Oh, god, ouch, another one where the full lyrics are not just relevant to the chapter, but to the whole story. The song is by Linkin Park, which I'm sure most of you know.
Trigger warnings: past/referenced dissociation & dysphoria, unresolved Guilt Feelings, suicide & ableism/sanism referenced, predatory/CSA Vibes:tm:, torture aftermath, disfigurement/body horror, eye & mouth trauma (not dwelled on), emotional abuse
~19~
I dreamed I was missing
You were so scared
But no one would listen
Cause no one else cared
After my dreaming
I woke with this fear
What am I leaving
When I'm done here?
-Leave Out All The Rest
There was something wrong with him. Alex ran his fingers over the spines of the books on the shelves, trying to enjoy that he could, now. Everything felt so much crisper, so much clearer. He could breathe, and feel himself breathing.
And he wasn't happy.
He was happy with having a body. He still got waves of euphoria every time he looked in the mirror – but that wasn't the only thing he was feeling.
He rubbed his fingers over the gilt letters, slightly raised from the leather of the book bindings. It had never really occurred to him how much emotional and mental processes had to do with the body. It made sense, really. And seeing Izumi had snapped it in place…
…and been exactly what made him so miserable.
Alex thunked his head against the spines. Then again, for good measure. All is one and one is all, which meant the whole time he'd been without his body, his mind hadn't been quite here. Staring at the wall during the nights should have driven him crazy with boredom, and it had, but not enough. And he'd gotten mad at Will a few times, but it hadn't been until that last blowup when any of it had really, finally surfaced. It'd taken that long to say anything.
And, he was realizing, he'd done it in the worst way possible.
He thunked his head against the books again.
"Honey, if you think that's how studying works, you need some help."
"I was going to go with how he shouldn't break his new body, but that works too."
Alex groaned, slouching against the library shelves and not even bothering to turn around. "Hi, guys." He wasn't used to having… Were they friends yet? That was how bad he was at the whole concept. "Don't mind me. I'm just… having minor existential failure."
"You can't scare us off with nerd language! We're all nerds!" Lyra grasped Alex's shoulders and turned him around.
Fletcher snickered. "You calling yourself a nerd willingly is new."
"Oh, shut up, midget. We were learning about the second law of thermodynamics today, I'm allowed to feel like a nerd."
"Did you understand it?" Alex asked weakly. "Because I've been doing alchemy longer than either of you and I didn't."
"That's a hell of a claim. How long have you been an alchemist? Because last I checked you were fourteen."
"I picked up an alchemy textbook when I was three."
Lyra opened her mouth, then closed it. Fletcher just looked impressed. "… Fine. Fine. That wins. Also, I kind of hate you."
Alex snorted, then smiled with relief. He was feeling better.
Which.
Which just reminded him why he'd been feeling bad in the first place.
Fuck.
"Oh-kay," Lyra declared, flopping down on the library's carpeted floor and dragging Alex down with her. "Fess up. What's wrong?"
"Wrong? Nothing's –"
"I should point out we can see your face now," Fletcher mentioned with a small smirk.
Right. Crud. "Is it that obvious?"
"Just a little." Fletcher paused for a moment. "Also, you were slamming your head against the books."
Lyra's snort of laughter just sealed his fate. He rolled his eyes, internally wondering if it was worth trying to talk about it. "I'm not… I don't know. I'm not used to people my own age."
"If it helps, me neither," Lyra shrugged. "I spent most of my childhood impressing my father's friends or chasing off all my nannies."
Fletcher hesitated, then sat down across from the two of them, fiddling with the book he was holding. It was on thermodynamics, the topic they'd been talking about today – extra research, or catch-up. Basic stuff when it came to alchemy… at least at first. Exchange of matter was the basis of how alchemy worked. Once you got into energy instead of matter, though… "Where did you come from? Before this?" he asked.
Alex hoped neither of them saw him stiffen. He didn't want to answer that.
"You just – you said you knew something about my brother. And you know Lyra from somewhere, don't you?"
"You do?"
"I –"
"But you keep avoiding the question. It can't be that bad."
It wasn't, really. Will wasn't some cackling villain. He was just… well, Will. He was a lot. Alex wasn't sure why, exactly, he was so ashamed of talking about who he really was. He loved Will – he just didn't want to be judged by him anymore.
He loved Will.
He'd… he'd almost forgotten. And then he'd just thought it, so casually, and –
"Hey, if it's too hard, you don't have to-" Fletcher said, half-panicking –
"No, no – sorry, it's… complicated." Alex pulled a face. "I sort of – Leaving was messy. I still don't know how I feel about it."
