"Miss Tucker? How old were you when you were spliced?"
They're sitting in the garden when Selim drops the question, and he can already tell that it upsets her on some level, so he doesn't look her in the eyes. It's the middle of spring, and he focuses on that instead. Pollen flits around them, acrid in his nostrils and on his tongue; falling in and out of the open air at the border between sunlight and the shadow of the garden wall.
His eyes flit from speck to speck. It's quietly claustrophobic, only being able to look at only one thing at a time.
"I was very young," Miss Tucker finally says, relaxing in her pose against the ground, and he pivots his head to look back at her.
"You're lucky," he says. "My mama won't let me get spliced."
Miss Tucker violently snuffles next to him, and then breaks into a howl, a howling laugh.
This used to scare the neighbors terribly. Miss Tucker herself used to scare the neighbors terribly. She speaks like a dog imitating a woman, lips and tongue stretched to their limits, slow and deeply halting; she laughs and cries like a woman imitating a dog, forsaking everything but the sounds of the hollow of her throat. Everyone else has gotten used to her voice, while Selim never minded at all.
"Trust me, Selim," she eventually says, when she's done laughing. "There's no harm in waiting. The opposite, actually. It's not safe to get spliced while you're still growing."
Selim kicks at the dirt, scuffing his shoes. "Mama isn't really worried about the risks. That's not why she doesn't want me to get spliced."
"Oh?"
"She just doesn't like alchemy!" Selim says bitterly. "She won't even deal with alkahestry! If she really wanted us to be healthy and safe-"
He grabs at the air like he's trying to rip it apart.
"I think she has the right to distrust alchemy," Miss Tucker says, perfectly conciliatory.
"She has the right to be stupid, you mean."
"Perhaps," Miss Tucker admits. "But, regardless of why she doesn't want you to receive nigh-irreversible bio-alchemical alteration, I happen to agree that she's probably in the right on that one."
Selim's lips thin. He loves his mama, even if he doesn't trust her judgement in many ways. But he trusts Miss Tucker's judgement, which means that he has to actually admit to the possibility that he's wrong about something. He hates that! Why can't he just always be right about everything!
"It's not fair," he grumbles. "There's alchemy to give humans superpowers!" Which is nine-year-old lingo for the freshly distinguished art and science of making human chimeras. Animal powers are superpowers! New bodies, new lives. "But there's no way to make young people older!"
"You want to be a grown-up so badly, don't you?" Miss Tucker asks, obviously amused.
"Yes! Of course I do! Why can't I just transmute myself older!"
"That's a good question," Miss Tucker says. "Why can't you just transmute yourself older?"
Selim frowns. "...is this a trick question?"
"No!" Miss Tucker laughs. "Think about it! It's a question of alchemy that really matters."
Why would it matter? Why shouldn't you be able to transmute yourself older? It's just another way to rearrange atoms. Dust in open air.
"Selim, the thing is, being a grown-up isn't just a matter of the body you're in. It's a matter of the shape of your soul. Growing up is about learning who you are and what you can do, and how you can do it. You can't use alchemy to create something that you don't already understand." Because the price of ignorance is alchemical rebound.
"What if I really understood myself?" Selim asks. "What if I understood who I would be as a grown up so completely I could use that as a term in a transmutation circle?"
"If you understood yourself that way, that well," Miss Tucker replies. "Then I think you would already be a grown-up, no matter your size or shape."
Selim doesn't understand it just yet, but this is why the ouroboros has always been an alchemical symbol: so often, one must already have what they are looking for, before they are able to obtain it. The absolute infinite regress.
"Why do you want to become a chimera?" Miss Tucker asks him, while he's still struck dumb with alchemical frustration. There has to be some way to lift myself up by my bootstraps!
"Why wouldn't I want to become a chimera!? It's awesome!"
"Is it now?" Dry amusement laces her voice: I can't believe how stupid you're being, you're being so stupid it wraps around to endearing.
