Ed jerked upright, choking on the scream and the wail and the hint of copper leaking up from his throat and knowing, somehow, knowing, as his heart beat fractures through his ribs and his limbs seared numb and his lungs were frozen, shattered, useless and nononononono –
He tumbled, threw, wrenched himself out of bed, deep asleep and far too conscious, and scrabbled at the blanket with hands he couldn't feel, couldn't stop shaking and wrapped it close around his son, his son. Every shift of air was blistered ice on his skin and he knew, he knew, like the sun rose and fell every day no matter which world he was in and nonono.
There was just enough time to pull Mathieu to his chest, to curl himself around the smaller body before the air keened, bellowed, shrieked, burst apart and tried to catch onto him with desperate, hungry claws and his whole body begged pleasepleaseplease not again not again, but all that mattered was in his arms and his own pathetic whimpering was lost in the snarl of don't you dare, I've already paid my price, don't you fucking touch –
White on white on black and he bared his teeth, clung tighter to his son as the doors opened, as the tarred hands reached for them.
A baby boy was born. It had been a long, hard labour, and the child had to be removed with forceps in the end, but finally came into the world healthy, breathing, perfect. Ten fingers and ten toes and so, so tiny, its red face twisted into a pinched expression of displeasure and the most beautiful thing they'd ever seen. And then a baby girl was born, and it seemed impossible that they could have made two things so perfect, that the world could produce two such amazing miracles and not pause at all.
Their eyes fixed on him, hungry and longing, and They giggled, drooled, grinned feral smiles and slithered amongst themselves, a rotted mass of black on black like his mother's organs pumping on the outside.
The boy was a difficult child. He cried constantly as an infant and woke screaming every night from his third year. His moods shifted abruptly and with no warning, seeing him clingy and affectionate in one moment and uncontrollably savage the next. Any discipline was met with screeched obscenities, wild eyes and hysterical struggling. His sister was the only one who could calm him, even in the deepest reaches of his fury. She would throw her arms around his neck and whisper words in his ear no one else could hear and slowly, slowly, he would slump in her hold, collapse into her embrace, heave wretched sobs into her shoulder, chest, lap.
His body called to Them, seductive wails of scent from his pores and vulnerable shivers along the curve of his naked spine and the erotic beat of his heart as it throbbed frantic and alive inside his flesh, again and again and again.
At fourteen, the boy's mood swings stopped. No curse left his lips, no affection leaked into his expression. If spoken to, he was as inclined to simply stare at the speaker as to answer, his voice a soft, flat monotone. He concentrated on his schoolwork, got perfect grades, met the jeers and the blows with impassive acceptance. He no longer abided his sister's touch.
They waited and watched, waited and watched, Their gaze crawling over his skin like slick spiders and they waited, watched, waited, let the air and the distance and the strength grow thin, waver, shiver with his own tremors and choke with his own rising nausea and They watched, watched, watched, saw inside his skin and his muscle and his bone, waited.
Near the end of his sixteenth year, the boy raped his sister.
They were hungry, starved, hollow; They ached with the need to fill the clawing void for even a moment, for barely a second of thrice-recycled, dirty air that tasted fresh and young and alive –
A baby boy was born.
The pain struck him before he saw Them move, slammed into him and over him and through him, squeezed and sucked and stroked over his skin, caressed his body in long, bloody furrows and licked with caustic saliva and breathed frozen air that seared his flesh to black.
The young man found his son, his nephew, held to his sister's chest, naked and bloody and tiny. Evidence of the birth washed the floor, clung to his sister's bared legs and soaked into his sister's pale dress. They were like a sculpture, the virgin holding the blessed child, too perfect to be truly lifelike. Soft, chestnut hair fanned out behind the mother in a classical halo, trailing with innocent seduction in the essence of her own life. Flawless, delicate features carved into marble with unnatural beauty, quietly closed eyes, slightly parted lips to give the illusion of breath. The gentle curve of breast, small and high with innocence but the hint of definition at the peak, the suggestion of something obscene and carnal. Waist, hips, legs, captured to some artist's ideal, long, rolling planes of flesh that looked soft even in stone. And the skillful folds of material, pooled around the mother's hips in a way that couldn't quite conceal her, in a way that tempted, suggested, courted but never satisfied, painted with crimson shadows. Perfect.
