The place reeked of silence and boredom. Despite efforts before his father's departure, Ira was still bored. After his microwave meal, there was nothing he had been permitted to destroy and nothing worth saying. It would be morning until his father returned with Roy and sleep wouldn't be able to entertain him until then.

There was, though, something to be appreciated from his bored silence. For once he could hear the sounds of the world outside this apartment. He could hear it all, the crackling of fires in the street, the chirping crickets and even the howling dogs. But that was as far as he could interpret from the roar of cars in the not-too-far distance.

Bu there was something else as well. Another sound. It was thudding on the wall. As if someone was… climbing it! It was growing louder with each thud. It kept nearing closer to him. Nearing the window! Ira froze with fear. He daren't move from hi seat on the floor.

The thudding ceased. But Ira remained cautious and stayed in place. Silence once again surrounded him on all sides. Until, there was a tapping on the glass. Ira's heart beat faster. Throbbing in his chest as his breaths grew quicker. Again the tapping on the glass came back.

Ira turned his head slowly towards the window even though he feared of what might be on the other side. He saw it. A face was staring at him. But he knew the face anyway. It was Crow. Ira breathed a sigh of relief and now that the fear had swept away from him he could find the energy to step over to the window and let Crow inside.

'I came to check up on you.' Crow breathed with a smile.

'Y-Yeah I know. Dad said you was going to.' Ira smiled finally. He was still feeling the lasting effects of the fear that Crow had placed upon him.

'…So… Are you ok? Had a good meal?' Crow asked. It was his job to check up on Ira after all and to his extent of knowledge it also meant seeing how the person was doing and check if s/he was eating well.

'I'm fine and I had a nice meal too.' Ira answered. He still felt unsure of Crow's presence. Ira never really knew Crow personally but the only thing he knew about him was that was that he was his dad's friend. This made trustworthy in his eyes.

'But you're not fine… are you?' Crow said with a satisfied smirk.

'What do you mean?' Ira asked in astonishment. How could Crow assume something like that when he had already given his answers. 'I'm fine! I just said so!'

'But how CAN you be fine? Lying awake every night wondering when daddy will come and get you out of bed! You can't even sleep!'

'I can too!' Ira shot back angrily. Again the arrogant assumptions were annoying him.

'No you can't! Because I know what you are! And you are not human!' Crow barked angrily at Ira. But Ira could've sworn that he heard Crow's voice change. It sounded almost… feminine!

'H-How do you know?' Ira stared up wide-eyed at Crow. 'Only dad, Roy and a few other people know that. He's not even told you about that. How could you know?'

'Because I'm just like you. Not human.' Crow grinned and as he did so, his hair turned slowly from its normal black hair to an emerald green. The transmutation marks diffused from the top of his head and slowly travelled down his face. A black headband took its place that was adorned with a symbol of an upside down triangle with points represented as circles. His black straggly hair puffed into a palm tree shape of long, emerald green spiked hair. His eyes transmuted from calm green eyes to harsh purple eyes with cat-like pupils. Crow's normally ragged clothes turned into a black, tight costume and his skin turned into a deathly pale complexion.

There stood before Ira a completely different person. His black costume was of a black crop top and a skort. His hands bore long fingerless gloves that stretched to the middle of his forearm and his feet were dressed with a toeless and heel-less design. Ira also noticed on the man's left thigh, a strange tattoo that looked like a snake was biting its own tail. A six-point triangle was in the middle of the snake circle and small wings were on the top. It burned crimson red in the man's pale skin.

'Hm. So you've spotted my ouroboros have you? Do you like it?'

Ira didn't know how to answer without causing any offence to him.

'You have one too. Under your right foot if I'm correct.'

Balancing on one foot, Ira pulled up his right foot for his view and on the sole of it he found the same mark. 'How did you know it was there?' Ira asked curiously.

'Because I was there at your conception. The beginning of the seventh homunculus. You.'

'And you're a homunculus as well?'

'Of course. They call me Envy. Your name could only be… Wrath.'

'W-Wrath? That's my name? My REAL name?'

'Didn't you know what Ira meant?'

'I guess not. Are there more like us?'

'Oh yes. Lust, Gluttony, Pride, Sloth and Greed.'

'Why am I here anyway? Why aren't I with the others?' Ira was still struggling to take all this new information in but somehow it was sinking in.

'Because your "dad" or "host" had to help you grow.'

'I know that now. But there's still so much I don't understand!' Ira yearned to know more about his own kind. He'd only heard Edward refer to him as a homunculus a few times but never had he heard any more information about these beings afterwards. For what seemed like so long he wondered about his kind and yearned for this knowledge. Now that the chance was here he wasn't going to pass it up.