"Of course it is! If I could, I would become a chimera of everything."
"Everything?"
"Yeah! I want to fly though the sky on falcon wings! I want - tentacles! Swiveling chameleon eyes! Photosynthetic skin! Gills! Big teeth to scare bullies with! Hibernation for super-naps! "
"Unfortunately, sweetheart, chimerism is not quite so mix and match," Miss Tucker says. "More like 'pick one'."
"I'd be a snake chimera, then."
"A snake?"
"Yeah! Snakes are-" the thing he believes he dreams of, late at night; slithering low through the bowels of the earth. "-super cool."
"Well, that's as good a reason as any," Miss Tucker sighs. "Just don't give your mother a heart attack, okay? At least work up to it, first, when you're a grown-up. Shock her by getting a tattoo or piercing, first, before you walk home covered in snake scales and dribbling venom all over her nice hardwood floor."
He giggles, but when he goes to bed that night, he brushes his teeth before his bedroom mirror, and he wonders if he already has a tattoo.
A blotchy red birthmark mars his forehead, like a ring-stain of blood. But it's not quite right for a birthmark, because even blurred and distorted, it's too fine. A tattoo of the ouroboros, smeared by a slippery thumbprint.
It stands out like crimson wax on white stationery, a perpetual brand against the pale skin that blisters at the first kiss of sunlight. He puts on a gallon of sun-block every day before he goes outside.
He wonders if he's already a chimera, too. But there's nothing but guesses, and he gives it up for more conventional questions: the dilemmas of lore, and alchemy, and arts and sciences and flesh and forces and fire and steel. Soul and body, and how to invent the good life.
Just like everyone else, he doesn't know much about the old government. It's all classified. But he knows that they could stitch life into itself, and they wasted that power on themselves, until their alchemical secrets were torn from their tomes. (On some level, well - he knows in his bones that they didn't just stitch life, but weave it.)
The monumental waste offends him on a level that he can't explain, and he doesn't know why.
So, it isn't as if Selim Bradley intended to have darkly ironic conversations with one of the most infamous victims of human experimentation in the country. It just sort of… happened.
It started when he was barely four years old and tottering around as if he was much older, propping himself up with the skeleton of someone else's life. The more words he learned, the more he realized that he knew the words all along, an explosive riot of exponential uncovering. It wasn't until his mama said a particular word with seven syllables that he went to find a dictionary and realized: huh, sometimes learning doesn't feel like remembering.
Well, it's probably normal.
He generally creeped absolutely everyone he met out, carrying around the vocabulary of a tricentennial and the enunciation and attitude of a toddler. For a time, he didn't see any point to his expanded vocabulary, beyond just being a cute trick; why should he have used big words, when simpler ones would do?
Then he realized that big words made people impressed with him! They paid attention and stuff! So he went too far in the opposite direction. Slipping into the tongues of foreign nations that most Amestrians had never seen and dead languages that no-one else remembered. So eventually his family friends got used to his manic, piecemeal affect. His mama never minded at all.
He decided that he wanted to take care of the animals on his mama's estate. There were actually a lot of animals there (and no, he wasn't the one hurting them! Miss Armstrong could be so suspicious!), and in the woods well beyond.
He learned veterinary medicine, and yet, it wasn't medicine that his mama turned to when he fell deathly sick at age three. It was the one time his mama turned to alchemy as her first option. Alkahestry. Transmutation, the miscibility of humours.
"I want to learn alchemy, Mama," he said to her one night.
"Why is that, darling?"
"So I can make the animals better, too!"
She shook her head. "Oh, well, of course that's why."
She talked to their family friends, and he got to meet all kinds of nice people. For a few years he got alchemy lessons from the Elrics, but - although they eventually warmed to Selim - they had their own lives to deal with, and they weren't professional teachers.
So he met someone who was a teacher.
