"You cannot talk to it," said the Major General Armstrong, her eyes as cold as her voice. "Though it will try to talk to you."
"Yes sir."
"You cannot interact with it in any way, save for the work you will be doing."
"Yes, sir."
"It's been properly restrained, so it cannot harm you. You cannot do anything to compromise those restraints."
"Yes sir."
"You cannot listen to anything it says."
"Yes, sir."
"..."
"Then the rest of the information is in this folder here. You may enter the laboratory to begin when your partner arrives."
Heinz was handed a pale envelope, wide, but too thin to contain much of anything. Armstrong looked at him hard for a minute more- it was difficult not to shy away under her eyes- and then she left, a swish of blonde hair and heels that struck purposefully in the concrete floor. Heinz was glad when she was gone. It was impossible to breathe around her- not that he was a man of no confidence, but she had a way of making everyone feel bumbling with those blue eyes. He had felt this ever since he had started working in Briggs, all those years ago, as the resident State Alchemist. He had never been able to manage himself naturally in a room with her.
But despite that, it had been a good job. The people at Briggs took good care of each other. He had been comfortable. He hadn't needed a promotion. He hadn't wanted one.
He hadn't wanted to be moved to something like this.
"You are one of the only alchemical experts we can confirm had no dealings with the enemy. You are the only one we can trust."
He wished that had never been said to him.
He bent the envelope in his hands, folding it into a cylinder and then flat again, jiggled the keys to the new laboratory with hands that couldn't keep still. There couldn't be much in the envelope, only a few pages, hardly enough to be considered proper 'research'. But that was why he was here, wasn't it? Because no one knew about the...thing...he was supposed to be studying, and no one who claimed to know could be trusted.
Hell, he didn't even know! He knew nothing! When that terrible day had come- when his soul, alongside everyone else's, had been sucked from his body and into the air- he had been caught completely unaware. He didn't even know what was inside the laboratory. Clearly, something that could talk...
But he couldn't go in until the other guy showed up- his partner- someone called Marcoh.
Heinz debated reading the files. He didn't think his mind was settled enough to take anything in. There was anxiety aching in his chest, something that could only be cured by action, not by reading. Still, he should at least open it.
Fingers fumbling with the lip of the envelope, Heinz didn't have a chance to even look at its contents before the door to the antechamber moved again. This time, not for his former supervisor, but for an old man in a lab coat, that must be-
-oh, God, his face was horribly disfigured, like wax that had been melted, what in the world had done that-
-Doctor Marcoh, who smiled at him, an expression that twisted his rubbery, scarred skin around like the folds in a collapsed circus tent. Heinz tried to smile back, but he wasn't sure if it came out right.
"The Iron Circle Alchemist," Marcoh said, and Heinz nodded after a pause. That was his title, certainly, but he had heard it spoken so few times since his arrival at Briggs he had almost forgotten it. To the soldiers there, he had just been 'Heinz'.
"It's wonderful to meet you," Marcoh continued, offering a hand which Heinz took, and Marcoh's grip was firm but not overpowering. "I've read some of your work. It's interesting stuff."
"Oh, thank you," Heinz replied, surprised, and he realized then that he quite wanted to like Marcoh, unsettling appearance or not. But he hadn't read anything from the Crystal Alchemist. All he knew was that he had been in Ishval (Heinz hadn't, his State qualification had been achieved after the war). Actually, hadn't he heard that the Crystal Alchemist was dead, or missing, or something? He wasn't sure. He wasn't really one to keep up with the news.
"Have you read that?" Marcoh asked, gesturing to the folder, and Heinz started to say "Oh, not yet," but Marcoh was already moving past him, towards the door.
"It doesn't matter if you have," he was saying. "There's not much in there. I supplied most of it, actually- and the Fullmetal Alchemist, if you've heard of him- but that was all second-hand observation. No one has studied this thing properly yet."
He unlocked the door to the laboratory and paused, his hand on the doorknob. Heinz wasn't sure what he saw in that distorted face- he had never been good at reading people, even ones with normal appearances. Perhaps, it was some kind of resignation, but he couldn't say. All he knew was that there was a depth in those sagging features that hadn't been there before.
"And, well…" Marcoh said, his voice soft. "This is the only one left. So we need to find out as much as we can before it's destroyed."
Heinz nodded but Marcoh wasn't looking, he opened the door and stepped in, and Heinz could do nothing but follow him.
