Disclaimer: FMA belongs to Arakawa Hiromu.

Recap: After arriving in Liore, Claire is chased into the Church by a soldier who has been ordered to secure (or shoot) all possible followers of Letoism. In the Church, she runs into Envy, who toyswith the soldier until he flees from the homunculus. Envy then confronts Claire about whether she wants to make the Philosopher's Stone or not, and Claire says that while she is not trying to make it, but she is investigating it as well as investigating Hohenheim. Envy loses his head after hearing Hohenheim's name mentioned and makes a deal with her - he won't kill her, but in exchange, she has to help him find Hohenheim.

Chapter 11 ~ Wading into Lunacy's Waves

Huge shelves of books lined each wall of the room. Each shelf held all sorts of alchemy books – some thin, some thick, some hardcover and professionally bound, others simply journals bound with string. The first day she had walked into this room, she had gazed wonderingly at all the information that was stored there, like a child suddenly surrounded by walls of candy. There were so many books to choose from; there was so much to learn.

On that first day, she had scanned the backs of all the books, trying to figure out which she wanted to read first. Some of the books were so new, they looked as if they had never been opened, and yet, others were so torn and yellowed that they seemed to be several centuries old. She plucked one of the journals off the shelf, and carefully began to turn the crinkled pages in her hands. Just slightly, she felt her nose crinkle at the moldy reek that immediately penetrated the room the second she opened the journal. Each page seemed so delicate and fragile as if it would crumble to dust in her fingers, and the handwriting was in old script, almost impossible for her to read.

The little girl's brow furrowed as she squinted at the page with her amber eyes, trying desperately to read it. She didn't have all that much knowledge of the old style of writing yet – it seemed so complicated and unnecessary to her. She added ancient handwriting to her list of things she needed to study as she finally managed to decipher a fragment of sentence:

"A homunculus," the page read, "is a man-made human that…"

The ink that made up the rest of the sentence had bled in a coin-shaped mark, as if the writer had been crying as he wrote. Even if she had known ancient script, the page was almost entirely illegible. The only other words she could make out the page:

"Soulless."

"Forbidden."

"Sin."

Everything else was smudged, faded, or bled.

"Claire-chan!" Winry's voice called from somewhere else in the house, interrupting the girl's thoughts.

The little girl looked up from the book, closed it, and hastily shoved it back in the shelf, glancing around somewhat guiltily even though she knew Winry wasn't anywhere nearby. She was supposed to help the Rockbells take care of the Elric's house while they were away, apparently learning alchemy. Instead, she was snooping through their books. Pinako-san would get angry at her for that.

"I'm coming!" she called back after quietly exiting the room. She would explore it further the next time she came here.

It was, after all, Hohenheim-san's study. Where else better to investigate the man?

It was several weeks later when the contact list that Ed had used to mail letters to Hohenheim's acquaintances when his mother was dying fell out of one of the books she was reading.

The next day…

Envy grinned smugly as he walked towards the abandoned building that he had taken as his residence as of late. It was on the edge of town, and even now with the ongoing civil war, there weren't a lot of people there. Messing with humans was fun, but he didn't want to be stuck with them 24/7.

Annoyance flickered across his face as he remembered that his human-free residence was no longer human-free because of that foolish human girl. She had turned the tables on him awfully fast after she agreed to his deal. At first, she had been silent, feeling threatened by him like she should, but then all of a sudden, she relaxed, lightly slapping her face a few times.

A bright grin crossed her face, like that of a triumphant child.

"…I need a place to stay," she spoke, still smiling in a way that Envy found very disturbing, given the current circumstances. Envy's eyes narrowed. She was up to something that he knew he wasn't going to like. Humans only smiled like that when they thought they were on to something.

"Yeah, and?" Envy asked in a bored and entirely uninterested tone as he stared at his fingernails. He had gone to lounge on one of the church pews shortly after she took the deal.

"Let me stay with you." Her tone was serious.

It took Envy a moment to digest that before he nearly gagged – what absurd notion was that? It was as ridiculous as the idea of a mouse asking to live with a cat. Maybe this girl was smart, but there was clearly something wrong in her head. Grinning a grin just as wide as the girl's, Envy said, "Yes, of course…" His voice trailed off.