"You're a dog," Selim said, upon meeting Miss Tucker for the first time.
"Selim!" his mama said, scandalized. "You shouldn't say such things!"
"It's okay!" Miss Tucker said, with a great big (doggy) laugh. "He's not exactly wrong!"
"You're a kid!" Selim said, given free reign to talk shit. "Are you a kid?"
"Eddie and Al were kids when they learned super-secret forbidden alchemy," Miss Tucker said. "So don't write me off just yet."
"He lets you call him Eddie!?" Selim's jaw dropped. "Wait, you know secret alchemy! Will you teach me?"
"Teach him all of the secret alchemy you want," his mama interjected. "But nothing secret and forbidden!"
"Of course, Mrs. Bradley."
"Yes, mama."
He was learning how to heal animals from a talking animal, and it was awesome. Then he started learning everything else about alchemy from Miss Tucker while he was learning about biology and biochemistry and chemistry, academics in leaps and bounds. Satiating the inherited and accumulated desires of 300 years that he didn't even remember. What spirit of poisonous pride would ever be happy, lacking the power to reshape the world?
"I was reading," he said to his mama one day, as she was tucking him in. "You took care of another Selim Bradley, didn't you?"
"In a sense," his mama said.
"He was born before I was, right?"
"In a sense," his mama said.
"What does that mean, mama?" He couldn't look her in the eye. "Why do we have the same name?"
"I suppose I never figured out how to talk about this with you." She sighed and ran her fingers through his hair. "Something happened to the other Selim, dear. He had to become young again. A baby."
Selim felt tears rising to his eyes. "I was that Selim?"
"Yes," his mama said.
"And…" his throat constricted, agonizingly tight. "You've been my mama twice?"
"Of course."
"Why?" For all that he didn't remember who he had been before, something was screaming inside of him: you don't deserve that, what did you ever do for her the first time around?
"Because I love you, of course," his mama said, and she kissed him on the forehead. Her lipstick blotted out his birthmark.
"Are you going to become young, too, someday?" He asked her. The absurd image struck him - himself as a grown-up, holding his mama as a mere baby. Then he would be the daddy, and she would be…
He didn't properly know her first name, actually. He hadn't ever wondered what to call her besides 'mama'. No other name had ever seemed useful or meaningful.
His mama laughed. "No, I don't think so."
"But you're so old! You can't keep getting older forever!"
"That's right," his mama said. "Eventually, I won't keep getting older. But that doesn't mean I'm going to get any younger."
He stared at her, incredibly confused. "So you're just going to be old and wrinkly forever?"
"I'm afraid not. Eventually I'll die."
Oh, well that was no big deal. Immortality was obviously possible! (How did he know that it was possible? It didn't matter.) "I'll fix that!"
"Oh, of course you will," his mama said with a chuckle. "There are plenty of very smart alchemists working on that even as we speak. Maybe you'll be the one who helps them work it all out."
"I will for sure!"
She went to go and let him sleep, but she departed with one last warning:
"Selim, my dear? You should know never to make a big deal out of a woman's age."
"Yes, mama."
"I'm sorry," Selim says. He's in the garden with Miss Tucker again, and the smell of summer is miles away.
They're playing games like they always do, manually transmuting each piece and token from the garden wall before they even begin to make their moves. The wall has seen a lot of alchemical abuse like this, in truth; but they always give back when they're done.
"Sorry for what?" Miss Tucker asks.
"I'm sorry," Selim repeats. "My father… was a bad man. A really, really bad man. A lot of bad things happened because of him, and I could have stopped him."
"You're talking about the late King Bradley, yes?"
"Who else would I be talking about?" Selim asks.
"No one in particular," Miss Tucker replies. It smells like a lie, and his nerves scrape and skitter along the insides of his skull at the thought of it. "Why do you think you could have stopped him?"
"Why couldn't I have stopped him? I was his son."
"Do you control your mother, Selim?"
