Written for ask-an-earwig as a giftfic for a 150-follower giveaway on Tumblr!
2003-verse, set near the end, so pretty major spoilers obviously.
TW for character death, food, war, unreality, and fire.
SANCTUARY
It's a very strange sensation, sharing your mind with somebody else. Not a particularly welcome one. After all, this is your sanctuary, more than any building or brick structure could ever be in this time of fire and rage. All the places you've slept and stayed have fallen, but your mind – that should have been safe.
He's confused, almost more than you. At least you know where you are. It's London, and you try to give him this name, even as he jostles your consciousness around, pushes you away in an attempt to settle himself into a body that isn't his – but the word doesn't evoke anything but more mindless panic. You can feel him raise his (your) hands, tearing at your hair and your clothes, everything but your face.
Stop it, you try to say, fighting to say something, anything – but you've never fought anybody before, and he's stronger than you, the stranger who's fallen on you from above and taken over everything you are in the space of two breaths.
Your name is Edward Erwick, and you have never left this country. This is your home, the paved, twisting alleys and the high towers and the drizzle of spring rain on sparse, stubborn grass – not even the acrid smell of burning bodies and the taste of ash in the back of your throat as you wait to be old enough to enlist can make you stop loving it.
(You can't stand the sound, though. It makes you wonder how on earth you're supposed to do the right thing, the expected thing, when the whistling of the bombs coming down makes you want to cry.)
You had a headache last night, you remember all of a sudden. Is that when this new man slid into your skin and took it over?
You're following your father down the road, that abominable whistling following you. The explosions start fractions of seconds afterwards, but it's the sound of their descent that you dream about. (You never remember them when you wake up. For a moment, you wonder if you'll forget this when you wake up, too.)
Your mouth opens, and he -
(thiefthiefthief)
asks what's going on. You almost laugh, not that you could anyway with your lips on invisible strings with someone whose face you've never seen pulling it this way and that. You could tell him. If he'd let you.
You're not even sure if he knows you're here. He's not comfortable in this skin, although you have to admit it's not like it feels all that different when you're wearing it. How can somebody not know about the war? The anger comes unexpectedly – the war has taken everything from you, not all at once but in fits and starts, a collapsed house here, the names of friends on casualty lists there.
You can hear your father talking (and part of you is starting to wonder about him; he's your father he's your father he has to be but when he talks about your mother it's like he's talking about someone else completely -) but it's like it's coming from underwater. You can feel your captor nod, then tense up -
you hate him so much what right does he fuckin' have after all this time ALL THIS TIME
and these thoughts are not your own.
Your name is Edward Erwick. There is a tree somewhere with your initials and Whitney's carved onto it (you promised to marry each other once - she forgot, you remembered but didn't mourn the idea); there is a building in Covent Garden with 'WHITNEY WAS HERE' crudely scratched into it. You tried to stop her but her arms were big even then and she laughed in your face.
Your mother's name is Patty and she is a master of the art of smiling to hide her sadness. You buy her lilies.
(Patty got into the gin once, and started crying; something about a boy she'd never seen grow up. Edward thinks he might know what she means, but he doesn't mourn that idea either; he's been quite happy as a single child.)
(That isn't quite right. You do feel a sense of loss, and you resent her sometimes for never even telling you his name, but those are emotions unsuited to Patty's little man. Whitney can cry over her parents all she wants. You're stronger.)
Another underwater, distant argument that you're an unwitting third participant in. You can almost pick out the details now but they don't make any sense to you. Instead, you string the disconnected words onto a thread of your own design, try to arrange it in a way that makes it magic, tries to unlock the secret to taking back your body.
You've never thought about it like this before. Your body – your arms, your legs, your beating heart, your eyes that you only remember are unusual when you catch sight of a mirror. It's yours.
You don't know if you'll ever feel quite the same way again. The stranger is desecrating your home (not anything as simple as four walls, or even a city you could find on a map) just by being here. There's nothing you can do, and you're certainly trying. Helplessness isn't a new feeling for you, but this is the most keenly it's ever bitten.
His name is Edward Elric. Echoes, useless echoes, alien echoes bouncing off of walls that aren't supposed to be there – He is from somewhere far away. He stepped across a threshold and through the gate.
What gate?
These aren't your thoughts.
His mother is Trisha and he misses her every day. He thought the laws of nature could be his plaything. He hurts other people but he never means to. He's only doing what's right.
You flinch away from the wisps of thought thrown in your direction. You don't want to know him – you just want him gone -
edward elric edward elric edward elric
- and you want to feel safe again. You were sleeping. You were sleeping in your own bed in your own home and now there is no such thing as shelter. For the first time, you imagine what it'll be like if this is it.
His name is Edward Elric and he made his mother lilies.