The girl's face lit up, and she clapped her hands together. "Wonderf—"

"Hell no," he sneered, shrugging arrogantly. "Why the hell would I ever let a pathetic human like you order me around?"

She frowned, giving him a fierce look. "Because it's in your best interests."

Envy raised his eyebrows. His best interests eh? He doubted she was only proposing this idea for him, and he hardly wanted to be stuck babysitting a human. Raising his hands as if she were a hopeless case, he scoffed, "I didn't realize you were so eager for danger, Girlie. You shoulda said so earlier, you know." He smirked.

"I'm not a freak like you," the girl returned sharply.

"That's right," Envy said as a wolfish grin spread across his face. The girl tensed up at the slithering tone of his voice. "Unlike you losers," he sneered as he gestured towards Claire, "I'm a homunculus."

She stared at him for a moment. "A homunculus…" she murmured to herself, her gaze shifting to the floor.

"What?" Envy asked, sulking slightly. "No reaction?" He had hoped that she'd call him a liar or something and have some pathetically overdramatic reaction. "Tch." He shook his head. "You're no fun."

She haughtily put her hands on her hips. "I'm perfectly fun, thank you very much."

Envy whistled sarcastically. The human girl glared at him reproachfully. It was so easy to rile her up.

"Hmph."

For some reason, this reaction annoyed him. He had just told her that he wasn't human, and she wasn't acting the way a human should react to that. "Hm..?" he asked dangerously. "Is Little Red Riding Hood not afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"

"Nope, she's not." She hadn't detected the threat lurking in his tone; her words were stated matter-of-factly as she looked at him with her amber, doe-shaped eyes.

Envy's violet eyes narrowed with ire; his fists clenched. Humans should fear him – he was Envy; he was a homunculus; he was above them.

"Well, I suppose that's not entirely true," she said, correcting herself. "I am afraid of you."

The ire dissipated slightly, and his hands relaxed. Good, his mind said, that's how things should be, you pathetic human.

"It's something like choosing the better of two bad options," she continued thoughtfully. "I could do everything on my own here and get myself killed by a crazy soldier or something, or I could stay with you. You're dangerous, but I'm useful to you, so you won't kill me. And you can prevent me from getting killed by crazy people."

The memory of the scene was suddenly blurred by Envy's anger. His muttered curses were the only sound filling this desolate part of the city. He despised the fact that the girl was right – a corpse couldn't help him find that bastard.

She had been able to turn his obviously lopsided deal to one that was in her favor.

The homunculus regained his calm though as he remembered that, in the end, he still had the upper hand. Envy chuckled evilly. That human girl didn't know what she was getting into, making a deal with him. Even if she regretted the deal later, he wasn't going to let her escape from it. She was going to find that bastard whether she liked it or not. She was his puppet now.

But on that note, Envy wondered, why is she back in Liore? If the military had sent her back here, the soldier wouldn't have been shooting at her. The military didn't have a reason to send her back either… Envy frowned, puzzled. Is she here of her own volition then…?

Out of the corner of his eye, Envy noticed a lone child watching him from the shadows of a nearby building. As Envy glanced towards him, he shrunk back, as if that would prevent him from being noticed.

What was she interested in that brought her back to Liore on her own?

Although the homunculus was wearing the face of an average Liorean, the child could sense that Envy was something much more dangerous. On the occasion, human children would notice that. The adults may have had more knowledge about what was dangerous, but they relied too much on that knowledge to make their judgments. Children could sometimes – but not always – tell things by instinct.

And for that matter… why was she investigating the Philosopher's Stone when she didn't want to make one?

Envy allowed a wolfish grin to slink across his lips as he looked at the child straight on. The child's breath froze, and his small frame trembled. His eyes widened as he saw the insane look in the homunculus' violet eyes, the look of a predator about to snag its prey. He ran, his form eventually engulfed by the darkness of the buildings' shadows.

At least this girl didn't seem to be as boring as the rest of the humans.