"Well, no," Selim says. "But that's only because I'm stupid."
"Pardon?"
"I'm not smart enough to figure out how to control her. If I was smarter, I could find a way to convince her to listen to me. I could have done the same with my father."
Miss Tucker bares her teeth, smiling like a human and grimacing like a dog. "Do you think it's okay to do that sort of thing? To control people like that?"
To control his mama? Maybe? No? But… "If I could have stopped my father, I should have. I should have. He let people do terrible things-! Not even for the greater good, but just because he didn't care enough to stop it!"
King Bradley seemed to be the lynchpin, and he held up a military that committed genocide. His institutions employed Shou Tucker and allowed him to experiment on his family. And Shou Tucker didn't have anything meaningful to show for it, because the military could manufacture infinitely grander chimeras at the drop of a hat! The military had that power and knowledge all along. Shou Tucker was barely even reinventing the wheel, and he hurt Selim's friend for it.
A meaningless, monumental waste. If there was some other lynchpin for Selim to find, he knows that he could have found him, too.
"Maybe there was a way that I could have convinced my father to listen to me," Miss Tucker said softly. "Should I apologize to myself because I couldn't?"
"What? No!"
"Why not?"
"Because…"
Because Selim never looks at other people the way he looks at himself. He loves other people, and cares about them so deeply that it hurts, but he always sees himself as an untouched eye in the midst of a storm. A lynchpin for the dust in the wind around him. He is a crux, swollen with potential, and the world might turn around him.
He never expects anyone else to sit at the center of the world.
"Because you're a hypocrite," Miss Tucker concludes, when Selim can't give voice to his arrogance.
"I'm not a hypocrite," Selim mutters. "You were a victim, and I was a bystander."
"Were you? A bystander?"
"I wasn't a victim," Selim says. "And… I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what, now?"
"I've said a lot of insensitive things," he says vaguely. "I'm sorry for that. I've probably hurt your feelings. A lot."
"It's okay," Miss Tucker says. "Eddie told me you were, in his words, a 'little shit', well before I ever agreed to teach you. I just happen to think you're a little shit for completely different reasons than he did."
"Hey!"
Selim has always had nightmares, but now they strike more often; more and more frequently, until every night he wakes up choking down a scream.
He dreams of murdering people in the dark, and dismembering their bodies between more teeth than could ever fit inside of his mouth. He dreams of a life where his body is a paper-doll shell, without beating heart or pumping blood or muscle or bone. His soul is a puddle of cool quiet dark, a perfect anaesthetic.
He wakes up and aches with embodiment. He wakes up and blood rushes through his veins, and he is a microcosm of the old world. Ink surges through his insides and under his surface and he wonders if his veins don't trace some alchemical array.
"I know I'm not human," he says one day, while he's walking with Miss Tucker to the laboratory, snow crunching under their feet. This is not privacy or protocol, keeping sensitive things under the cover of secret formality. This is just anonymity.
"You're as human as I am," Miss Tucker tells him.
Even Miss Tucker is old news, now. First she was a victim, a symbol of scientific sin. Then she grew up, because - why would mere mutilation be the end of her life?
("I don't care what she looks like, I won't let you put her down like an animal-!")
Less than a decade later she was yet another ridiculously skilled ridiculously young alchemist to show up grown-ups in the face of logic and plausibility. Alphonse always said she would have gotten farther, faster, if she weren't struggling with her condition; rehabilitation on one end and transmutation on another, and mere coping, stitching the two together. Miss Tucker always told him to shut up and stop flattering her.
"It doesn't work like that," Selim says, and bitterness overflows. "I'm not human just because you say I am. And you can tell me I'm a person or that I'm human in all of the ways that matter, but I'm not even sure that's true. And even if it is true - it's not what I'm trying to say. I wasn't born the same way everyone else was, was I?"
"No," Miss Tucker confirms.
