Visit

It had taken Dante a while to track down Hohenhiem's lodgings. Risenbool. Envy had never head of the town prior to Dante's announcement. He asked for a leave to visit the town the old bastard was living in. Dante didn't object, instead she gave off a large, cold, evil smile. She turned from him and walked away, waving her hand as if to appear nonchalant. "Just don't kill him Envy."

He didn't assure her anything in return. Envy really couldn't, but she already knew that.

As it turned out, Risenbool, located in the southeastern portion of Amestris, was only a reasonable distance away from Dublith.

While interviewing the town's folk to find where Hohenhiem of Light was hiding, Envy heard of a wife. It appeared Daddy Dearest had already replaced Dante with a new, younger woman. Envy found the despair Dante would soon be feeling to be amusing, till it arose in his mind that with a wife, the geezer may have other new family members as well. Quickly, his amusement drained out and was replaced with boiling rage. His earlier expectations of a lonely old man, body rotting out like a corpse, alone in a house covered in test tubes and transmutation circles covering all the floor space and walls disappeared and was replaced with a vision that no longer kindled happily in his imagination.

Just because he hadn't wanted Hohenhiem to actually see him in return, Envy had gone in drag. On the outside he was a woman with red curly hair and freckles covering her face and arms. Since when he had asked the townspeople where the freak lived, they had replied right next to the Rockbell's automail workshop, Envy added an automail leg to look as if there where somewhere he was headed when he walked up the main road.

Envy didn't even have to make it to the house before he found him. They, the bastard and his bitch, where casually walking up the side of a small brick wall that lined the road. Envy wouldn't really have cared too much about the sight—him knowing he would later be able to kill Hohenhiem of Light just as Dante promised he would—but in his wife's arms, cradled like a precious prize, a small baby swaddled in a blue blanket rested. Hohenhiem held another little boy, obviously older, obviously his son, by his tiny hands as he helped him walk along the top of the brick wall.

Hate didn't even have to build up in his gut, Envy immediately hated the children, as if all his life he had hated them, only realizing his emotions towards the spawns till he actually laid eyes on them. He had known them and despised their existence all his life, even though for a while they had only existed in his imagination.

He didn't watch them for long, for a part of his self-conscious was aware that if he stood there staring for too long they would become mindful of his presence.

Envy stomped off till the end of the road, footsteps shaking the ground and red ringlets bouncing against his chin. At the end of the road stood a large cream colored house which Envy assumed was the bastard's, till he saw the small wooden sign in the front yard that said: "Rockbell Automail". He looked around, and to the right, there was a small white house with a large yard and an oak tree that stood in the front yard.

Envy stood there looking at the house in which the spawns would grow up, as still as a lamppost and his hands clenched into fists. He growled like some kind of dangerous animal, because, at the moment, that's what he felt like. Not a homunculus, a superior being, but an animal that had been beaten and estranged out into a lightning storm one night and since then, left to fend for itself, that grew for the taste of blood while learning to defend itself. He had been pulled from death by someone who claimed to love him too much to let him go. But what he had gotten from the experiment had obviously not been enough to satisfy him, thus discarded as if a failed specimen. Now to see that same love reflected in Hohenhiem's eyes once again as he looked upon that young boy made his stomach twist and clench.

They were his replacements.

What a cruel fate to have to undertake. Not even by choice.

Envy turned around and left, never to look back at that house again. When the little clones would attempt to bring their dear little mother back to life, it would be Dante who would go save the homunculus from death, not Envy. The memories that would've come from rescuing his twin would've made him puke.

-X-

Dante sat on the red velvet couch in the foyer, a large alchemy book sat in her lap. She barely even made an effort to look up at him. "Shall I ask how it went?"

Envy didn't look at her either. "Go there yourself." He left the room, stomping down the hallway like a child who believed they had wrongfully been punished.

A/N: My head-canon is that Winry found Den. That's why she's not barking at Envy.