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One of my favorite things to do is to go into the relationships between characters, so prepare for that. But also prepare for some action! I love to torture characters. And we're getting close to something big! :3

Edward POV

Days passed without event. I spent much of my time outside. I couldn't stand staying in that house, living with Envy. I didn't want to see or hear him if I could avoid it. The fact that everyone was being nice to him made it that much worse. It was as if they had forgotten he had been our enemy not that long ago.

Al even carried on full conversations with the sin, speaking mostly of alchemy. Apparently Envy had quite an extensive knowledge of the subject. My brother had told me on several occasions about tricks he had learned from our guest. I tried not to be too interested...

Winry had taken on the role of mother around him. She made sure he ate three times a day, even when he was too detached to want it. She tried her best to keep him entertained, offering different books for him to read or to take him on short walks around the small town.

Rose, who had taken over Winry's job as his nurse, seemed quite enthralled with the man. She usually took over the walks my mechanic offered him, and read the books to him when he refused to read them himself. Envy seemed quite content with that arrangement, always looking at her with a mix of wonder and fondness.

The absolute worst part of all of this was that they were treating him like a human being.

But that's what he is, isn't it? Human?

I shook my head, attempting to clear my thoughts. His body was human, but that didn't mean he had a soul.

Does it?

Envy's wounds had healed, quite remarkably, according to Rose. He was up and moving almost every moment of the day, causing me to switch my evasive action and hide in the house, as opposed to outside. Most of the time when he was gone, so was Rose.

"They really have hit it off, haven't they?" Winry noted beside me.

We were sitting on the porch outside, watching the two in question play with Den in the front yard. Rose was laughing heartily, teasing the dog with a large stick she had picked up. Envy was sitting on a stump nearby, watching the girl and her playmate with a slightly amused smile, occasionally catching the stick if it came too close to his face and throwing it to the dog in turn.

"I suppose," I muttered.

"What's with the sour attitude? Things have been going well lately," my childhood friend said, chastising me lightly while remaining carefree.

"You know I don't like him. I agreed not to start any trouble, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about his being here."

She sighed, exasperated. "Alright, Edward."

"Ed!" Rose said happily as she walked up to the porch. "I can feel your bad mood all the way over there. I know you don't like Envy, though I'm not sure why, but maybe you should try to get to know the guy. He's really fun to be around." After she lobbed that idea at me, she turned to Winry. "How about we go to town and grab something for dinner?"

Winry nodded. "Sure! What should we make?"

"I have no idea. What do you think?"

My mechanic eyed me as if we were sharing some private joke. "I know what Ed wants." She paused for dramatic effect. "Stew!"

My eyes lit up in excitement. "I would love some stew! Have Pinako make it!"

"Well, then that settles it," Rose said. "We'll be back in a little while!"

Once the girls left, I went back to viewing the green setting around me. A sense of comfort surrounded me, covering me like a security blanket. I wasn't worried about a single thing outside of how much time there was between now and the moment that delicious meat soup would hit my stomach. My eyes eventually wandered to Envy.

He was still perched on the stump, but now he was staring at the rapidly setting sun with a somber expression. He was wearing very normal looking clothes, allowing him to fit in with the scene a bit better. After his injuries had healed, he'd started avoiding being around people and when he was, he'd strategically place his hands to hide the newly formed scars. They were ugly, that was for sure. After a few days of that, Winry had offered him her father's clothes once more, this time having the offer accepted by the ex-homunculus.

Sometime earlier that day, Rose had been playing with the guy's hair, braiding it, undoing it, pulling it up, undoing it. She'd decided to leave it in a loose ponytail. The shorter strands near his face hung free, much like mine, while the rest of his wild main was subdued in the tie low on his neck.

Envy looked so utterly human in that moment.

A strange emotion washed over me, one that I had never felt towards him since I'd met him. I couldn't quite describe it, something similar to sympathy. I wanted to talk to him, know what he was feeling. The guy had never really had much, power really being the only thing important to him. Or perhaps it was the fact that what little he'd had was taken away from him. That I could definitely empathize with.

I blamed the feeling of understanding on a mixture of the way he looked and the fact that I was getting stew for dinner as I walked over to where he sat on the stump. I stopped a few feet from him, waiting to see if he would react.

After a few moments, without looking at me, he said, "Can I help you?"

"Are you alright?" I asked.

His back jerked, causing him to sit straight up. He looked at me with wide eyes. "What?"