He follows Hohenheim out of the city, still trying to shake off the wrongness of this all. This isn't Amestris, or anything close to it. Those ships high in the sky – it makes him shudder to imagine what the military would do with those. They cause enough damage on the ground.
(He wonders briefly what happened to Mustang, whether he had succeeded or failed; he renews his promise to himself to be a little kinder to him when they meet again. Now that he's seen his father again, it's all that much clearer who he really wants in his life.)
Then they're standing on the grassy knoll, and Edward suddenly can't breathe. The city is burning.
"Why aren't you stopping it?" he asks, fingers (flesh) curling into (warm) hands and tightening until he can feel blood rising to the surface of both of them.
There's a hiss of pain, and it doesn't belong to him. It doesn't sound like Hohenheim's heard it either.
-your name is Edward Erwick -
You're beating your hands bloody on the walls of your own head, screaming and trying to make it stop. GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT
He has a brother and his name is Alphonse and he needs to get back -
You don't have a brother you've never had a brother -
And Trisha used to smile and call him her little man -
"That's not yours! That's mine! Give it back!"
He's too busy fighting with your father, except that man isn't your father either, and you want to cry with the hopelessness of it all – is everybody like this? Trapped in their own head by their own mirror selves? You wonder, swallowing down the panic over and over and hoping it'll stay down, if Whitney is alright. You haven't spoken to her in a few weeks – you've both been busy with the war effort, and you already know she wants you to sign up.
Hohenheim drives away, and Ed's headache is getting worse and worse. He thinks it's probably just backlash from the Gate, but that's scary enough on its own – or maybe it's just having to hear his father apologize, having to think about whether he hates him or not -
get out get out get out -
He claps his hands over his ears, and it begins to really hit him – now that they're away from the crash and confusion of the war-torn city – that these are not his hands. Which means -
"Who are you?" he whispers, and he only gets a scream in response. "I'm sorry! I don't know how to -"
I DON'T CARE!
He's talking to you now, but that only rubs in the hopelessness of your situation more – if he can't give you back control of your body, you'll bloody well take it, won't you? There's a sort of grim pride to that. Whitney might call you a coward but you won't give up because this is yours, this is your mind and your memories and your identity. You don't care about anything else, not now.
Your name is Edward Erwick and you can't remember the first time you had your mother's beef stew, but you can remember the last. You've only had an orange once, and you shared it with Whitney, and it spread across your lips like a sweet bee-sting. You take your tea black and bitter and strong, and you hold it in your hands until they burn.
But you can already feel it all slipping away.
"Listen, I can help you, I just – I need you to talk to me, okay?" He feels so stupid, talking to thin air, but he doesn't know how else to communicate to the person whose body, he realizes, he must have taken over. Damn Dante, and damn the Gate. This wasn't what he wanted.
Another spasm of pain racks him – it's like he's splitting apart from the inside, like the person inside is crawling their way out of him like a snake from its skin. "Aargh! Stop it!"
His name is Edward Elric and he doesn't want to be here, all he wants is to go home and tell Winry he's sorry and that he didn't mean to break it and that he's gonna fix everything -
-i'll fix EVERYTHING I PROMISE -
After your mother's funeral, you stay in the church a long time. It's not like you have a choice. Your home is gone. Where else do you have to hide? You're not the first person to claim this church as sanctuary.
The sun sets in the striations of the stained glass. The church turns blue, then yellow, then red like fire and blood and sadness – you don't trust all those people who tell you that grief and loss are blue or white or purple. It's red, bloody fucking red, and you can't get it off you.
It's hours before somebody comes to sit next to you, but it's Whitney. You almost ask what took her so long, but she knew. She always knows.
You almost ask her to marry you. You don't – you know she'll say no, or even worse, she'll say yes – but it's on your lips.
"I can't fix this. I don't know what to do -" You find your lips quivering instead, and then, despite knowing how much she'll hate you, despite knowing you're better than this, despite knowing that your childhood is over or perhaps because of it, you find yourself crying, then sobbing, leaning your head into the pew and almost biting through your lip trying to make yourself stop.
Whitney stays with you the entire time, and she doesn't call you a coward once, even though you're thinking it over and over and over again. Coward. Coward. Coward.
It takes both of you a while to open your eyes when the fire begins.
Just like home, and one of you is afraid and one of you is just sad, but either way there's nowhere to go home to anymore.
-my name is edward and my mother likes lilies and I never went to her grave -
-i hope my brother doesn't hate me-
Someone once told you you wouldn't feel anything, and you almost hope you'll survive just so you can tell them they were wrong, you can feel your chest caving in and the flames scorching the flesh on your face and arms and legs and stomach, every piece of you that there is left -
-equivalent exchange-
-you went to covent garden once-
-you clasp your hands together in prayer, and you beg for sanctuary.