IMPORTANT: If you read Chapter One prior to 11/4/2012, you might want to read it again. I've completely revamped it and added a small section to the end. The prologue has remained unchanged.

Disclaimer: I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist or Harry Potter.

A/N: I'd like to thank everyone who reviewed the last chapter. DawnScarlet19610 - thank you for officially (according to my friend) inducting me into ff.n authordom with your highly ridiculous and hypocritical flame.

Rating: M

Warnings: References to child prostitution and paedophilia (nothing happens to Theron)


Chapter Two: Salvation


It was only after the first light of dawn kissed the world gray that Theron finally slept.

He dreamt that dream again - the one that left him with a pounding heart and sweat-soaked nightshirt and the gut-wrenching feeling that he had forgotten something critical.

It always began the same way. Beams of light - yellow, scarlet, poisonous green - cut blinding streaks across a shadowed, unfamiliar village square and set the black sky above on fire. The air was heavy with the stench of blood and burning flesh and something else, something tangy and sharp that raised the hairs on the back of his neck and itched across his skin. His heart pounded, and that strange electric something that came from within and all around him - that almost was him - pounded with it.

He was power, he was death; he was conqueror, victor, executioner. He had never known such joy.

Time rushed on to the rhythm of screaming and shouting and laughing and the hiss of his own breath racing past his lips, and then came the careless, taunting invitation - "A duel, dear Cousin?" - and everything stopped.

And then nothing, nothing, nothing, and Theron was prepared to wake up.

But this time something had changed. There was that sensation again, the electric heaviness that itched and sang across his skin, but it was other (Don't you know me, Hesperus?) and the difference made it beautiful.

Theron - or something within him - did knowthis feeling. It dominated his awareness like a half-forgotten song, pulling his mind into a dance of thought and memory that was both foreign and familiar. Flashes of people and places he had never seen and lessons he had never learned built new framework for his thoughts, blending with his own experiences to create a motley mindscape seemingly shared by two lifetimes: his, and someone else's, someone he was and wasn't, someone he couldn't fully remember, but that maybe, impossibly, he had once been.

(Don't you remember, Hesperus?)

Woven into every bit of the Other mind was the impression of a man - dark hair, black eyes, and a quick, cunning smirk - but also of something more. Power and heat, elegance and ambition, calculation and passion - all threaded through with broken recollections of twisted sheets and an owning weight above him and the burn of skin on skin. But most of all there was an otherworldly sense of sameness, and the realization that Theron and this man were one being, one power, forced to exist in two pieces, and if only they could get a little closer-

(Hesperus...) came the voice - his voice - deadly and deep, worshipping a name Theron had never heard but somehow knew was his. And everything Theron was resonated with the compulsion to answer that call, to go to him, to lose himself in a power that was equal to but different from his own.

Tom-

"Get off me, freak!"

Theron started awake, the dream slipping from his awareness like smoke through grasping fingers. He blinked the familiar feeling of emptiness away.

A glance out the frosted window revealed a lightening overcast sky and fields of thick, undisturbed snow. Even the bedroom, heated as it was by three bodies, was cold enough to turn Theron's breath into lingering silver clouds. He was shivering, his ratty nightshirt clammy with sweat, and had obviously tried to escape the cold sometime during the night by curling into the side of his roommate.

A rough shove from the bigger body beside him almost sent him over the edge of the bed. "I said off!" Jason grunted, squirming away from Theron as though he were a disease that could be caught.

Theron ignored him as he untangled the blanket from his legs and bravely slipped his bare feet to the cold stone floor. He dressed quietly and carefully in his most worn and shapeless clothing, ignoring Jason's grumbled insults and Mikhail's mocking sniggers and whined complaints about his frozen toes. There were bigger problems to face today than bullies and a bit of cold.

As he made his slow, reluctant way through a drafty hallway, down a flight of frosted stone stairs, and across the dawn-lit entrance hall, he prayed again and again to long forgotten gods that he was too young, too strange, too unremarkable to tempt them.

He was still praying as he slipped through the door to the dining hall and their gazes fell upon him, bored at first, then measuring, then hungry. The weight of those greedy eyes sent a thrill of terror down his spine, and it was all he could do to make his slow way to a bench as far from them as he could get and keep his trembling body from fleeing. Six pairs of eyes followed him, not seven, he had time to notice before dropping his gaze to his plate; the new, slender man he had seen the night before wasn't with them.

Something told Theron his world would change that day, and not for the better.


"I've found one, Lady," Adrian told the visage in the mirror. It was a woman's face, elegant and striking, with long features and hard angles and deep-set slanted eyes. A silky fall of blood-red hair curtained her face, styled straight and simple - a stark contrast to her arresting and unusual features.

She sat tall and posture-perfect in a high-backed velvet armchair, graceful hands curling over its arms and the room behind her black with shadows. She was firescrying, Adrian realized, and the glow of the flames chased shadows across her features and wove warmth into her hair. Her gown was rich and simple, made of silk that flared red and indigo and ink-dark green with every pulse of the flames.

The woman's perfect lips quirked and curled into a smile as lovely as her eyes were fierce. "Good, good," she said in her usual cultured purr. "And Thomas?"

"A day gone," Adrian answered. "He left wards, though, a whole net of them. Concealment, protection, and entrapment, interestingly enough. They were a devil to unravel."

His Lady frowned. "How curious..." she mused. "Any idea what drew him there?"

Adrian sighed, subconsciously 'sending out his feelers,' as his Lady put it, to track the child. He was leaving the dining hall, his distinct aura skittish and disturbed. Three guesses what had frightened him.

"I'd wager Lord Thorn was drawn by same thing that drew me," he said, bringing his mind back to the conversation. "The boy is quite powerful, and there's something off about it - creature blood, most definitely, but I don't know what kind." He paused, tasting the strength and nature of the child's power for the hundredth time since his arrival at the orphanage, trying once again to figure out what he was.