The homunculus let the child escape, but not out of mercy. Soon, Envy knew, the fresh conflict he had sparked in town just a short while earlier before coming back here would erupt into a scorching flame, and that flame would engulf everyone in the city – including that child. Occasionally, it would die down to nothing but smoldering ashes, but then all he would have to do was pour some oil on those ashes to set everything ablaze once more.

Claire stared in the cracked bathroom mirror as she fought with her long hair. It flowed gently over her shoulders and torso now that she had rid it of most of its tangles. When she was younger, Ed had, multiple times, told her to cut her hair because it was impractically long. And each of those times, she had gotten angry with him because she liked it this way – she could style it in more different ways. Besides, she took good care of it, so it was nice and soft, with no split ends. In all honesty, she was quite proud of her hair.

What she was not proud of, though, was that she had woken up extremely late that day with a cherry red, sunburned nose. The unrelenting desert sun had caused her to look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Her cheeks and shoulders were slightly burnt as well. Sometimes she wished she could get tanned because then she wouldn't sunburn so easily. She sighed, running her brush through her hair once more.

Somehow it was strange how, in one day, she could find a dead body and almost become a dead body herself and then the next day, be sitting here brushing her hair like everything was normal. Generally, her missions weren't terribly dangerous as long as she simply chose to investigate from a safe distance, but this time, she had walked right into the very danger that she usually tried to avoid. She could feel the heavy atmosphere of the town; it was as if chaos was just waiting to engulf the city once more. Nothing was happening now, so it all seemed awfully distant. But it wasn't, and she knew it.

Placing her brush on the dusty wooden table, Claire tied her hair back with a faded pink ribbon and grabbed some makeup from her bag. I've gotten myself into quite a lot of trouble, haven't I? she mused inwardly. She definitely should have checked up on the state of Liore before coming back here, but she hadn't expected another civil war to break out just because the Elrics exposed him as fraudulent.

Something in the back of her mind whispered that she had also played a hand in exposing the scandal, and her gaze guiltily shifted to the ground for a moment. She rested her face in her hands.

I can't start thinking this way, she told herself, biting her lip slightly. I'm stronger than this. I can't let my resolve waver this easily. It's not my fault that the scandal escalated to such proportions. It's not my fault...

When the thought wouldn't be silenced by simple mental persuasion, she shook her head to force it out of her mind. All that mattered was that she find the truth.

The fifteen-year old girl picked up her eyeliner and carefully began applying it. No use dwelling on depressing stuff, she thought optimistically, changing her mental subject to that of her success convincing Envy to let her stay with him.

Claire placed the eyeliner back into her bag and grabbed her mascara. To be blunt, she hadn't expected everything to go so well. Hell, it had taken a lot of acting to feign calmness when she was proposing that idea. She didn't want him to see how afraid of him she actually was – the stronger he knew that fear was, the more he would exploit it. Luckily, she had managed to look confident.

Standing up, Claire dropped her mascara back in her bag and walked into one of the main rooms of the building. The building itself was fairly big, but she and Envy were only making use of the top floor of it since it was less noticeable that people were inhabiting the building that way. Claire looked around the room, trying to find a spot where she wouldn't have the shield her eyes from the sun's intense glare.

The room itself was undeniably plain. Around its edges, there were some old wardrobes and a few folded blankets, suggesting that this had once been someone's bedroom. There was also one other doorway besides the one she was standing in, leading to the stairway that led up to this floor of the building. Musty-smelling curtains, patched-up with holes and slightly mouse-nibbled at the bottom, hung above the windows, but they had little effect. They were far too thin and worn to block out the sun. A single dusty photo frame lay on the floor near the window sill, but there was no picture in it. Whoever the last occupant of this room was, he had removed it before leaving. Judging from the lack of damage, this building hadn't been attacked in this civil war or the previous, but it had probably been abandoned during the first.

Claire walked over to one of the old wardrobes, and opened its doors. As soon as she'd arrived here, she'd checked out all the crevices of the room, and on the top shelf of this particular wardrobe, there was a puzzle box. The dark-haired girl pulled the box out, grabbed one of the dirty blankets, and sat down in the shadiest corner of the room.

