Disclaimer: I don't own FMA!
A/N: Another drabble taken from my Alphonse RP account. Here you go!
In the quiet of the night when the rest of the world lays motionless—that's when it happens. When not even the crickets will talk to you, and you can look up at the moon all you want, but it never answers. Believe me, I've tried. That's when it happens—that's when I realize what it really means, to be hollow. Empty.
Instead, the moon seemed to talk to you, brother. Take an interest in you. But the moon and I, we are not on speaking terms; we are not on sleeping terms. And there you are, some feet away from me, your damp hair strewn across the pillow in golden waves of thread. It shone through the window, casting sparkles across your hair and skin. It lit up your face, revealing gently shut eyelids, with two pairs of still butterfly wings. It illuminated your body against the darkness, your chest heaving in and out like the ocean's tide lapping at the shore. It enveloped you in its blue-white glow as though it had chosen you special.
And me, well, it slid across my metal, slick and cold. Calculated, like science. There was nothing more to it—a ricochet of light, a reflection at best. There was nothing in that. Part of me wanted to reach out and take it from you. But I knew better than that. It wasn't mine to take; it was bestowed upon you, not me. It caressed very inch of you, even permeating through your thin sheets. Like an old friend, it visited you every night. It knew you. It welcomed you.
And I was a stranger.
I was just like the wooden chair I sat on, like the floor beneath me, like the burnt out candle on the nightstand. I saw the light shining on all of them every night, but they were empty like me. I wanted butterflies. Oceans. Sparkles. It's so funny how once you lose something, it becomes beautiful.
Most of all, I'm jealous of your shut eyes, your limp body and its unmoving folded skin, your slowed heartbeat. Night after night, I lay awake with these stabbing thoughts. They could never kill me, no, but they could weaken me to a pathetic stagger as I grope through the darkness, desperately reaching for something tangible to sink my nails into. I yearned for that nothingness that you knew; always, these thoughts, whispering to me, so many they all blended together into tongues I didn't know. They hissed and cackled, sometimes they wept, and sometimes they would share a laugh with me, but mostly I felt empty.
There was a difference between the emptiness I endured and the nothingness that you fell into. Emptiness is hollowness, is a shell, a skin without the snake. When you're empty, you're still there. You're incomplete. You're the remains of what once used to be, or you're designed to be filled. Maybe I was like a cookie jar in the kitchen of a house without a baker. Maybe that was it. But I wasn't nothing. Nothing was your butterfly eyelashes and ocean chest, your gentle breath and your sparkle hair, your glistening skin and your twitching nose.
Moon, can I please have some too? Can I please get some sleep?