Once, she redeemed and reclaimed the science that made her. Then someone asked her how they could become a chimera, too, and it rapidly became clear that not everyone saw chimerism as a terrible mutilation.
Miss Tucker isn't the only human chimera on the streets, only one of the oldest ones. This is why no-one bats an eye while she and her charge discuss their monstrosities; no-one would think anything of it, even if they singled their voices out of the crowd.
"Does everyone know that I'm not human?" Selim asks.
"Not everyone. Eddie and Al. The Fuhrer. Your mother knows most of it."
A light turns red, and they wait by a crosswalk.
"I don't remember very much," Selim says. "I remember… I was made of people."
"That's not exactly wrong," Miss Tucker replies.
"I remember…" Selim shudders, cutting himself off. "I used all of them up, at the end. None of them were left."
"Yes," Miss Tucker confirms gently. "That was when you became young again."
"So where did my soul come from?" he asks.
"What do you mean?"
"I was made of other people's souls. They were me, and then they were gone. I - I shouldn't have been able to keep going, when they were gone. Like if a human used up all of their nerves and cells."
The light turns green, and they keep walking. "Where do you think your soul came from, Selim? And no, that's not a trick question."
"I don't know," Selim confesses. "I worry, sometimes. What if someone else's soul is still inside of me? What if my mind still riding on their soul, and they're still hurting?"
Miss Tucker doesn't miss a beat. "Well, worry about this, instead. When a woman becomes pregnant, where do you think her child's soul comes from?"
He almost trips over his feet in the middle of the crosswalk. "I - I'm not a metaphysicist! The answer is unknowable by definition! No-one knows what's out there! You can't even get Truth to tell you!" Because by the time Truth told you anything meaningful, you would have already sold so much of yourself that you would be on the other side, for your own first-hand experience-
Miss Tucker laughs, loud and surprisingly clear. "You've bought too much into the symbolism of alchemy, Selim. The soul doesn't come from anywhere."
"I don't understand," he says.
"When a woman becomes pregnant, all that happens is some organic molecules are rearranged. There is no essential spark of life, flooding into the womb at the moment of conception. The flow of the world does not take a pre-existing soul and allocate it to the growing child. Instead, a soul is simply… created out of base matter. And isn't that a miracle? That we can stir carbon into something more priceless than diamond?"
"That's not true," Selim protests vaguely. "It's not just biochemistry and molecular energy. I'm only a kid, sort of, and I know that making babies is about love, too."
"Perhaps. But is your love necessarily reduced when you give it away?"
"No," Selim admits. Love is a thing that can be irreducible. Undiminished.
"That's a part of the miracle, Selim. And the thing is - if you can stir carbon and nitrogen into a new soul - you can stir the ichor of a philosopher's stone into a new soul, too. If you can rearrange no souls into one soul, you can rearrange ten souls into eleven souls, too. We are positive sum creatures, every one of us."
Selim closes his eyes, but he doesn't lose track of where he is in the world around him. "So, what, then? I'm more than the sum of my parts?"
"Of course you are, Selim," Miss Tucker says. "If you weren't, you wouldn't be here today."
"...thanks, Miss Tucker," he eventually whispers, almost too quiet for her to hear in the hustle and bustle of traffic. But she catches it anyways.
"Have you told your mother that you remember?" she asks.
"No, I haven't," he admits.
"Is there any reason why not?"
Selim dodges by a pedestrian on a bicycle before he answers. "...if it turned out that I did still have people inside me, I don't think my mama would have cared."
"She absolutely would," Miss Tucker replies.
"But she cares about me more! She cares about me more than everything else. And she shouldn't… get pulled in two different directions by her caring." Selim spits. "Either she would stop caring about me, which is - maybe for the best. Or she would stop caring about them, which is something I don't ever want her to have to do. Or she would never stop caring either way, and she would be torn up forever and ever and ever-"
He stops himself from letting his tears slip into his voice.
