This is my third-wave fic for the FMA Fandom Challenge! Inspired by the fantastic artwork of Nerieners.
Great thanks to both avaritiabonaest/afgunst and sparklekinkz for betaing this story!
TW for the story as a whole: physical and emotional abuse, miscarriage/child death.
TW for this chapter: blood, miscarriage/child death.
PROLOGOS
At first, she thinks she's seeing things when the blood starts pouring down her legs. Surely there's some mistake, she thinks, because this isn't how it was supposed to go, and then the floor slips out from underneath her, faces of her customers blurring and disappearing.
Arms catch her, strong and sinewy. Of course Sig caught her. He's been there every time she's fallen. This isn't the way this story goes. The blackness rises and swallows her, but she can still feel herself drifting in the dark, the small little heartbeat in her stomach beating, beating and fading away.
Come back, she cries out. Come back.
The little boy in front of her looks so much like her it makes her heart want to rip itself apart. I know what you are, she thinks of shouting. She could throw something at him. She could tell him to go back to where he came from.
The moment he begins to cry, all those thoughts disappear. He's only scared, she realizes, and even though she knows it's all her fault, that she can only make things worse, her feet take her forward anyway. She pushes Edward aside, and the little boy clings to her like he's drowning.
She doesn't know what to do. She never got to have a child. Is this what they do? Is this how they look at you – like goddesses?
"It's okay, little one," she whispers. "I'll take care of you."
It's not the waking after her miscarriage she remembers first, but the rough hands pulling her upwards and away from the transmutation circle etched in the soil, ruined now by the rain. "The Master was right," growls the voice, and Izumi can't help but wonder if she knows it. It almost sounds familiar – almost.
"Come on." She's too tired to open her eyes, but she lets the stranger slip her arms around his neck. She tries to rise from the ground – and the jagged, cruel pain in her stomach forces her back to the earth. She coughs, horribly, sickly, and her mouth is filled with coppery-tasting blood.
"You really fucked up, didn't you, lady?" He laughs, and Izumi wants to hit him, hurt him, for laughing at her pain. But the urge disappears when instead of dragging her up to her feet again, the stranger kneels and takes her into his arms, one under her legs, one supporting her back. "Idiot," he whispers, but there's a sadness to it.
Izumi doesn't quite pass out again. Every time she closes her eyes, the Gate looms in front of her. So instead, she fixes her eyes on the stranger's smooth black clothing and the green tendrils falling down over his shoulder, and tries not to think about what price she paid.