didn't want to know.
Sloth's other memories were vague and clouded. She supposed that was fitting.
She remembered vaguely rising, or trying to, and feeling stuck to the ground. Stuck to another world. Trying to use her limbs but not quite knowing how to, seeing and not quite understanding sight. And children screaming. Her first memories.
She didn't like them at all, but she never really needed to think about them. They didn't have to be remembered.
They weren't very necessary, and she was glad of it. But she didn't know what she wouldn't do if she could get rid of them.
Necessity had always been a driving factor in Sloth's everyday life. If she had to carry out a task, then she would go ahead and do it without regretting it or looking back. If she had to and didn't want to, she'd tell herself there was a reason why Dante wanted her to go ahead and do it, and she just got it over with and didn't think too much about it. No otherwise harm could be done, she thought. Sacrifices had to be made. She realized that at times, she would have to really exert herself, endanger herself, put herself in places nobody would want to be.
It was necessary, she thought, to think the whole time that no matter how often she thought she wasn't cut out for the work of the homunculi- she came to realize she was exactly what Dante wanted- that she had to stay. It was necessary for her. She almost wanted to stay. Because if she did, she'd one day be human.
She had to be.
She had been in the bed for a few weeks, and her hair was entirely formed but a mess, and her head felt heavy with all the thoughts and information she didn't know what to make of inside. There were others around. Others with simple, dark clothes like hers, but she didn't see them much and as of then didn't really care to. There were other things on her mind, in a way. She had to set something straight, but she didn't know what.
The one person who she saw regularly wore elaborate clothes and had white hair. It looked like it would be nice to wear those clothes, but she thought they would feel strange on her own body. Thick and heavy and too layered, too ornamental. Confining. But she would get used to confining things.
She felt stronger gradually, over the time she didn't care to keep track of. She would have liked to know exactly who she was.
She looked up from her pillow, turned. Lifted her hand slowly. It took some times. "Who," she asked. Speaking. Like her. And she said to her, "is this. Am I."
The woman leaned in and smiled at her. "I am Dante."
"Dante," her canvas-woman echoed. She tried to move her hand, and the color changed and it didn't feel as heavy, and it twitched and then she couldn't feel it, and it was see through and liquid and pretty. She looked and didn't want to look away.
"What is this?"
Dante leaned in further, looked at the watery hand. There was one left, she thought. She didn't seem like she would care too much. So, for all anyone cared, that was that.
And Sloth it was.
Sloth was appointed to disguise herself as a regular human, hiding in the open, just like Pride. Pride was, to the humans' knowledge, her "boss". Ruler and assistant. She was the "youngest"- although she wasn't the only one to notice she seemed older than many of the others- of the seven, and the least experienced. The newest. At first, there was a lot she didn't understand.
She caught on.
Humans were easily fooled by a face that allowed trust, inconspicuousness, regularity. For all any human cared, she was the well-mannered receptionist with green eyes who was good with business and got a job done, who didn't seem to be around any of the trouble most people in the building were living.
It was all around her, as "King Bradley's" personal assistant. The people he dealt with, the events he regulated nearly astonished her, made her think horribly of humans. The war about ten years prior- the humans who just threw gasoline on the fire they had created and watched as it all spun out of control, acted as if they had the right to mourn what they made. It was still all causing problems and such to those days. No wonder some of the others hated humans so much. She didn't hate them herself, but she hated that they would go so far out of their way to make such an unfixable wreck. Fools.
If she had the ability to make those decisions, the decisions that enabled that catastrophe to happen, she knew she wouldn't do that. But then again, she knew she wasn't sure about how she would use those abilities. And, most importantly, it didn't matter. She wouldn't.
Maybe, she figured, she was better off where she was.
The librarian- Sheska. And the country girl- Winry. They were afraid of her. They were afraid of her water-body, her all-too familiar face, calm when she apparently shouldn't have been.
So she was something to be feared.
Something about that steered her in a direction that she wasn't sure of where it was taking her.
She was going to be something fearsome. It wouldn't be too hard.
There was almost something comforting about it, in a strange way.
So Envy hated humans. Sloth didn't think she wanted to hate anyone.
"Who are you?" she had asked, early on.
"I am Envy," said Envy, and later said "I would never want to be a human. My ability mocks those parasites."