"Your dad?"
Alex almost laughed at that, and had to stop himself. "God, no. My brother."
Lyra and Fletcher looked at each other, then back at Alex. He quailed, and decided to just bite the bullet, squeezing his eyes shut. "So, uh, yeah, my brother is the douchebag alchemist with the green hair and the automail-?"
A burst of screeching laughter broke through Alex's dread and he opened one eye. It wasn't Lyra laughing – it was Fletcher. He had fallen over on his back laughing so hysterically that he was clutching his stomach, and Lyra was holding her hands over her mouth and nose, face gone pale.
"No, god. No, no, no, him? HIM?"
"…So, uh, Fletcher knows that bit?"
"YOU WERE THERE?" Lyra squeaked in horror.
"For him kissing you and then looking like he'd swallowed a lemon? Yes. Sorry about that."
"I'm going to kill myself," Lyra murmured, burying her whole face in her hands.
Fletcher was trying to pull himself together, wiping his eyes. "I can't believe this. You're his brother? And here Lyra wants to-"
"Shut. It." Lyra whimpered into her hands. "I will wring your tiny neck."
"Oh, please don't hurt him," Alex said, suppressing giggles he hadn't expected. "It's my fault. I thought it was a good idea."
"You did?"
"I should have known better. He is rather charmless, isn't he?"
"I'll say," Lyra groaned. "My god. I don't think I've ever hit a man harder, and I've had drunken boors grab my ass."
Fletcher cleared his throat, carefully settling back to normal. Alex wasn't foolish enough to think he hadn't put a couple of the other pieces together, but it remained as an elephant in the room for now. "Sorry," he murmured.
"You should be! I trusted you with that in confidence!"
"He was there," Fletcher defended himself lamely.
"I was," Alex admitted. "So, fair's fair."
Lyra's blush subsided just as a little as she processed the new information in context. "I can see why you were sitting on that one. He's a little, uh… polarizing, huh?"
"You have no idea," Alex groaned sulkily.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Fletcher offered – and that was where Alex came back to a grinding halt. Because it was tempting – but then he came right back to what was plaguing him in the first place.
Will hadn't been trying to hurt him.
Maybe he had. He didn't know. Envy had planted the idea in his head – or had he only given him the base to build off of? – that if Will had been anybody else, the violence, the aggression, the temper, would all have hit differently. That taking care of somebody for years with no thanks in return was cruelty in and of itself. But there was that, and then there was trying to articulate that to somebody else, and the second was – there was a reason, there had always been a reason, they didn't talk about it. Because the military had already threatened to lock up Will once, after the Tucker thing. Because, because, because –
"No," he said, finally. The easiest answer. "He's not a bad person. We just don't… get along." Five words to try encapsulate his relationship with Will. It didn't work. But it was the closest he was going to get. "Now are you going to keep cradling that book on thermodynamics or are we gonna figure this out?"
"Oh, I'm so glad you asked," Fletcher sighed.
"Where's Mei, anyway?"
Lyra's face soured. "Getting special tutoring or something," she grumbled. "Stupid little princess."
Alex decided to let that one slide. Lyra's feelings about Mei obviously had a lot less to do with Mei and a lot more to do with her own issues, and as long as she kept it to the occasional light barb and sulking, it didn't seem worth bothering with.
Mei Chang sat on the edge of the bed, eyes glazed over, as Dante slid her robes off of her shoulders. "Hm. What do you think, Envy?"
Envy didn't really have an opinion, nor was he expected to have one. Dante just liked to have something to talk at that wasn't her drugged student.
"A little underdeveloped for fourteen. But we can speed that up. And that hair."
He'd expected her to take the taller one. But the moment Mei had given away that she was a princess –
A sour feeling turned in Envy's stomach. He hated this. He couldn't even express how much he hated it. "Hush, hush," he whispered to the panda in his arms. "It's okay." Xiao Mei was a smart thing. She knew something was wrong.
"Are you going to do it now?" he asked, trying not to sound as hesitant as he felt.
"Hm. Not yet. I'm still a little tired from creating the new mannequin. Although-"
The sharp ringing of a phone cut through the room's still air. Dante pulled Mei's robes back onto her, and pushed her back onto the bed, letting her sleep off the drugged smoke she'd breathed in. She didn't have much of that available; it was one of those awful substances that worked to a lesser degree on his kind, as well, so he found himself thankful every time she had reason to use it on somebody else. As cruel as it was.