"I didn't want her to hurt," he says, and he sounds small and pathetic. As much a child as he ever will be.
Even worse, on some level: if he was living in the skin of someone else's soul… would he have let them go, even at the cost of his own life? How could he take himself away from his mama, just because of some moral lesson he thought he might believe in?
Even worse, on some level: his mama isn't the only one who cares about family more than about everyone else.
"You can't always stop other people from hurting," Miss Tucker says, but he's already a million miles away and barely listening. "I think you should tell her."
"I know," he says.
"I won't do it, Selim."
He's a million miles away from children and lies, and he's more grown-up now then he has ever been. But he's still so much less mature than he needs to be.
"Why not?" he asks, and desperation bleeds through him. "Mama, please, it's safe. Do you think I would want you to do this if it wasn't safe?"
"Yes you would," his mama says. She says it with pure affection in place of cruelty, but still, it burns. It lacerates through his chest in arcs. "I know how you think, dear. You love me, and as far as you're concerned, my life is on the line already."
Selim grits his teeth. "Your life is on the line, mama!" She's getting old and she's going to die-
Her hair is getting gray, and her joints ache and creak loudly enough for him to hear, and her blood is thin, and doesn't she care where this is going? The Selim of his oldest memories would have been bitterly contemptuous of her frailty, and put her down to lift himself up in his own head. But now he has come too far to be so callous, and all he wants to do is lift her up.
"I think I can live with that," his mama says, completely serene.
But she can't live with that because you can't live with anything at all if you're dead. Doesn't she understand? Why won't she understand!?
"You don't have to live with it," Selim says weakly. "We can help you."
"No," his mama concedes. "But I think I should. I won't take life from someone else just to have it for myself."
"Mama, this isn't like what Father did," he says, and for a moment he forgets if he's talking about Wrath or talking about the creature of the flask. "It's not anything symbolic! It's not about transferring life energy or manipulating souls. It's just healing the body you keep your soul inside, the same way a medical alchemist can heal everything else!" Patching over senescence. Rejuvenation.
"That may be so," his mama says. "But it's not simple, is it?"
"...no," he admits. It's one of the most complicated things anyone has ever done.
"You're doing something monumental, dear," his mama tells him, and now she has to stand on her tippy-toes to kiss his forehead. "But you could do it for anyone else, too. If you do it for me, that's time you're not spending to heal someone else. That right there is life I would be taking from other people."
"I already don't spend most of my time healing," he says.
"That's true," his mama agrees. "But I don't think you have to spend your time healing other people, if you don't want to."
"You just don't want me to heal you," he says bitterly. He wants to scream. He wants to cry. He wants to rage, and shout, and kick down the walls.
"I'm okay," his mama says. "I don't feel like there's anything to heal."
He wants to crush her and put her back together in a way that isn't so stupid, in a new body where she'll never be able to hurt herself. He wants to take her apart and reassemble her into someone that he can't lose.
"I'm going out," he says, swallowing down the gorge that rises in his throat.
"Selim-? Selim!"
She reaches out to grab him, and he bats her hand away, turning for the door.
"Selim, no, come back-!"
It's dark outside. Ancient gas-lit street lamps cast flickering shadows alongside newer electric filaments, and they all burn bright. Behind him, a moth breaks against glass fire, and he can smell burnt hemolymph.
He doesn't know where he's going. He just knows that he wants to go somewhere else. He wants to go to a place where he can be an ordinary child. He wants to go to a place where he is an adult, a president, a king, a fuhrer, a prince, a dictator…
Why are you so stupid? he asks himself. Why are you so weak, that you can't do what needs to be done? No-one else will save your mother.
In the end, he checks in to Laboratory 9, and goes to the fourth research wing, surrounded by books. Originals and transcriptions, fat with lore stolen from Father's compound; fat with the lore that Father stole from God.