And she had said, "That's a funny thing for someone who is in the form of a human all the time, who loves looking like other humans. If you're as you say, such a creature, such a homunculus, if you're Envy, the inhuman being, then why are you the opposite so much? Your ability is there for a reason I couldn't tell you. You can be anyone you want, yet don't want to be anyone. You know exactly what you are, but have endless options otherwise? That is nonsense, Envy." Except she never said anything like that, and liked to think she never even thought those words.
If she could be an endless amount of people.
She supposed there was something funny about her, Sloth, feeling like that. She didn't seem like anyone, and had no idea who she was. But there was an irony she couldn't really admire about the fact that she had never before felt so strongly about her identity than when she became the envious one.
She wanted everything the world would personally give her, and she had no idea what to want.
No. She knew, and couldn't know.
She wasn't quite Sloth, and not quite Trisha. Maybe not even the gray area between, the still water inside wailing for something to make it solid.
It was easy to tell herself it didn't matter just yet who she was, and just as easy to say Sloth and be done with it. Being Sloth, she had found that taking the easy road was harder than it seemed.
So what was she to do?
Outside she was the still, calm water. Clear and relaxed, switching from water to woman when needed.
Inside the water wept, and she swam in it, looking for nothing in particular that she wanted to acknowledge. There was nothing she could do about it.
She would, one day, she hoped, at least, bring who she really was out, draw her in, make her own self exist. She knew she would have to find her.
She hoped her own waters wouldn't drown her.
Sacrifices are necessary.
Lust wanted to be human, and Lust left to make that happen. Aligned herself with humans. In doing that, Dante would never make her a human.
There was a possibility, Lust had recognized, insinuated to Sloth, that Dante wasn't going to anyway. Not to her, not to Sloth, not to anyone else.
But Sloth stayed. She reasoned, there was nowhere else for her to go, and if she left, what would the others do? Greed had made a stupid choice, and Lust was taking a big risk. Dante wouldn't make her a human soon, Sloth knew, but she knew that she could.
Lust had said that she was going to be human, and that she felt human, however that felt. And then she was gone.
Sloth had always imagined after that what would have happened if she'd left too, imagined what would have happened if she knew whether or not she felt human already.
She knew she had her chance and missed it. She knew it was unlikely, more than unlikely, that had she'd taken it, she would have become human. She told herself it wouldn't have been a chance worth taking, whenever she thought of it.
She thought of it more times than she wanted to count.
Wrath had been like her child and there was something comforting about that, feeling like his mother.
It was like taking the almost-memories, unreal and existing, from her mind and getting rid of them. Or explaining them. That would also do. She remembered children loving her, and then she didn't have to, she could just make it seem like it was going on right then. –Ed and Al were small, reached her waist, and they were at peace- but she wasn't, she couldn't if she didn't know it was her, and if it was her, what did that make her at that point?
Something was temporarily comforting about Wrath.
But something else was not, and it only made her more confused.
Sloth, to scare Edward Elric, had asked why he had not brought her back correctly. Well, for all anyone cared, that was why she had asked.
It was impossible, but she wished they had done it. If they had, then they were her sons, and even more so, she was Trisha, and that was why she felt so lost, because she had been that woman all along, just hadn't truly realized it. That was why nothing felt usual when she was taking to the others, why when she was around the brothers the elder couldn't look away and the younger was almost attached to her.
But she hadn't been brought back, and there was no surface explanation for anything.
She almost hated them for it. But more confusingly, she almost loved them for it.
And now it's almost like the early days, when she felt too heavy in the head and her arms were limp and she almost didn't even try to control her movements.
Trisha, she had decided. It took a long time to decide. Gone and Trisha was better than Sloth and of conjured existence, a necessary decision was made, a chance had to be taken. She hoped she took the right chance. But she had nothing left to lose, so she figured there was no harm.
She isn't fading, really. She brings herself to the tide, is in the unknown, she thinks. Trisha brings the water's harvest and Sloth is among it, and they come together, and she is made. They stop. She is both and neither.
Her water washed her to what she is prepared for, she leaves what was once not hers.
She had to make a sacrifice, and she knows a lot about sacrifices. Now she will end them, and begin something else.
She will wait for what is underneath the surface to come to her. It has begun. It will take a long time, but she can wait.
It is the last sacrifice she will make.
She will be united and at rest.
Until then, she waits.