Adrian's first impression of the boy's aura was that it was shallow, as befit his lack of training and experience. The control was there, interestingly enough; he'd managed to teach himself to use his talent for something, and from the way the walls of the orphanage pulsed with a dull and malignant kind of intelligence – the primitive dredges of a ward - he could venture a fairly good guess what.

Adrian barely needed to skim the surface of his power to see that it was inordinate. Its swiftness alone revealed the strength he would eventually command – it flowed and danced around him in a great current of color, like a waterfall of liquid gemstones, each one representing a different shade of warmth. The fall was very dark and very cold – colder than any Adrian had ever known a gifted to command, almost as cold as the power the creatures of the Shadowside were said to own.

Despite that, though, its rhythm - at least on the surface - was rapid and light, reminding Adrian of the currents commanded by the few full fay he had the misfortune of knowing – with one key difference. Every fay Adrian had ever met, be they Timber or Water or Sky, had an aura so bright it burned and blinded him - nothing at all like this boy's.

And the deeper Adrian reached into his power, the more foreign and mysterious it became. Beneath the layer of rhythm and energy was stillness of a kind he had never felt from any living being, the stillness all currents adapted in the moment of their commander's death - the moment they turned traitor and erupted into the storm of power that would ultimately destroy him. Adrian didn't dare dive deeper into that.

But most shocking of all was the purity of it. The auras of most gifted swirled with a motley mix of colors that mellowed into monochrome warmth – the consequence of too much crossing of creature lines over generations. But this boy's aura was so exclusively dark and cold and so distinctly other that Adrian really didn't know what to make of it.

The one thing he did know with absolute certainty was that whatever it was, his Lady would want it.

"Adrian?" came her voice, pulling him from the maze of power he'd lost himself in.

"Some kind of fay, I think" he mused, a line of confusion growing between his brows. He sighed, his eyes meeting his Lady's once again. "Whatever it is, he's got more than half of it."

That got his Lady's attention. "More than half?" she breathed, her eyes lighting with interest and a hint of greed. "And you still can't tell what he is?"

"It's certainly not a type I've seen before, Lady," Adrian said. "It moves like a Timberfay's, but the feel of it matches what they say of shadowsiders – heavy and cold and…still. I've never felt anything like it."

There were a few heartbeats of silence. Adrian watched as his Lady thought, wishing, not for the first time, that her mind was as open to him as his was to her whenever she cared to listen. All of her was beautiful – her body, her face, her strength, her power, but her mind was one beauty he would never know, and something told him it would be the most wondrous.

You don't become the Monarch of Noble for nothing, after all.

"Still, you say?" his Lady said several moments later, leaning forward in her chair, her elegant fingers clenched like talons in the fabric of its arms. There was fire in her gaze, and more want then Adrian had seen in the eyes of all his men combined.

"Like death, Lady," he said, wondering what hell he was condemning this boy to.

"Shadowfay," his Lady breathed, eyes and face ablaze with triumph, and the child's fate was sealed.


The hours passed cold and slow. Matron Cole kept the children home from school and in plain view of her guests - or she tried, at least. Theron had fled the breakfast table the moment he was finished eating, his belly full for the first time in a month with food that tasted like ashes going down. He'd holed up in the attic, a dusty, crumbling old room at the top of the Secret Staircase that no one ever used - the children, because it was dark and cold and whined eerily on windy days, and the adults because the children were never to be found there.

He'd brought a book and candle and the blanket off his bed, no doubt to his roommates' consternation, and there he stayed as the light moved across the floor and eventually faded.

He was halfway through his candle and in the last pages of his book - a worn-out old tome chronicling ages long gone - when the creaky step halfway up the Secret Staircase screamed.

Theron froze.

It was no good hiding, he knew, and judging from the abruptly unmuffled sound of footsteps climbing the last few stairs, the sneak agreed with him.

Theron sat up and closed his book, pulling the blanket tight around him as the door swung open and the figure behind it slipped inside.

It was the seventh clergyman, Theron realized instantly. The man was tall and ribbon-slender, with fine-boned hands and a long fall of the most beautiful gold hair Theron had ever seen. Lovely was the first word that came to mind as Theron looked at him - lovely and delicate and noble, much too noble to truly be one of them.

"Who are you?" Theron asked, realizing as soon as the words had passed his lips that they were the wrong ones.

The man's perfect mouth quirked into a smile pretty enough to make Theron blush, and then the world exploded.

Or so it felt, at least. The currents, previously no more than a gentle whisper playing in the shadows of Theron's awareness, had erupted into a wild storm around the man that stood before him now, the same way they had around the dark-haired man the day before. And just as the men themselves were as different as night and day, so too were their powers; where the dark-haired man had painted the world beautiful with shadows and music and depth, this man set everything ablaze in a fiery dance of color Theron couldn't see, but that lapped shades of warmth against his skin and mind and what he only now realized was the current he himself commanded - a power he had often used but never understood.

'Who are you?' had been the wrong question to ask. More compelling and pressing was the question that had tormented him all his life, the one that his roommates answered with "freak" and the adults answered with "off" and that he had never dared voice to himself, for fear that he would be forced to agree with them.

"What am I?" he breathed, eyes wide and face pale, somehow knowing that this man - this exquisite creature of fire and color - could give him an answer, because he and Theron were (freak-off-other) the same.

Blue eyes flared with triumph as that lovely smile sharpened into something wicked and cruel - a shark's grin on the face of an angel, a threat wrapped up in beauty. His voice was honey-sweet and lilting when he answered, "That, my dear, is an excellent question."

And then the currents flexed and twisted, and the world went black.

Posted 11.04.2012