Story Title: Pieces of a Dream.
Chapter Title: The Other Side of Maybe.
Pairing(s): Edward Elric/Envy; nods to Roy Mustang/Alphonse Elric and Edward Elric/Alfons Heiderich; one-sided/platonic Russell Tringham/Edward Elric
Beta: No one, yet.
Rating: R, this chapter. R, overall (Uncensored version will be post at my LJ).
Genre: Angst, Romance.
Warnings: Post anime, more or less consistent with movie canon, violence, gore.
Feedback: Very welcome, please!
Word Count: +/- 2 165.
Summary: This is not what they need. This is not what they want. This is what they have, to build up something from ashes of their dreams.
Author's Notes: This is a gore-ish chapter. Disturbing images, so please proceed with caution. Also, yes Ed, Envy bites, did you forget? I'm trying to keep the chapters short to avoid pointless rambling, do tell me if you feel I'm rushing it, though.


Pieces of a Dream.

The Other Side of Maybe.

"Are you so scared to look within?
The ghosts are crawling on our skin.
We may race and we may run,
We'll not undo what has been done
Or change the moment when it's gone.
(…)
I know it would be outrageous
To come on all courageous
And offer you my hand,
To pull you up onto dry land
When all I've got is sinking sand.
The trick ain't worth the time it buys,
I'm sick of hearing my own lies
And Love's a raven when it flies."
-- David Gray, "The Other Side."

Later, much later, alone and nursing a fatal heartbreak, Ed would spend hours analyzing those first moments, the first instants in which Envy awoke and their eyes met. He thought, foolishly, that maybe he had done something wrong, that it was his own fault that things degenerated as they had. It was useless, of course, but in the torturous solicitude that caged him, Ed couldn't help himself, gathering his memories close and ignoring the world outside. The first time: those vibrant, inhuman eyes staring at him, the pain lingering in between gasped breaths, the translucent skin that glowed eerily in a sordid mockery of illness… Yes, Ed would remember everything from that day. Everything, forever.

He didn't wake slowly, tuning his senses back one by one. He didn't have a fuzzy recollection of the world before it slowly came back into focus. No, when Envy awoke, it was instantaneous, shocking and oh so painful. His eyes snapped open and a high pitched keen erupted from the very core of his being as the pain reset itself within. Quite simply, his body was breaking itself and nothing, nothing could compare to the feeling of molecules methodically stripping themselves away to ether.

"Envy!" Ed allowed the basin in his hands to fall and shatter in the wooden floor as he reached over for the convulsing homunculus.

Envy keened louder when Ed touched him: his skin was so cold it felt frozen, but he continued to sweat. Panicking – Ed had expected anything from cold fury to violent attempts to kill him; but he hadn't been prepared for the sheer agony that was apparently withering Envy away – the blond scrambled around to restrain the shaking limbs. Without anything else to help, Ed found himself laying flush over Envy, pressing him down with his weight and matching snarl with snarl as he tried to subdue the attack.

Then, it stopped, as abruptly as it had started, and Ed found himself face to face with a pair of very sober, very conscious violet eyes.

And then Envy turned to the side, heaving violently as he threw up, red water and red stones, all over the nice pine planks that made up the floor.

By the time Ed gathered his wits – and convinced his own stomach to stay put – Envy was out again.


The second time Envy awoke he still felt like something Gluttony had munched on then spat on the sidewalk, but the display wasn't nearly as dramatic as the one before. He was dizzy and pained, but he contained the wail with sheer will, not wanting to alert the other that he's awake. His mind was a tumble of images and sensations that just didn't fit each other and Envy had the sinking feeling he had done something unbearably stupid. He sat slowly, uncurling his spine despite the fact he felt it wobble as he did, and looked around the room with something that might have passed off as curiosity.

It froze up into something else all together, when he caught sight of Ed sprawled on a chair by the window.

The last thing Envy remembered clearly was the tall archway stretching before him before everything else blurred into sound and color and painso much pain – that carried his weary mind back to that instant, the precise moment when his stomach, or whatever passed off as his stomach, twisted and wrenched until some of the red stones were pushed out of his body. The cacophony of sensation made no sense at all, so Envy concentrated on what he knew, the basic principles that he could always find shelter on; killing Ed had always been one of those.

Except that his body was not precisely in the best condition and Envy suddenly found himself lying on the floor, his whole body acting like an inflamed, oversensitive nerve that wailed for attention, and unable to move. Bemused for a second, he blinked away the tears that gathered to obscure his vision, and then slowly brought himself upwards. He was sweating red water and, if he hadn't been so busy trying to ignore the fact he wasn't fine, he would have noticed there was a puddle in the bed and a puddle forming around him. Red water wasn't blood, but it surely looked like it when it pooled and remained still, a physical testament of a truth Envy was trying hard to ignore.

He was falling apart.

Somehow, grinding his teeth and applying that single-minded-ness that was so intrinsic of him, Envy was suddenly standing before Ed, looming over the sleeping figure and shaking, but whether it was from the dizziness that was threatening to swallow him whole or the sheer anger that was setting his veins on fire – or maybe it was just the pain that was resetting itself with a vengeance – it wasn't clear. Envy reached out for Ed's throat, unadjusted to the radical change in the brat – taller, thinner, older and just queer – but still resolute to carry out his original intent, when Ed opened his eyes.

Envy would never know what happened then, except that Ed had wrapped his hand around his wrist, a hand that should have been metal but felt warm and alive, and felt his skin break at the smallest brush of it. Ed couldn't be that strong, not without the automail, and still Envy felt his wrist bones shatter under the light contact and a scream tore out his throat as they did. Ed caught him when he fell, scrambling to prevent more harm, and only succeeding in sending Envy into a panic attack.