The front of the room squirms with synthesis and new research. Selim stares at the blackboard, at diagrams. Telomeres, free radicals, entangled proteins, degenerate membranes, apoptosis, immune decline, faltering mitochondria… the dragon's pulse, qi, meridians, chakras, upright spheres, binding spirit, bodily cores, seats of the soul.
He's staring at nothing at all. His eyes are looking through the blackboard, somewhere else, and he drops his head into his hand, blocking out the lights around him. Almost immediately, a weight lifts off of him; a headache he didn't even realize he had recedes.
"Fuck it," he mutters, and he pushes his face into the crook of his elbow, leaning across a desk and allowing himself to fall asleep.
It's almost noon when Selim wakes up in the morning, and his drool has left a blotchy crimson stain all across his sleeve, running down to seep into the wooden surface of the desk.
"Fuck," he curses again, running his tongue along his teeth, scraping at his blood. Cinnabar and minium pool together underneath his tongue and in the corners of his mouth.
He gets up and hikes a trail out to the bathroom sink, damping a rag and scrubbing at his shirt. The door opens behind him.
"You look disgusting," Miss Tucker says to him.
"Isn't this the men's restroom?" Selim asks, mostly as a way of getting her to go away and leave him be.
"I am technically a boy," Miss Tucker tells him. "I'm as much Alexander as I am Nina."
"Bull and shit," Selim replies. "Who you are as a dog doesn't have very much to do with who you are as a human."
She's right about one thing, though, because he does look disgusting. His eyes are truly bloodshot, and his pale skin has gone waxy, discolored by his own sweat.
"Your mother told me you got in a fight with her," Miss Tucker says lowly.
"I did," Selim confirms. "And now you're looking for me, for her?"
"No," Miss Tucker says. "She called me, and I was already here, because you're not the only one who does research and theoretical alchemy. I'm looking for you for me."
Selim's ouroboros stares back at him in the mirror, like a parody of a third eye.
"It's the same as it always is," Selim eventually says. "She's more human than I want her to be."
He wets the rag again and sweeps it across his face, scrubbing at the muck and sand of sleep.
"Sometimes I want to make her healthy," he admits, and he knows that he's dropping a bomb on his teacher but he doesn't care. "I wish I could change her. Save her from the rot in her cells. Wouldn't she understand that I was only doing what was best for her?"
His teacher is quiet for a long time, and the last echoes of Gluttony dissect her. Heart rate, pulse, breath and sweat, viscerally real.
"Do you know, I still love my father?" Miss Tucker asks him, and the bottom drops out of Selim's stomach.
"What!?"
What.
His mind is whited out. He can't understand.
"It's true," Miss Tucker tells him. "I still visit him in prison, sometimes, too."
"But he hurt you!" Selim splutters.
"He did. Do you know why he did it?"
"Because he didn't care about you!" Selim tears his face away from the mirror to face her. "Why would you care about him?"
"Because it's not that simple," Miss Tucker says. She shakes her head. "Do you know how it started, for him? He wanted to provide for his wife and daughter."
"So he drove your mother to suicide and mutilated you!?" Selim scoffs, disbelieving. "How can you call that providing?"
"It started with providing," Miss Tucker says gently. "He needed us to be happy, so he wanted to work hard and provide for us, even though his hard work isolated him from us. He started treating hard work as an end-in-itself, because he was just as human as all of us, and he was stupid. So he thought he needed to work hard.
"Then he needed to get his state alchemist certification in order to work hard. And he forgot that the certification was a means-to-an-end, and started treating it like the only thing that mattered, because he was human, and stupid. And so he tortured my mother, because he was so bent around that he could justify everything by thinking he was helping us. And when he hurt me, he earnestly believed that he would keep me in his home, and I would still be his daughter. He never thought of either of us as disposable."
The picture she paints is as disgusting as he is. Warped. Hideously wrong. "He was insane, Nina."
