A/N: This one's more Wrath-centric and angsty. I wanted to set up what some possible scenarios could be for the future, so you're not all omgconfoozled.
Wrath got a job because he didn't want to be left owing anything to anyone. Automail equipping just happened to be one of the most expensive procedures existing in the human world, and seeing that the girl had been willing to let him have it free of charge when she hadn't even offered that service to her best friend, made him sick. He wouldn't have what little was left of his pride damaged by charity.
He took up an apprenticeship in construction; seeing as that was the only occupation he could find that he might stand a chance at, noting his lack of experience in just about everything. Further than that, though, after having lost his ability to use alchemy, it felt good to be able to make things with his own hands. After having lost essentially all of himself, he wanted to at least believe he could do something worthwhile.
He bought an apartment; not for need of a place to sleep, but only for the sake of not rousing suspicion in the humans who had so recently become unavoidably entwined in his life, and for need of a place from which to mail his automail payments back to Rizenbul.
Every week, Wrath would take the end of a worn down pencil, and make a slash mark just above his head against the wall by his doorpost. He spent hours, often, just staring at the small line of hashes against the whitewashed wall, ascending the wall little by little. It wasn't only that the lines signified his inevitable need of an eventual adjustment in his prostheses, and would require another debt, and another trip to Rizenbul, but there was the lingering question in his mind. It engulfed his consiousness for long periods of time, as he gazed listlessly at the marks, wondering why. Things weren't supposed to be this way. He wasn't supposed to age. He should have been immortal; he'd been told so. He feared hopelessly that maybe he'd lost all of his essential being as a homunculus, that maybe little by little he was turning human. He was growing, healing slowly, needing food, warmth, rest; it all frightened him to death.
To death... yes, that was what he feared. He knew that that was what awaited him at the end of the sick human cycle of life. He was moving, hurtling toward an inevitable end and he had no control over it. Suddenly, days had a heavy value; the ticking of a clock was no longer an insignificant bother; it represented another second, another minute, another hour lobbed off of his no longer extended existence. It represented another bit of time lost into the void, another second gone from what now was meant to pass for a normal life. The marks on his wall weren't just a growth record; they were his life sentence- no- his death sentence.
It wasn't the thought of dying that terrified him; it was of dying alone.
But then, that was how he was born, wasn't it?
(Review, darn it!)