Inside the laboratory the lights were bright, and Heinz had to blink to adjust to them, certain he would get a headache eventually. It was a white room, only moderate in size, with a railing and a few desks set up around a small steel table, and on top of that table- in the natural center of the room, where eyes were drawn- was a tiny glass box.
Marcoh walked around the railing and Heinz followed, his eyes trying to take it all in, because there didn't seem to be anything in here, and he hadn't known at all what to expect, but he had expected there to be something…
"Hello again, Doctor Marcoh," said a high, tinny voice, and at the sound of it Heinz jumped horribly. The words had seemed to come from nowhere- but now, looking over Marcoh's shoulder he could see that there was something in the box.
"How the tables have turned," said the voice.
"Oh my God," said Heinz, though not in response to the voice, which could have been a hallucination because there was no way it was coming from something like that. The box had a- a what, a leech? a worm?- in it, a tiny green thing with bulbous eyes and wet, wrinkled skin, split from top to bottom by a sickly pink slit, marked by tiny lamprey-esque teeth.
"And who's your friend?" asked the high voice, and in time with it the flaps of the slit- a mouth, Heinz now realized- moved, and with a nauseous turn of his stomach he realized that he had never seen anything like this ever before.
"This," Marcoh said, "is the only surviving homunculus. Our subject of study."
Homunculus. Heinz knew the word, but he had never looked too far into that- his specialty was in metal and glass, barricades, not living alchemy. What had happened to that guy he had heard of, the Life-something Alchemist? If it was a homunculus, shouldn't he be working on this instead? But then, this didn't really look human at all, artificial or otherwise.
"I have a name," said the little thing, flicking its tail back and forth. A shudder of revulsion creeped up Heinz's spine.
"Remember to ignore it when it talks," Marcoh said to Heinz, and there was a bit of a bite in his words, in his twisted expression. Heinz just nodded, and for something to do with his hands opened the briefing envelope, taking out the pages inside.
"I'm Envy," said the worm. "It's nice to meet you."
"We don't need to do anything tonight," Marcoh said, like the worm hadn't spoken at all. "We don't have all the equipment. I just wanted to see it. You needed to see it."
"Yeah," Heinz said slowly, and even though he had taken the papers out now, his eyes were drawn past them to the thing in the jar. It was looking at him with those swollen, gelatinous eyes, and he could see now that they had purple irises. They were mammalian eyes- almost human eyes. It flicked its tail back and forth in the box, lazy, and though it was disgusting he wondered to himself why Armstrong had acted like it was such a terrible threat.
"Read the file tonight," Marcoh said. "Tomorrow I'll have everything, and we can begin."
~
The contents of the folder were a strange whirlwind. The Philosopher's Stone, government conspiracies, estimated 175 years- a shapeshifter. Even reading it left him out of breath.
Just what had he gotten himself into? This stuff was of myths and monsters, bedtime stories for children. It was difficult to reconcile with the world he knew. He had never been the kind of man who had sought these things out- plenty of alchemists did, looking for truth in the fables, but they always ruined themselves. No one of State caliber would entertain such fantasies in their work, that was what he had said whenever he was inevitably asked, by those inexperienced in the field. And more then that, he hadn't believed in it, never, even when he was a child he had never believed in any of it…
Now that he had those unbelieved in things within reach, he wasn't sure how to handle it.
He didn't know if the feeling in his chest was resentment, or incredible excitement.
~
"So how is work?" Mother asked, her voice tinny from the distance on the phone. "I hope you're dressed warm enough up there. Winter is coming, after all."
"Actually," Heinz said, even though he had been putting off saying this, "I've been transferred to Central for a new project. So you don't need to worry about that."
"Oh! Why didn't you tell me! I will come visit! Where are you staying?"
He answered her questions, and told himself he would need to clean the apartment he was renting. It had every quality of a 'bachelor pad' as it was now, from the unpacked boxes to the crowded sink.
"And now that you're back to civilization," Mother continued- because to her Briggs had never been civilization- "you'll have a chance to meet someone."
"I have plenty of friends up North," Heinz said, and this was why he hadn't called her, why he hadn't visited her on the first day of his arrival in Central. He couldn't stand this.
"No, no, you know what I mean. I want grandchildren, Kristoff."
Like his teenage self, Heinz found his head nodding glumly to what she said, even though she could not see it.
"And it shouldn't be so hard. You're rich, thanks to the alchemy. And there are plenty of lovely women here in Central."
"Of course, Mother," he said to her, which was what he always said, what he had been saying for years, before and after he had discovered that women weren't what interested him at all.
"I hope to hear good news soon," she replied.