"What is it?" she demanded. Then a smile spread over her face. "Well, well. Isn't that interesting. Thank you very much, Wrath. You may dispose of her whenever you want."
"What is it?" Envy asked when Dante had hung up.
"Oh, quiet. You know I hate nosy servants," she snapped. But her excitement drove her to continue anyway. "Apparently this little thing has been nervous around you for good reason. Qi sensing. One of her countrymen gave the game away."
Envy felt a shiver run down his spine – accompanied by a sense of profound sadness. So that's what it was. He hadn't done anything wrong. She could just see the wrongness in him. The emptiness.
"She can see souls," Dante murmured. "I will definitely have to wait, then. Let her show me how that little trick is done, if she can. And then…" She ran a finger down the curve of Mei's sleeping chin, then along her throat and the pulse of her jugular. "One last time."
Envy wasn't supposed to hear the tinge of desperation in her voice. But he'd known her too long.
Once upon a time, Edward thought, he'd believed they were doing the right thing. Or some approximation of it. They weren't doing the wrong thing, at least. There were so many crueler things in the world than them. Fathers abandoned their children. Husbands murdered their wives. Terrible things happened in the dark, behind closed doors and behind closed eyes.
It'd been a long time since he'd really believed that. But opening the door of the room that had been so beautiful to the smell of blood and terror –
It wouldn't have been so terrible, he reflected, if he didn't remember this. If he had been shocked, or even dully surprised, instead of – of course. He'd opened a door to the macabre remnants of Wrath's dreadful fury before. The difference was, before, he'd been able to rest easy knowing that her victims had deserved it.
What were they now, he wondered, when foe and bystander had become one and the same? Sometimes he felt like he was going mad for believing that innocence still existed. Maybe he was going senile. That was it.
The light flickered on, slowly, the bulbs still functioning despite the tension that had weighed up on the ceiling lamp. Most of the room was intact. It was just… bloody. There'd been no fight, no push-and-pull. Just Wrath, and…
There she was. Wrath had taken her down from the lamp, and she had crawled away from the door, curled up against the wall and below the fresco.
He closed the door behind him. Let whoever else was here think he was finishing the job. Maybe he would. "Hey. Can you hear me?"
She didn't respond, but there could be any number of reasons. He could hear ragged breathing, so she was alive, but who knew if she'd stay that way? So he approached, carefully, slowly, and stopped a few feet away.
"…I'm sorry," he said. He sat down, wincing at the feeling of the blood in the carpet. "I didn't – want this." No, that sounded hollow even to him. And even as he thought about it, a lump rose up in his throat, and he could feel his tattoos swirling up in response. "I, uh –"
She shifted, dark-chestnut hair falling over her wrecked face, and fuck, fuck, fuck. He couldn't be here. He couldn't do this. This felt like – this was –
Don't do this. Don't run off on her. You failed Alfons. You don't get to be scared now. Do better.
Ha. Better. Like that had any meaning when you didn't know which way was up.
Ed got up to grab what he'd brought in with him, not sure if he'd even need it. He'd half expected to come in to a corpse. A bucket of water, a cloth. Simple. Then he sat by the wall, carefully easing up her head –
A set of teeth dug into his hand.
"Ow!" he hissed. "Jesus fuckin' – lady, I am trying to help you. Please – please, please let me."
Her eyes – eye – fixed on him.
"Please," he said again, more quietly. "I'm sorry."
Juliet stayed silent, but then nodded, wincing as she did. Ed placed her head on his lap, heart skipping a beat. For half a moment, she looked a lot like Al.
"Let's get you cleaned up. Figure out how bad this is." He started carefully washing the blood off her face and shoulders, then realized her clothes were over her, not on her, and looked away with a faint blush. Her body shook, and he glanced down at her face – "Are you laughing at me?"
She didn't respond to that either, and he wasn't sure she could, but that had seemed like a yes.
"Well, I guess I can't be squeamish if I'm playing medic," he joked, because it did seem to bring a slight bit of light back to her eyes. Nothing big, but after what Wrath had put her through…
Well, anything was a victory.
"She's not… Riza isn't usually –" He stopped himself there. He'd been deliberately calling her Wrath to himself. "This isn't-" Normal? Define normal.
Juliet kept watching him. How much she was actually taking in, he didn't know. Maybe he was just projecting onto somebody who could, for all intents and purposes, barely hear him anymore.
