Skin Deep
She was beautiful. There was no doubting it. Men tried to court her constantly, and women were made jealous, as their boyfriends came to her like lost puppies, asking for her hand. She turned them all down. Whether or not they were handsome or not didn't matter. Most of them had their strong suits; wealth, looks, personality. It never mattered. It was no use trying to get someone to realize love, when they felt nothing for anyone. Ever.
It had to be a sin to be loved so much, to have one's beauty adored and envied by so many, and yet feel no pride. It had to be a sin to be the one that shadowed countless men's hearts with lust.
And indeed, Lust was just that, with flowing black hair that fell well past her shoulders and a dress that crept its way around her slender, feminine figure and to her ankles. Dark lipstick painted her thin lips and brought color to her otherwise pale face. Yet she felt nothing but contempt for her appearance, which could melt the ice around nearly any man's heart. It was the blood red symbol tattooed just above her breast that told everything about her. Her world, her entire existence, was filled with blood, and the pain caused to extract it.
A single thought plagued her almost daily. Who am I, and where am I going? She almost never said this aloud, but the idea was always there, taunting. She would often stare out of a window, into the distance, where a voice asked her that mercilessly, never backing off. One time when the words had escaped her lips, Envy told her it was a stupid thought. She never spoke of it again.
And so the days went by, and men came to her as suitors and tried to court her in every way they could imagine. But she had no interest in any of it. All she was concerned about was finally getting the Philosopher's Stone, so that she could do the one thing she'd wanted for years. She wanted the Stone so that she could die.
In a way, it hurt to have all the men after her like lost puppies. She could not love them back. She could feel nothing towards them. And yet….
There was always a nagging vision that came to her now and again, amidst the taunting of the voice in the back of her mind and the screams of those she put to their untimely rest. In these visions, there was a man, leaning over a bed, sobbing, praying. He kept asking someone named Ishbala to, 'Save her, just please save her.' And in the bed was a woman, her skin color the same as the man's, and she held weakly onto his hand, and watched as he prayed, tears coming to her eyes. The man would hold the woman now and again, and whisper pleading words into her ear. Lust could not comprehend them. What startled her most was that the woman that the man prayed for and held, had long flowing black hair, and a face that was strangely alike to her own. But that could not be true at all! She did not have memories, so this woman could not be her! And yet, whenever this scene danced in front of her eyes in a sad waltz, there was a sort of pain that throbbed in her chest, where her heart was, where it beat because of the energy of the incomplete Philosopher's Stones that gave her life.
No one knew that she wished only for death. They never knew that she hated this cursed existence with her entire being, hated being a puppet for a person who controlled her from the sidelines. She did not want this to be her fate. She'd have rather remain in the realm of nonexistence, rather than live on this lie. She was not a person, not human. She had no attachments to anything, material or living. And she had no real purpose for moving about the earth like a ghost. Indeed, it felt like she was a ghost sometimes. In the eyes of women, she would be a terror, the kind of things that haunted their nightmares, as it drew their men astray. For men, she was just an illusion, a fleeting specter, seen only for an instant in time, even if that instant lasted for days, or weeks. Time was no longer tangible. She did not know what day it was, and never bothered to pay much attention to the year. She knew the ages of people sometimes, but events had time. She could discern how long ago it was that she had killed someone she had felt particularly close to, even if that closeness was a distant one. She took those moments and committed them to her unreliable memory. They filled her with an inescapable sorrow, though.
Yet, still, no matter how she pushed men away, they still came back to her, and her presence shattered relationships and cancelled weddings. Countless men proclaimed her beauty to those around them, but they did not see the blackness and torment that lay just beyond the service. After all, her beauty was just skin deep.