They came on his breath, rattled thick splinters inside his lungs until each inhalation was edged with a slow, rasping scrape and each exhalation bubbled up wet and sour and dribbled red from his lips –
The man, who was once a tiny child, believed in sin, had understood it since before he could speak his first pleading words. He never confessed his own transgressions, because he knew from the apologies and the accusations and the sobs muffled with his skin year after year that words alone did not, could not lead to forgiveness. He knew that one is forever tied to their sins, chained and trapped and embraced by them, and that one with sins can never atone, can never transcend, can never reach heaven to see their sister and child again –
They crowded into his eyes, reduced his vision to spots of writhing shadow and he couldn't scream, couldn't beg, couldn't plead, couldn't.
– unless one has the power to reach the Gates by other means. Unless one has enough to offer to suggest an exchange. Unless one is desperate enough and determined enough and hopeful enough to risk paying the price. Unless unless unless.
His skin was stretching, pulling, splitting apart and then they were inside him, squirming and writhing and burrowing deeper, deeper, penetrating further than his body, than his mind, than his whole being.
He took the first woman in the winter, on the day that marked his son-nephew's birthday. She struggled and screamed and begged for the first few days, until he managed to design an array that would sedate her without taking away her awareness. The next week, he seduced a man with hair streaked grey to follow him, and set the array to the base of the man's neck while he was being rutted into the side of the woodshed. A young girl was next, grimy and distrustful but desperate enough for food and shelter that she offered himself in exchange. His first little boy was beautiful, barely two and reaching out to him as he lifted him out of the chair while the mother wasn't watching.
– nonono he wanted to struggle, to buck and twist and scream, but he couldn't, he couldn't, he was wrapped around Mathieu, Mathieu, Mathieu, if he moved an inch They'd see his son, They'd remember his son, They'd touch his son –
A life for every week his sister had been dying and he didn't know, for every week his child had lived without breathing air, for every week his sister hated him. Thirty-six bodies, lives, souls, laid into the curling lines of his array like a bouquet, cut and arranged and beautiful. A gift, an offering, a sacrifice. Not all virgins, maybe, not all pure, not all honest or good, but they were perfect, imperfect, perfect. Open eyed and silent, they sung wordless, breathless melodies and shone with dim, intimate light that shivered from beneath their skin. Their hearts pressed energy through their leaking veins, pulsed a base of anticipation and need and power over the air, suggested and teased and promised with its aching beat. Men, women, teens, boys, girls and the heady wrench of alchemy in a stale basement.
He had no body, no protection, sat naked and skinned and shredded as every shift of Their awareness raked over him like glowing needles. Everything that he was or had been or might be and had ever wanted or thought or feared was touched, licked, swallowed and regurgitated back onto his being. He was everything and nothing, he was precious and worthless, he was delicious and foul –
"Sister?"
A presence that was once a man that was once a boy and Ed couldn't do any more than shudder and hunch closer to his son as he felt the cold and the sick wash over him, press into him, slide into his veins as easy as a glance.
"Sister?"
The hands retreated and Their eyes turned away from him but it didn't matter, Ed was nothing and everything and They moved within him as They drifted away, cautious and curious and still desperate like starving children.
"Si–sister?"
The scream rippled over him, scrabbled up his own throat, squeezed blood from his ears before it touched the flat non-air. It was preceded by whimpers and frightened stutters and a single choked off, "Sist–" that echoed like, "Broth–" and then the nothing white shattered, exploded, sparked shards of broken metal into shrieking whirlwinds. He couldn't move, couldn't see, couldn't speak, could only feelhearsee the hands reach for the man, reach into him and through him and surround him and consume him.
Man and man and man and he has never understood his own desires, much less the cost of them. He spews equivalent exchange and it is a hollow mantra, a clumsy grasping at a Truth he is both too arrogant and too simple to realise has always been beyond him. In his ignorance, he can neither make the correct request nor offer the correct equivalent, and thus has no choice but to sacrifice the decision to that which can understand the trade, to agree to whatever is demanded against whatever is given.