He tried again. "She shouldn't have hurt you. You weren't – I mean, you were doing something. You stabbed me. And I'm not saying I enjoy being stabbed. That was kind of rude. But you're a kid." He laughed suddenly. "I know, I know. I look younger than you."
Juliet raised an eyebrow. That really was a response this time.
"You were following me around, right? So you know I've got lots of faces. This one is the real deal, though. I've been, uh… sixteen? Sixteen, yeah. For a couple centuries, now." He made a wiggly gesture with his head. "Not all it's cracked up to be."
She was fading out again. He could see it in her eyes – heartbeat fluttering slightly, but not giving out, and pupils dilating.
"I think I'm supposed to tell you not to go into the light or something," he said idly, still running the cloth over the blood on her face. "To be honest, I vaguely remember it. Seemed interesting, but give it some time. I-"
He paused as he reached Juliet's chin, streaked with blood. Too much blood. Blood from her mouth.
"Hey. Can you open your mouth?"
No response. She had passed out again. She'd come to again in a little bit, so Ed carefully eased her mouth open with a few fingers to feel inside – and immediately pulled them free, heart thudding in his chest. No wonder she hadn't been responding.
"…You deserved better than this," he murmured. Not like she was the only one. He kept having to fight the rising panic, the feeling that it was Alfons he was holding, Alfons butchered and open – Stop it, he ordered himself. The past and present influenced each other, but he was in the present. The past couldn't be changed. He'd told Will that enough times.
He felt something in the pocket of her jacket, and stuck his hand into it. There was something inside – a pendant in the shape of a hand, with an eye in the center.
"Oh, I've seen these. They're meant to ward off bad luck, aren't they? I don't know what luck has to do with it." He put it around her neck, and the cold metal startled her awake, one good eye staring up at him in fear.
Oh. She'd felt the metal, and –
"I won't hurt you. I promise."
She looked down at the pendant, and he felt her muscles relaxing. Her eye might recover; it would be a while before it healed enough to tell. Then she raised her eyes back to him, mouthing a word and trying to push the sound out with the tongue that wasn't there anymore.
"Why?" he echoed. Then he shrugged. "If you mean why I'm helping you, if I knew, I'd tell you." He was lying. He had a pretty good idea. But even here, in a room he remembered too well… saying it out loud would bring it back.
He leant his head back against the wall. "I grew up here," he said quietly. Too quietly for her to hear. "This was the sitting room. I think if you look in the corner, you can still see where I drew on the wall. My bedroom was on the next floor up. It's all caved in now."
If Juliet had either been awake or capable of speaking, he guessed she would have asked him if he missed it. That was another thing he couldn't make himself say out loud, too worried that maybe somebody would hear, somebody other than the tortured wreck in his lap – because he didn't. Not a single moment of it. These walls had watched the knives tear his flesh, too.
She'd lost her temper. She hadn't meant to. But now she was crying, all that extra tension coming out of her any way it could, hands shaking on the table –
"I came as soon as I could."
She was too scared to even respond to him. She hadn't washed the blood off her hands – she'd made the phone call to Dante, kept her cool, and then, finally – it had all come apart.
"Look at me."
She tried, but she could barely move –
-then his fingers found her chin, wrenching it around. He was angry. Of course he was. Disappointed.
But there wasn't any disappointment in his face. Just concern.
"It's been a while, hasn't it?" Mustang said, his voice almost… sad. "You were doing well."
"I'm sorry."
"It's alright. She won't be missed." His grip on her chin didn't relax, even if his voice was sweet. "Now lock it down."
She wanted to claw his face off. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to hurt herself. She wanted to die. She wanted to throw up. She wanted –
"Riza. Lock it down. That's an order."
That was right. If she locked it down, she wouldn't hurt anybody else. She could focus. Needles and bullets. Precision, not impact.
She focused on the body in front of her – Mustang, hardly much bigger than her, but so much more present. So much more in control. He didn't have any more of a real heart than her, but the Stone within him pulsed like one. She could watch it work, watch it keep him alive, the same way hers fuelled her. She couldn't help that hers was broken. Not broken. Just… imperfect. Flawed.
"There we go. You look better already. My god, you're a mess," he clucked, grimacing at the blood on his white gloves. "The things I do for you."
Something still raged in her at that.
"Thank you, sir."
He smiled at that, a warm gesture that made things seem…not so terrible. "If I got angry with you every time you lost your temper, I'd never have time for anything else. Now go get cleaned up. We've got things to do."