'There'll be plenty more times to explain all this to you but now I need to take you to our master. Before I do that though, you must eat this.' Envy took out of the back of his skort a small pouch. Pouring the content onto his hand, he showed Ira the small collection of shimmering red stones.

'Rocks?' Ira smiled as if he'd been told the punch line to a joke. 'You want me to eat rocks?'

'They aren't rocks! They are incomplete Philosopher's stones!' envy spat at the boy's insolence. 'They give use energy, which can be used to regenerate our bodies if we are injured or killed! Our kind thrives on these!' Envy thrust the stones into Ira's frightened face and, reluctantly, the boy picked out a small handful and crunched them in his mouth. Once Ira had enjoyed the taste of them once, he couldn't help but grab for the rest. 'That's it! There's plenty more where that came from! You like them don't you? The taste of all the human souls that went into them!'

The thought of hearing that human lives were involved made Ira spit out the remains of the stones that were in his mouth onto the floor.

'You're that merciless? You'd rather not savour and do rightly to these humans by giving them what they deserve? These are humans who are so cruel and pitiful that they deserve to die! They deny us our OWN humanity and our wants of dreams! So isn't it right that we deny them theirs?'

'Does that mean dad's a human too?' Again he was struggling to understand this new frame of logic.

'He's not your father! He never was! He's just a host! But it's that very same human that denies you sleep and humanity! That is why you can take there lives!' Envy shouted angrily.

But what was once a secret operation was no longer so. Footsteps littered the hall outside and an impatient knock was heard on the door.

'Hello? Who's there? I demand you open this door!' A female called from the other side of the door.

'We're going to be spotted!' Ira cried with panic. 'What do we do?'

'We blow this joint! Literally!' Envy sauntered over to the gas cooker and, taking a hold of it, pulled it out of place causing the sound of twisting metal to erupt from the back of it followed by a steady hissing sound.

'What are you doing?' Ira said with surprise as he saw Envy hauling the gas cooker out from its place.

'Starting a gas leak!' Envy smirked. The broken pipe at the back was still producing a hissing sound as a nauseous smell was supplementing the air. Finding out a box of matches, Envy took out a match and quickly, without hesitation, struck along the ignition strip. It was all he needed to do. The strike caused a spark of fire to ignite the gas-filled air.

The force of the blast sent the two homunculi crashing through the windows already alit with the flames. The people outside the door too met the same fate as the fiery blast cooked their bodies to black shrieking crisps. Their fearful and strangled screams filled the air for their deaths weren't instant. The whole apartment was ablaze and it spread quickly and fiercely through the whole apartment building until the whole building was meeting a fiery doom.

Out on the sidewalk, two black sooty corpses lay there, quiet and still. But this was only for a while. Soon, the soot and scattered body parts gathered together to their respective parts with regenerating ease. The black soot transformed into pale white clarity and their bodies were stood upright and were clean of their burns and temporary death. Ira stared down at his newly reformed hands with shock, disbelief diluted as well with fear.

'I-I'm alive? But how?'

'I told you. The incomplete Philosopher's stones give you energy to regenerate if you are injured or killed! Now come on. We can escape through that manhole.' Envy instructed pointing to the manhole in the middle of the unused road. Lifting up the lid, he allowed both his and Ira's escape, a normal human would feel pity for the lives lost in that fire but instead, Ira felt happiness bubble up inside him. He felt like the humans were getting what they deserved. Ira seemed to think that, knowing what he knew now, that if he killed his "host" he would be able to know sleep. To know the peace that humans knew and were so selfishly denying him. Well, they were going to pay dearly for it, with their lives.

Author's note: Like the plot twist? I do too. It gives Crow more of a purpose or should I say ENVY!!! Lol. I amaze myself sometimes. I've been on study leave all week, which is why I've been able to update a lot of chapters onto here. Plus my sister KuraiSeken, and me have started planning a FMAXHP crossover. It's a joint project but it'll show up on her account. Basically, I write the storyline and I type it up and then she goes through it and makes it a hell of a lot better with description and proper character personality and stuff. She knows Harry Potter a hell of a lot more than I do but I still control the FMA characters because I know FMA a hell of a lot more than her, which is why it's joint together. We've even made up an OC especially for the storyline. I hope you read it when it's put on the site. We haven't got a name for the story yet though but I'll try and give you a title once we've come up with one.

But I shall not abandon this fan fic at all! I shall carry on the best I can!