"I never said he wasn't," she replies. "He was very very sick, Selim. The tiniest thing in him, some small urge… he fed that urge, and it grew, and grew, consuming his person from the inside, until he had been eaten up by cancer."
And so shame swallows Selim, like Gluttony back from the dead.
"That singular urge was really all that was left of him, while he hurt us," Miss Tucker continues. "It hollowed him out and played him like a puppet. He still loved us, but that urge had eaten and broken his memories of how to love, until he forgot what it was like to be loved, and until he forgot what it was like to be hurt. He had forgotten, by the end, that… even if he provided for us, and gave us everything we could ever want, it would be utterly meaningless if he also violated us along the way."
Miss Tucker stares at him with her milky-white eyes, half-blind with cataracts, and he's half-blind in this moment because he's crying.
"You can't love someone so broken," Selim says weakly, and he knows he is a hypocrite to the core.
"I wouldn't ask anyone else to love him, or to love anyone like him," Miss Tucker says. "His sickness does not save him from his coldness, or make his broken parts any less sharp. I don't even forgive him for what he did to me, and Alexander, and Mom. But I do love him."
"You shouldn't," Selim says, and Miss Tucker is still staring at him. Her gaze is uncomfortably shrewd.
"Will you save me from loving him, just as you will save your mother from dying the way she wants to die?"
"I don't know," Selim says, and his voice breaks like he's ten years and two lives old again. "No. I don't know. Why do people have to hurt themselves?"
He slumps against his teacher and simply weeps. Tears and snot stain Miss Tucker's fur.
"Sometimes, Selim," she begins to say. "People take the things that hurt them, and they grow with the hurt until it becomes a part of them."
"No-one should ever be hurt like that to begin with," he insists.
"You're right," she says. "But you can't un-hurt people, and that means you have to take them as they are, with all of their hurts and scars."
"I don't know how I can," he confesses. Trying to come up with another excuse for why he can't do this. "All I am is this - urge. It's all I've ever been."
"No," Miss Tucker says, and she licks his face. "You are more than that. And if the rest of you is small, then we will help those parts of you grow."
"We?" he asks.
"You and me," Miss Tucker says. "Everyone."
He goes back to his mother that night, and hugs her tight, apologizing profusely. And for the first time, he appreciates what it means to love someone that you can't have forever, until the lack of them threatens to sever his lungs.
And he knows he'll never stop wanting to know her forever. Is he in the wrong, for wanting her to live forever? Is he in the wrong, for not acting when he could be saving her?
Part of him wishes he could go back to a time before he was hurt into knowing humanity. But he can't un-hurt himself, and so all he can do is take himself as he is.
"Hey, mama," he says, through teeth too large and sharp for his jaw. He is centuries and decades and change, and he has taken himself apart and put himself back together too many times to recall, now.
He was never meant to leave his container, his 'flask', but he has. He can't put himself back in the bottle, which means he must hold himself together without his skin of glass.
Is he stronger for it? Weaker?
"It's been a long time," he says, and he reaches his right arm across his chest to his lower left, where the light hairs of his body have been replaced with blooming flowers. He rips a rose from his body, and lays it across the grave. "Armstrong was talking about you last night, you know? I can't believe you went drinking with her and left me out of it!"
He wonders what she would say to him if she were still alive.
"I don't care if I was a child, I was centuries old. That is well old enough to drink copious amounts of booze," he says to the open air. "Isn't it?"
She doesn't respond.
"I know you're not really here," he admits. "And for that, I'm sorry. Ever since you began to love me, I think I've been too inhuman to know what I want to do, and too human to act on it. Or maybe that's just the human condition? There are still a lot of things I don't understand."
He sits down in front of his mama's grave, and then lies back to close his eyes. "Can you believe that I'm still older than you?"
At the other end of the graveyard, someone steps on a dandelion.
"I can't believe it either," he says, and then he laughs, because he is still a little shit, even when it hurts him. "Happy birthday, mama."