A/N: Hmm... this is just something that I put out on a lark... so I don't really feel like it's all that good. But whatever.

This was supposed to be a Scar x Lust drabble... but somehow it got a lot longer, and kind of turned into Scar with a little bit of Lust. But anyhoo... this was something I came up with after realizing that for a self-proclaimed religious fanatic, Scar is...weirdly understanding. And so, without further ado but with a lovely disclaimer...

Disclaimer: If FMA belonged to me, I would be able to come up with something much more clever and insightful for a disclaimer.

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As a boy, he had dreamed of slaying monsters.

Admittedly, it was hardly an uncommon dream, especially among boys his age. But as everybody; his parents, his friends, the townspeople in general; began to notice, he trusted in it more than most. He believed.

What a peculiar child. As soon as he was deemed by his parents to be old enough to venture out that far on his own, he would go and sit in the desert, all alone, for hours, simply staring up at the sky. The sky over Ishbal was high and clear and palely intense; like polished blue eggshell. The sand was gritty and mica-sparkling, twisted into long, serpentine dunes. Here, everything was clear. Everything was sky or sand, heaven or earth, black or white.

If anyone had stopped to think about it for very long, perhaps they would have considered that in the desert, he found a metaphor for himself. For he too was a child of sharp lines, lacking all knowledge of ( or interest in ) shades of gray. Of course, this went mostly unnoticed, seeing as it is quite a common phenomenon in children, and not something to be overly concerned about. Besides, concern was hardly the emotion it generated even when it was noticed, for he was certainly not alone in his black-and-whiteness. The world was a strange, dangerous place, full of opportunities for corruption, and surely the only certain way to avoid complete and utter perdition was to make sure that firm boundaries were set, and that rules were followed exactingly.

Of course, no matter how much one believes in it, the world will never be comprised of solely black and white, and one ignores shades of gray at the cost of losing sight of them all together.

Naturally, the first sin was a small one, and one that he himself neither noticed nor admitted to. But, it was still there. And, if anyone had asked him at the time, he himself would have answered ( probably with a touch of shock that you even had to ask ) that covetousness, especially of a person, was most certainly wrong. And yes, if he had ever bothered to think about it, that was still true even when applied to his brother's abnormally beautiful fiancee.

Still, if being more than a little in love with her was wrong, it was only less than a little wrong, anyway. Besides, he reasoned, it was inevitable that anyone who really spent any time with her would feel affectionate, to say the least. Aside from being drop-dead gorgeous, she was also smart, and humble, and kind, and... ... ... ... ...the list went on and on. But the general idea was that she was, if unusually glamourous, a good girl. And all jealousy aside, her marriage to his brother was definitely something to be approved of.

And then, everything changed.

Perhaps covetousness was a small sin, something that he could easily pretend didn't happen. But what his brother did wasn't small, and couldn't just be washed away.

Sure, she had been a good person. Sure, the world might have been a better place if she had lived.

But, she didn't.

But, she was dead. And she was meant to have stayed that way.

How could his own brother, the one he thought he knew so well, even dream of using such a wicked and forbidden science as alchemy to do something that even the alchemists in Amestris considered immoral?

It was unthinkable. Impossible, even.

But that didn't stop it from being true.

And so, he was forced to...adjust his values a little. It wasn't that brother was evil, or bad, or wrong. It wasn't. Not my brother. He was just confused. And sad. Perhaps it was all her fault, for having to go off and die, anyway.

And for a while, that was okay, and through everything that happened, at least he was sure of where he stood.

But then...there was her.

He had always assumed that this transmutation, this...thing that his brother had done was too crazy to ever really work. But if it was true, if something like that really was viable ( but still completely unthinkable and horrible in every way ), then why was she like...that?

In a way, it was all pretty ironic. He had poured so much time and energy into the selective killing of State Alchemists, in the understanding that the monsters that had filled his thoughts all through his childhood didn't really exist. And then, she had showed up. And surely she was a real monster, the type that would have given his younger self nightmares for a week.

Monster, murderess, dead woman walking. Crazy, evil creature that simpered and wore her face, but who wasn't really her.

And what sort of name was Lust, anyway? Where he came from, there was a strict code of conduct for women, which generally excluded running through the streets murdering people in a state that he could only think of half-dressed, and which she ignored shamelessly ( and how did that...dress manage to stay up? He could hardly call himself an expert on the subject, but it did seem to defy all laws of gravity ).

In a way, she did everything he could possibly think of wrong. It seemed he had finally found his story-book monster. Too bad he had no actual way to slay her. It had rapidly become quite obvious that he couldn't hurt her even if he tried.

And, soon it started to be even more obvious that, even if he could find a way, he didn't really want to.

By all rights, he knows he should hate her. Fear her, in fact. She breaks every single rule that he has always followed so carefully. She knows full well that she herself is an abomination, and she revels in it. She laughs. She takes everything he has ever cared about, everything he has ever believed in, and shreds it to pieces before his very eyes.

And for this, he cannot help but love her.

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A/N: Grr! Why can't the both of them just have proper names like normal people? I never want to see another third person singular pronoun as long as I live.

But mehh... R+R, my pretties!