I sneered at him. "Well, never mind then."

"No, I just... You don't care. So why are you asking?"

I thought about this. "If you want the truth, I really don't know."

He stared at me for a long moment. "I believe you mean that."

Again, we were both silent. I could see a pattern forming:awkward mumbling, silence, more awkward mumbling.

"So this is your real face, then?" I inquired. "I always thought it was just your favorite look."

"It is. My true form is something different." Every muscle in Envy's body was taut with stress.

I cocked my eyebrow. "Really? Why didn't you revert to that form when Dante made you human?"

He shrugged. "That would be some complicated alchemy, I imagine. She made my body human, she didn't revert anything."

"How do you figure that?"

"If she had simply reversed the alchemy used to create me, I would have turned to nothing. This is, or rather was, an imitation body, not my original. But it's my body now."

Another bout of silence passed.

"Did you pick someone to base your looks off of? Was this-" I gestured to his body "-one of your friends?" Though the idea of someone like him having a friend seemed like a far stretch, I'd stopped believing anything was impossible.

He chuckled, his thoughts evidently following the same path as mine. "No, I don't have friends. Or, I didn't." The smile faded from his face. "I just picked out certain features from different bodies, features that I found aesthetically pleasing, and mashed them together in one body."

That explained why his appearance was so god damn confusing. It was a little easier to tell that he was a man now that he was wearing very male clothing. But not by much.

"Then what did you look like before you made this body? Who were you supposed to be?"

He closed his eyes, lapsing back into silence once more.

"You're really old, right? Were you someone famous?"

He glared at me sharply, daggers in his eyes. "Don't call me old."

I rolled my eyes. "You still haven't answered my question."

Minutes passed. It started to feel like hours. I wondered if I had upset him with my question. Maybe he missed his old body. Or his old life.

I threw my head from side to side.

No. He's not that person. He's a fake version of that person.

"You don't want me to answer that."

His voice startled me. "Why not?"

He stared at me from the corner of his half-lidded eyes. "You really wouldn't like the answer."

He had sounded so much like his old self in that moment that I felt a shiver of fear crawl down my back, breaking through the warm security my hometown had covered me in. And yet, my curiosity was getting the better of me.

"Just tell me. I'm a big boy, I can handle it."

The look in his eyes reminded me of the one that he'd had when he first got here. Complete and total surrender.

"His son," he whispered.

My chest tightened, for reasons unknown to me. "What? Who's son?"

He took in a deep breath. "Hohenheim's son."

The sound of rushing water took over my ears. I balled my hands into fists and spoke through clenched teeth. "That's... That's impossible. My mother only had two of us."

"You're not wrong. Trisha Elric is not my mother."

"And Hohenheim is not your father!" My rage burst through the gate, my voice rising with my anger level.

"I don't like it either. He abandoned me, ran off to his new family." His body was shaking with the same emotion I was feeling, but darker somehow. It was a grudge we'd both been harboring almost all of our lives, but he'd been holding on to it longer.

"Even if what you're saying is true, and Hohenheim had another son, you're still not him. You homunculi are just imitations!"

He stood up, his larger stature extremely apparent. His face was dark with a deadly mix of emotions. "I'm not a homunculus anymore, don't lump me in with them. And just because you don't want to believe it doesn't mean it's not true. I'm sorry, Edward, but I am his son!"

I screamed, a guttural, primal roar as I swung blindly at him. My fist connected with his jaw, sending him stumbling to the side. My foot reached out and tripped him, putting him flat on his back. I jumped on top of him, one leg on each side of him, and started swinging. "You son of a bitch!" Three punches connected with his face before I was interrupted.

Two metal hands gripped my waist and lifted me off of him. "Brother, please!"

"Let me go! Let me go!"

"Edward, what the hell?!" Winry screamed. She and Rose ran up to us, bags of groceries in their arms.

Rose was looking at me as if I'd just kicked a baby. She quickly switched her attention to the thing on the ground. Her eyes widened and she dropped her bag, running to his side. "Envy!"

He sat up. Blood was running from his mouth, his nose, and a cut on his forehead.

They had been three really good swings.

"Ed, why did you hit him?" Al asked, still holding on to me.

I struggled against him, almost growling out my words. "He said he was Hohenheim's son!"

My brother gasped.

Everyone fell silent.

Alphonse said exactly what I didn't want to hear. "He's... our brother?"