When she'd checked out the room earlier, she'd only had a chance to open the slightly grimy cardboard box, but now that she had time, she figured she might as well put it together. Taking the lid off the box, Claire dumped the pieces out onto the blanket and began to flip them all over so that they were right-side up. At a quick glance, she could tell that the puzzle wasn't particularly big, but all the pieces were tiny – it would take awhile to put together. There was no picture on the box to indicate what sort image this puzzle created, so she had to figure it out all on her own. Smiling happily as she wondered about the picture the puzzle would show her, she began piecing it together.

Just as she had several small groups of the puzzle pieces fitted together, a shadow stood over her. She had heard him walk in the room earlier, but now that he was standing over her, his green-hair falling over his shoulders as he ate an apple, the amber-eyed teen glanced towards him from her position on the floor. Unlike the day before, he didn't seem to be particularly threatening. Instead, his violet eyes simply looked at the puzzle curiously, like those of a bemused child.

"Where'd you get that?" he asked, gesturing towards the puzzle as he took a bite of his apple.

"I found it," Claire answered, frowning as she tried to fit two pieces together but failed. She was surprised that he was actually talking to her (she had expected that he was going to ignore her), but since he didn't seem to be up to anything sneaky, creepy, or sadistic, she paid little attention to him. "Someone left it in one of the wardrobes."

The boy crouched down in front of her so that he could get a closer view of the puzzle. "Is that so?" he asked. "I don't think a puzzle classifies as an article of clothing."

Claire shrugged indifferently. "Maybe he just wanted some place safe to put it."

"I don't see why there's a need to keep one of these things safe," he stated bluntly, as he picked up one of the puzzle pieces and stared at it irritably. "They're worthless."

"How rude," she objected, but not particularly angrily. She was focused more on the puzzle than on him as she tried once more to fit some pieces together. "I like them. They're fun."

"Whatever," Envy said uninterestedly. He glanced at the pieces she was working with and to the other sets of pieces she had managed to assemble. "Hey," he said, pointing towards one of the sets. "Doesn't this go together with this one?"

Claire looked over to see what he was talking about. "Umm…" she mumbled as she attempted to fit them together. "Yeah, it does. Thanks."

In response to her thanks, the green-haired teen said nothing. After standing up, he brushed himself off, threw out his apple core, and went to go stare out the window. Silence overtook the room as the puzzle was gradually beginning to come together. Claire could now see two children sitting on swings. The image wasn't painted like many of the other puzzles she saw; it looked like a child had drawn it with crayons.

Claire fit several more sets of pieces into the puzzle, and the formation of the pieces began to take on the rectangular shape that it was supposed to. She was almost finished – she now held the last piece in her hand.

The stick-figure-like children were smiling, and side-by-side scribbled leafy trees held up the swings the children were sitting on. The sun was a wobbly circle surrounded by crooked orange, yellow, and red lines, and fluffy clouds had been drawn with a bright blue crayon. Claire placed down the last piece right in the center of the puzzle.

The children were holding hands.

Claire couldn't help but smile a bit sadly, finding the childishness of the puzzle cute, but at the same time, thinking that it was ironic how a Liorean child had probably owned this puzzle before – this puzzle that created a picture of tranquility, friendship, and abundance.

Her thoughts were interrupted as she heard Envy croon, "Ah, finally…" as he watched the city below from the window. Something in his voice sent a chill down her spine, and the fifteen-year old turned her gaze towards him to see him grinning as wide as the Cheshire Cat. His eyes danced with insanity.

All of a sudden, an acute shriek pierced the air, soon followed by a gunshot. Then, another scream, but this one was one of agony.

Bullet to flesh, axe to neck. Heads rolling across the blood-soaked earth.

As more screams and shrieks followed, Claire found herself with her knees pulled up to her chest as she covered her ears, wanting to get as far away from them as possible. She knew what each of them meant: death.

Death was the end of the line. As the bullet wound seeped blood onto the dirty ground, your vision blurred and your mind grew foggy. You would never get to see or speak to your loved ones again. You would never get to fulfill your promises to them. Your hazy memories flashed through your mind like the slides of a motion picture.