The darkness ate across his skin, stained him with heavy tar and bottomless holes and forgotten shadows.
Equivalent trade. Balance. For a creature that can only conceive of time in the linear, can only consider an event or action or object in respect to itself, the impossibility of their understanding, their fundamental inadequacy is as inherent to their nature as their denial of it.
He bent beneath Their weight with the crack of breaking bone and his scream tightened, convulsed, split open to reveal a jumping inside that bubbled thick and harsh and wet and left long streaks of nothing on its descent. His body crumbled, disintegrated, dissolved, was absorbed with frantic hunger and torturous care and replaced with handfuls of pitch that were poured, slid, thrust into him to replace the parts They had taken, were taking, would take.
A body, a soul, an existence to balance the pursual of a wordless, incomprehensible desire. Energy and life and humanity to replace the first he had taken. Everything to nothing and full to empty and self to puppet in exchange for every breath taken, every twist of loss, every life altered for even a moment during the continuing, limitless ever.
And the new black child stood, naked and formless and staring from new white eyes that were born hungry. Not a God, not a spirit, not a man, but an excretion of all three, as important and insignificant as a single drop of rain.
Every shift of balance, every breath of power and defeat and knowledge flowed and flows through himItThem, vessel and vessels that recall a desire they couldn't reach and can't possess, even now it strokes through himItThem. HeItThey fill with what is blindly, arrogantly, inevitably offered, feel and hear and smell it as it tortures himItThem with an eternal want that will never be satisfied. And then it is simultaneously, continuously, effortlessly siphoned away to one and ones who can still touch it, hold it, taste it, can still request and offer and choose.
It looked and looked and trailed Its intense, tormented, scraping attention over every inch of him, already forgetting him as once-similar to Itself. Every deep rip of Its regard was followed by the fluttering tear of countless lifeless eyes. They were shadows and reflections and memories, tangible and not, separate and not, harmless and not. He could hear Them, echoes of silence in hollow bodies and the fervent passing of his pain and his emotion and his life from one to another like shared breath and momentary, faded ecstasy.
A baby boy was born.
The whisper-not-whisper slid through him like all the rest, clung to his insides with slick blades and serrated tongues and – his whole being jerked with a fierce, desperate, fractured no.
Four years and thousands of lives irrevocably changed, affected, redirected –
He never would have agreed if he'd known, if he'd. If. He wouldn't have, he – no – he, he wouldn't, but. His brother, how could, no –
Three homunculi –
No, no, no, he hadn't known, he'd just wanted his brother to be alright, he wouldn't have, he just. Just. He'd promised. He'd promised –
A valued soul, a sacrifice, a philosopher's stone –
– nonononono –
Five years of influence and –
– nonono, please, anything else, everything, please, don't, don't, please, no –
– a life born from two worlds.
No –
– and the sharp white flared. Pure and harsh and everything and nothing like alchemy, it seared up through him like endless, fathomless, exquisite fire and filled him, filled him, burst outward, scattered any trace of form or place or being. It surged brighter, sharper, hotter, engulfed him in every agony he'd ever known or could have known, every agony he'd caused or could have caused. Everything was shaking, convulsing, retching from his insides out and his outsides in and all he could do was curl tighter around his son, pull the boy closer to whatever tatters were left of his self and pant harsh breaths into his hair and hope and plead and beg that he not wake up, that he not feel this, that he never know –
– nothing.
It, everything, the world stopped, jerked him back and away so abruptly that he didn't exist for a moment, nothing and no one and nowhere and nothing.
And then his body shivered.
The ragged breath took him by surprise, very real air into very real lungs, and he almost hacked it back out again. Would have, if he hadn't been frantically drawing another.
Everything was raw and numb and too sensitive but there was a chill slowly creeping through the thin pants he wore and it was real. It slowly trickled up his nerves, washed a wave of prickling goosebumps along his skin and the sensation rolled through him, crisp and sharp like melted snow. The concrete floor was hard beneath him but smooth against the bare soles of his feet. Light cotton rested like a soft breath over his legs and it was like the shock of getting new limbs all over again. A jerking tremor chased up his spine and he welcomed it, relished it, savoured the simple, untainted, tangible rush of feeling.