~
"We're trying to figure out how it was made," Marcoh said in the lab, laying out his own papers, the tools he had needed- strange devices, things that looked like they were made for poking and prodding, decorated with minute alchemical circles. "What makes it run."
"Father made me," said the high voice in the jar. "And I have a stone for a heart. You know that, Doctor Marcoh."
Marcoh didn't look over at it.
"From what I've been told, the first of these was fabricated in a laboratory in Xerxes, over a thousand years ago- so there are no records, or not good ones, at least."
"Xerxes! I never got to see Xerxes."
"Okay," said Heinz, feeling overwhelmed still from reading the files. "So we need to deconstruct it? Down to the most basic parts? Then we might be able to say how it was put together."
"Hey! No! I don't want to be deconstructed-"
"That will have to be a last step," Marcoh continued. "If we can't put it back together, we've lost our specimen. I'd like to look at the ties between the thing and its stone, first."
"Okay," said Heinz. Standing next to Marcoh, he wasn't sure if he should be there at all- he had so much less experience in this field, he was like an assistant. Well. There was nothing to be done about it, he supposed.
~
"Hold it open," said Marcoh through gritted teeth. Having fabricated one-way entrances on the sides of the box, hands covered in thick leather gloves, they had pinned the little lizard to the glass and peeled its maw so far open it seemed like it might split in half- and there, nestled between folds of slimy pink flesh, was the Philosopher's Stone, fat and red and glistening. The light of it was dimmer than Heinz had been anticipating- he had imagined something much more impressive, being an item of legend that it was.
The worm had not been complacent, but it was subdued now- those huge eyes darted back and forth between their faces, wet with a thin, clear liquid that pooled beneath its head, and occasionally it would whine, the most it could do with its mouth spread apart. Heinz wasn't sure where the vocal cords were, to be making such sounds- but then, he was not a biologist.
"Those threads there- I think those connect the rest of it to the stone," Marcoh said softly, prodding at the membranes in question, with something much like a scalpel. "But if you feel it, the energy seems to be going both ways- if we were to cut these, I think the stone and the body both would be destroyed, not just one…"
The thing whined again, tiny legs squirming in the air, and Heinz realized that the clear fluid must have been tears. It was crying. Of course, being split open like this, having one's heart poked at with knives- it must be painful. Heinz found he felt a little poorly about that. He had never been cruel to animals.
Even though he was the one outside the cage, it was a bit of a relief when Marcoh was finished and they let the thing go.
~
"What's this thing's formal name?" Heinz asked one day, in the middle of filing a report. The notion hadn't occurred to him until just then, when he had penned the first bracket where the scientific species classification would go.
"Oh," Marcoh said from across the room, seeming surprised. "I suppose no one has given it one."
"My name is Envy," the worm called, stamping its feet audibly in the glass container. "I told you already. Just use that."
"We should come up with something, then," Heinz said. "Since we're the ones cataloguing this specimen. How good are you, with the old Xerxian tongue? I'm pretty rusty, to be honest."
"Not terrible," Marcoh replied, putting his palm under his chin in thought. "I wonder…"
"If you want something in Xerxian," said the worm, "then it's 'Invidia'. Father did call me that, sometimes. Usually when he was angry."
"Parvulus," said Marcoh, smiling a little to himself. "Yes, I think that's appropriate. Parvulus invidia."
"Hey, no," squealed the little homunculus. "That's mean! Pick something else! I hate it! I hate it!"
"We'll go with that," Marcoh said to Heinz, returning to his own paperwork, and the worm let out a frustrated wail that was so similar in sound to that of a human teenager Heinz almost laughed.
"Alright," Heinz said, and he wrote it in, the black ink making matters official.
~
"You know, I'm actually super pretty," the worm was saying, rocking back and forth in the box, holding its tail between stumpy legs. "You know, Doctor Marcoh, but you don't."
The second 'you' was clearly directed to Heinz, it looked right at him, and he looked back even though he was supposed to be checking the results from the electricity experiment they had just done.
"Whoever you are. Won't you tell me your name? I won't do anything with it, I promise. I just want to know."
The thing almost never stopped talking. Heinz guessed it would be difficult to gag it, with a mouth like that, but he honestly didn't mind- it made the days interesting, listening to it prattle on, though he knew he wasn't allowed to reply. The talking seemed to bother Marcoh, though- he always tensed up when it addressed him, and Heinz wondered if he knew how obvious it was.
"Anyway, I really am. Pretty. Cute too. Yeah, I'm really cute…"