And then, you ceased to exist.

Claire tried to block out the morbid pictures that were overtaking her imagination as the screaming and gunfire from outside continued. But she knew – she knew that she was part of the military. The military killed people. Even if she had joined a part of it that generally didn't have to kill anyone, it didn't change the facts.

This was why she normally avoided conflicts.

Suddenly, Envy turned away from the window, so that he looking towards her as she hid futilely in the corner. "Hmm…" he said, holding his chin thoughtfully as he looked at her slightly trembling frame. "You haven't seen a lot of death, have you?"

"…What do you mean?" Claire snapped icily.

He smirked, transforming a gun for himself. "Considering your job, you've surely been involved with death before," he said smugly as he pointed the gun at some imaginary person, "but you haven't actually seen a lot of people die." He pretended to shoot, feigning the recoil of his arm. "Isn't that right?"

Like a cacophonous background choir, the shrieks continued.

Yes, a voice in Claire's head whispered to her, but she said nothing. She buried her head in her arms, not wanting to hear any more from him or the din outside.

"Pathetic." She didn't have to look up to know that he was looking down at her scornfully. At that moment, she didn't care. Maybe it was pathetic, but it wasn't wrong to hate death.

Suddenly, a muffled voice from outside shouted, "They escaped somewhere, dammit!" The tone was frustrated and angry.

"Shit!" another voice swore loudly. "How the freaking hell are we supposed to stop this goddamn idiotic war if all the catalysts keep escaping?"

A third voice, gruff and commanding, shouted back, "Stop talking, and get something done! Debbs! Murphy! Check that alleyway over there!" He paused for a moment to address some other soldiers. "You two! Check to see if they're hiding in that building over there!" And then, to all his soldiers, he yelled, "Don't let them escape!"

Claire froze – the death-filled realm outside this building was going to start consuming it. This place wasn't safe anymore. The anarchy would leave no region of the town untouched.

"Yes, sir!" a chorus of voices answered.

Two sets of heavy footsteps running up the stairs towards the room that she and Envy were in. Their echoes were a countdown – tick, tock, tick, tock – to the entrance of death itself into the room. The beating of her heart pounded in her ears as she stared apprehensively at the frail wooden door that led to the stairs.

Louder and louder; closer and closer. She could hear them coming.

Surely, they had guns, just like that soldier from before.

But this time, there were two of them. This time, they were probably more accurate shots. This time, she had nowhere to run.

"My, my," Envy cooed, his violet eyes gleeful. "Looks like we're going to have visitors."

Claire's amber eyes widened in fear, her face paling as she recognized the sadistic tone of his voice. Her eyes flitted between him and the door, him and the door: on one side of her, there was a psychotic monster, and closing in on the other, there were two people that were sure to try and kill her.

The footsteps stopped. Just faintly, she could hear hurried whispers from behind the door.

Any moment now, they'd slam open the door.

Taking one last look at the door, Claire scrambled behind the homunculus. Here, so close to the window, the screams from outside were sharper, more painful, than from the corner of the room she had been hiding in before, but here, she was also safe. The homunculus wouldn't let them shoot her.

Envy glanced back at her as she hid behind him, but was silent, a ferocious smile reaching across his lips before he turned back towards the doorway, the gun he had transformed earlier still in his grip.

She herself was in no danger of dying, but her hand trembled, a bead of cold sweat trickling down her face.

She could feel it.

Despite the desert sun, it was as if a wintry chill had descended upon the room, as if the Grim Reaper himself was poised with his razor-sharp scythe ready to behead his prey.

Two soldiers, a man and a woman, burst into the room.

Author's note: Aaaaaaaaand it's a cliff hanger. Heh. This story is finally starting to get good~ (although I think the previous chapter was far better than this one... for some reason, this chapter worries me. Lol?)

Thanks for all the reviews and feedback on Envy's human name last chapter ;)

What did you think of the puzzle scene and my portrayal of Envy in it? It's not the most important scene ever, but I portrayed Envy slightly different than I have so far, so I'd love to hear what you think about it.

As always, hope you enjoyed the chapter~