His heart was beating in irregular fits inside his chest and his skin felt like it was fidgeting uncomfortably on his frame until slowly, slowly, the lingering sensations began to fade. They melted outward from his bones, pooled slickly on his skin, flicked away from his skin in bursts of smooth droplets as his body shook with tight, rattling shivers. The only point of stillness was the solid warmth tucked against his chest and –
and –
– he couldn't feel the shift of Mathieu's breaths from within the blanket.
"Hey, Dragon?" He couldn't feel Mathieu's breaths – "You alright?"
Nothing.
... nothing.
No –
But the silence around them stretched, stretched, stretched, grew longer and wider and darker and thrummed with nothing at all. It stole a little piece of Ed's breath, Ed's mind, Ed's soul with every second and minute and year that passed. He tried to hold his panic tight in his gut, to swallow his own breath and his own pulse just so he could hear even the hint of another. This couldn't be happening, this wasn't happening, he'd give anything, everything, pleasepleaseplease –
"M'sleepin'." For a moment, Ed's heart stopped completely.
"Alright." The word came out choked, strangled, scraped its way up his throat, more painful than a scream. "Alright, sleep, Dragon."
He breathed in the warm scent of his son and it burst sharp in his chest, lodged bright shrapnel in his spine and settled with itching pricks behind his eyes. His mouth wouldn't quite settle on his face and he didn't know how this could ever be equivalent, how any price given over any number of worlds could ever equal his son, alive and ignorant and completely unguarded in his arms. He didn't understand – couldn't whispered through his insides – but it didn't matter, couldn't matter, just as long as it was so.
"Edward."
The sound cut through the air around him – not a murmur, not a touch, not an unrelenting press of knowledge sliding into him – and his head had snapped around before he'd so much as registered the word. He stared, eyes wide and heart speeding with startled adrenaline before he recognised dark hair and pale skin and Mustang and his whole body stuttered with relief. Why the man was staring at him like he was the one scaring the shit out of –
Mustang. Mustang.
"Edward."
Mustang meant military, Mustang meant alchemy, Mustang meant home, oh fuck, Mustang –
He replied, maybe, and then the man was helping him to his feet and Ed couldn't stop staring. Home, home, home, he was home. Same hair, same face, same flint-dark eyes even though one was hidden by an unfamiliar patch. Not military, apparently, but still with that calm assurance of command, still that unquestioning trust from his people. Mustang, home, Mustang, he was the best thing Ed had seen in five years, Mustang, home – Al.
"Fine." Ed had survived an arm right through his chest but he wasn't sure how much strain his heart could take, it was already jerking and gasping against the tears in his chest. "Healthy and well adjusted and far more polite than you."
Al was fine, Mathieu was fine, Mustang was making cheap shots at him and everything he thought he'd known as surely as his own name had stopped making any kind of sense, but he couldn't care. He was here, he was here, and the rest simply didn't matter.
"Good." Nothing in his life had hurt as much as each breath he drew into his lungs right then and it was the best feeling in the world. "Good."
A car, a seat, a drive, and Ed couldn't have recalled a single thing they passed, even though his whole body was sparking with a heightened awareness that shivered over him like hot ice. Everything was cleaner, fresher, brighter, colour and scent and sound saturated with so much that his breath kept trying to catch in his throat. A weight was dispelled from his chest on a sigh, a hazy shadow dissolved from before his eyes, thick smog unplugged from his ears and everything he'd never noticed before was rich, and deep, and beautiful.
Mustang was breathing not two feet from his shoulder, clear and steady and strong, and the sound eased comfort through him in a way he hadn't felt since he'd known with unwavering certainty that his mother would make everything alright. Mathieu's chest rose and fell against his own, soft and easy and alive and innocently, unknowingly, irrevocably making the world more than the world. And Ed's own breaths still weren't quite regular, weren't quite rid of the uneven shudder that threaded through each one, but he felt awake, alive, sane, for the first time since he was sixteen. He wanted to laugh, cry, run, rock himself into a gibbering oblivion. He wanted to scream his lungs raw and torn and bloody, just so this jittery ache would give up the clawing scrabble at his bones.