"Don't touch me!" The Sin growled as he trashed in his nemesis' grasp. "Fucking shit, don't touch me!"

Reality turned a lot sharper for Ed in that moment.

The past week replayed itself in his mind, the strange solicitude that made him move around, go out of his house more often than normal. Images flashed behind his eyelids, fitting themselves into the puzzle that was still by no means complete and allowing him to see just how fucked up he was. Ed cradled the sobbing Envy to his chest, like his mother had done to him countless time when he was a child, running a soothing hand over the mass of green that fell limply and nearly covered them both. Why was he taking care of Envy? Envy had killed him, once. All those lifetimes ago, when he was an Elric and broken, still trying to defy the sun everyday. Ed held the homunculus closer, eyes half lidded as his mind tried to grasp some sense into his sudden impulse to protect Envy.

The oroborus on the Sin's thigh was swollen, standing up angry and red against the fragile skin that was breaking and bruising wherever it brushed against anything. Entranced, and wondering why he wasn't panicking yet, Ed rubbed the mark with an idle finger, feeling Envy stiffen against him. His thumb traced the outline of the snake, morbidly taken by the red water that oozed out behind his touch, the shivering that it caused in the body against his.

Maybe it was because Envy was the last link between him and his old life, the one real spectator that had seen Edward Elric fall to pieces not once, but always. Maybe it was because Ed ached to find someone else who knew him, someone who knew the darkest corners of his mind and who didn't look at him any differently because of it. Maybe it was because he had nothing to hide from Envy, because Envy didn't matter; if Envy hated him, it was for a reason he would never fully understand, but which had nothing to do with who he dreamed of or what he quietly wished for at night.

"It's gonna be okay," Ed said suddenly, smiling softly but without an ounce of understanding to his own predicament, "I promise."

Envy wanted to spit, to hiss and to be threatening again. He wanted to feel the power rush through his veins as he stood up and broke the damnable brat's neck with the ease one crushed a hope, but he couldn't. He felt his skin sticking to the brat's clothing when he carried him back to bed; held back another cry when it stayed on the brat rather than on him, when Ed placed him back on bed. Envy choked another sob when he felt his muscles – whatever passed off as muscle within him – twist around like a viscous un-thing, insubstantial when he needed his strength the most.

He raised a hand to claw Ed's eyes out of his face, but he was unconscious by the time his arm started moving.


The fourth day since Envy had awoken, Ed realized he might have not planned this new project of his as thoroughly as he had first thought. Envy continued to suffer panic attacks, loosing red water and stones at every opportunity and his 'health', for lack of better wording, was not improving in the least. Ed didn't know much about homunculi, but he was certain it wasn't normal for them to throw up the very stones that maintained them alive in the first place, nor they were known for falling to pieces at the smallest touch.

It was the red stones that kept Ed on his toes, really. Envy continued to throw them up at the smallest chance, heaving violently and shaking until Ed feared he would dismember himself by trembling alone. And the stones themselves were wrong; instead of the shinny, clear surface that glinted weakly on its own, Envy's regurgitated stones turned to solid rock seconds after they came in contact with air and crumbled to a thin, weightless dust when Ed tried to pick them up. Not spent so much as they were burnt away to nothing, useless.

One needn't be a rocket scientist to figure out what would happen to Envy once he ran out of stones to vomit all over Ed's floor.

On that vein, the blond alchemist allowed his mind to run in circles, trying to figure out what was wrong with the homunculus or the stones or the world and what could he do to help. So far, Envy refused to eat and Ed had to wrestle him – much to his annoyance – to clean the residues of red water off his skin. Once, while Ed was trying to dry his back, a whole strip of skin had simply come off and Ed had had to run to the bathroom, least he threw up all over the bed. Envy's regenerative powers were off mark, too, as it had taken more than two hours for the damage to be mended properly.

The Sin hadn't given him a clue as to what was wrong with him, either; he didn't trust Ed.

Whenever he was awake and the pain was more or less bearable, he observed his caretaker with a very feline, very calculative glint in his eyes, following his movements as if he were expecting Ed to turn and finish what his body had started already. Not entirely unexpected, but it disturbed Ed somewhat, considering he had not a clue why he was suddenly so kind to what could be summed up as his worst enemy. Tension rose considerably as days bled one into another, each second more tedious than the one before as the fight brewed neatly between them.

Conscious he was getting nowhere and worried time was running out for Envy – though he didn't want to think too much about why he cared about that last bit –, Ed sat on his desk the fourteenth day Envy had spent under his roof and spread a white sheet of paper before him. He was well aware he was going to get yelled at – he deserved it, really – but he couldn't think of anyone else he could ask for help… he wasn't desperate enough to call Al on this, mostly because while his younger brother would have been of great moral support, Ed didn't think he could stand the idea of Mustang entering his little house, knowing the bastard was sleeping with his brother. Concentrate. Dispelling that train of thought, Ed raised his pen and began scratching the paper methodically, his handwriting resembling something readable as he chose his words carefully.

Russell was prone to fits of overbearing concern and overreactions, after all.

It took him an unusual amount of courage to let the letter slip into the mailbox but when he returned home, there was another batch of crumbling stones decorating the floor of Envy's room and a sourly homunculus that was just itching to pick up a fight to keep his mind away from the proverbial Pandora box that he hadn't just peeked in so much as he had ripped open for the world to see.

Ed stopped thinking in metaphors when Envy tried, in vain, to get a raise out of him with an old jab about his height.


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