But Mathieu was curled up silently against him, and the boy needed his sleep more.
So Ed let the hysteria wander through him, ignored the slight twitch of a hand or a leg or the occasional quavering of his mouth and the itching behind his eyes and felt it gradually, eventually begin to fade. The small tremors that had been scampering up and down his spine slowly eased, the tightness of his muscles eventually surrendered to the steady motion of the car, his jumbled thoughts drained from a frantic tangle to the hushed murmur of... something that felt like peace, maybe. He knew Mustang would have questions, he knew he would have questions, when he remembered why it was important to stretch his mind far enough to come up with them, but the man still seemed to have some innate ability to read Ed, and kept the silence between them like a tiny, delicate sea cradled between his palms.
"Edward."
Ed blinked, opened his eyes from where they'd closed and thought maybe he should have been surprised, or embarrassed, or something, if he could have summoned the inclination to do anything at all. As it was, it took him a moment of staring up at the man to realise that they'd stopped. And Mustang was standing by the open passenger door, waiting for him with a slight smile that had nothing mocking or teasing behind it at all.
Ed wondered if he should be finding that strange, but the expression sent a tickle of warmth through him and he found his lips twitching tiredly in reply instead.
"Yeah."
Mustang grasped him by the forearm and helped haul his boneless arse out of the car, adjusted his grip to steady Ed against him as the ground rolled slightly beneath his feet.
"Alright?" the word was a low vibration in the man's chest and Ed felt it roll into him with the seductive assurance that this was real, now.
"Hm." A soft breath puffed over his ear and Ed blinked his eyes open again, tried to pull himself into some sort of wakefulness.
"Come on, you can fall asleep once you're inside." Mustang's voice held barely any inflection at all, but it was clear that he thought Ed would have already passed out into a happy doze on the pavement without the arm about his waist. And was imagining it with great amusement, the bastard. If Ed hadn't been using most of his energy to take some of his own weight, he would have been tempted to hit the man.
Unfortunately, his sigh resembled a breath of thanks more than an indignant huff.
"Okay."
That subtle shift of air brushed over his hair this time, and the warmth from his spine eased out into his stomach, lapped upward into his chest
They made their way up the small path that cut between two halves of a neat lawn. Their footsteps were hushed by the soft, pre-dawn dark, but each breath was captured, treasured, drawn into a rhythmic symphony of life, and relief, and exhaustion.
He'd never seen Mustang's home before, and most likely wouldn't have given the unassuming two-storey house a second glance had he been walking past. But there was something, stepping over the threshold into an entryway with neutrally coloured walls, that felt more familiar than anything he'd encountered on the other side of the Gate. There was no blue uniform, no arrays, no automail, no hint of a single thing that differed from any house he had entered in the last five years.
Except that was Mustang steadying him up a perfectly unremarkable staircase, that was Mustang accepting his return with that implacable calm, and that was Mustang, smelling like rain on hot stone and just – him, a scent that filled every room with his presence and his breath and his life and left no question as to where they were, because Ed had never had a dream where the man smelled like home.
"Here." Mustang said as he pushed a door open, leading them inside without bothering to flick on the light. He left them by the bed to pull some clothes out of the dresser, and Ed blinked at the abrupt loss of warmth against his side. "I've been using the spare room for storage, so you can use mine."
"It's your bed." That felt incredibly important, though the reason eluded him. Mustang quirked an eyebrow at him as he turned and that smile crept onto his face again, whispered all the way up to his eyes.
"And I'm offering you the use of it." He put a hand on Ed's shoulder as he passed, gave him a light push toward the bed with a dark eye that reflected the fading moonlight in shimmers of soft amusement. "Sleep well, Edward."
"...Thanks." A slight nod of acknowledgement, and then the click of a door closing, the hush oftwo bodies sinking into a soft mattress. Ed draped an arm over his son, closed his eyes on a quivering sigh, and could finally, finally let sleep come.
He was home.