Hi guys! I'm back! I'm still working on the next theme, but it should be up soon - and I'm also chugging away on the next chapters of Hero and SNEA :) Thanks for waiting so patiently. I love you all, and I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

So I mostly owe this idea to 'Divine Right of Kings' by Oedipus Tex. It's amazing and bleak and you should all read it. There was also another oneshot - I can't find it right now, sadly, otherwise I would credit it - that had something similar happen to Envy as what happens here. It was creeptastic and amazing.

I was originally going to post this before Live Wire, but I just couldn't get it finished. So anybody who's read the list of themes...yeah, they're switched because I'm a silly slow writer.

Warning for mass death.

92. Survivor

Everything went wrong.

That was the mantra Ed clung to as he climbed over stones and pieces of fallen rubble, and found new bodies with every step. Everything went wrong. Everything went wrong.

It was odd how comforting it was. But it was so much easier to believe in human error than a brutal, evil God or a determined path. Everything went wrong was better than This was how it was meant to be, or Everything happens for a reason.

Because he didn't think any sane mind could come up with a reason for him to be totally, utterly alone.

Fifty million.

And one survivor.

Everything went wrong.

"So," he said conversationally, swilling the dregs of his coffee in the cup and wondering how long coffee lasted before rotting and whether he could drink through it all. He hadn't slept in something like three days. "How's life?" He threw his head back and laughed hysterically.

Roy stared into nothingness. His eyes were blank and grey, a testament to the sacrifice he'd made, and that was probably one of the reasons that Ed could stand talking to him.

"You know, it's odd," he mused. "I always wanted you to shut the hell up." He paused. "I didn't mean it, you know."

Again, nothing but silence. Still, it was a familiar face. He'd thrown up at least five times while hauling them up from underground, and another time when he'd decided to embalm them - thank god for alchemy, thank god he could still use it even after all of this - but it was worth it.

He touched the pendant around his neck, careful not to smear the seal of blood.

"So...are you mad at me?" he asked, unsure who he was talking to. Then again, who else was there? Just him and the dead.

The most overwhelming thing of all was probably the silence. Every animal larger than a spider had fled Amestris's borders and there was no sign of them returning, so when Ed walked the streets, the sound of his mismatched feet echoed like gunshots.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

(He shouldn't be alive).

He should have stayed within Headquarters, he knew this, but he couldn't stand to see them all scattered on the streets. It was better than it would have been had the soldiers not attacked - most of the civilians were indoors, and Ed wasn't going to invade people's houses.

(Funny. He's respecting people's privacy more now that he knows what he's going to find. Or maybe he's just a coward.)

So he started to dig, and every hour, every day, he dug another grave. No mass graves for these fallen - their souls were already wasted, used, destroyed. He only used alchemy for the stones. The pits themselves he dug by hand, and even as the bodies began to rot, leaking fluid and attracting flies, he rolled them in tenderly. He didn't know everybody's names, but enough of them wore dog tags for him to try.

Then he found Maria Ross.

It was strange. First he sat down hard, remembering how she'd slapped him, mothered him, protected him, fled for her life and she was here now, so she'd returned...and then his thoughts turned to Winry.

Winry.

Winry was dead, just like everybody else in this godforsaken country -

He curled into a ball, sobs wracking his frame, twisting at his battered automail, and that was the first time he cried.

He started to hear sounds in the walls. At first he was paranoid, but then he resigned himself to the fact that they were the echoes of his own thoughts, resounding and reverberating inside a quickly-deteriorating mind.

One day, the sound became a voice.

"Hello, Edward."

Too familiar. Too familiar.

He was going insane, that was all. He knew it was coming, when he was this exhausted and this deprived and this lonely. Still, he did not turn.

The voice became a touch, became a hand gripping his hair and pulling his head back. "Well? Aren't you going to say hello?" Another hand, icy-cold like the touch of the dead, grasped his bare abdomen.

Finally, Ed opened his mouth.

"Hello, Envy."

The homunculus's grip tightened in a sudden spasm at the name. "Wonderful," he purred. "Just wonderful. Just you and me and all of us, all alone and all together now...Didja miss me?" His voice dropped to a sudden low tenor, sending a shudder of recognition down Ed's spine.

"Creepy bastard. Didn't know you could do voices."

"I can't."

Something flickered inside of Ed's chest, a tiny spark of instinct that made him turn around - and ripped a terrified scream from his throat.

Roy grinned, a horrid mockery of his traditional cocksure smirk. "What's the matter, Fullmetal?" The voice, the voice, the voice was supposed to be the giveaway, but everything was perfect, from the pitch to the intonation -

Ed backed away, stumbling into the desk. "You're dead." He had incontrovertible proof of it, only a few meters away. And this couldn't be Roy Mustang anyway, because his eyes were the same deep black they'd always been, instead of blind, senseless grey.

Roy's face fell. "I am?" It was acting worthy of an award. Then - "Of course I am...how silly of me. It really doesn't feel like it, you know."

"M-Mustang?" Ed stammered, hating himself for it. Of course, as soon as he did, the grin widened across the Colonel's face, twisting and melting into a fountain of red sparks until it became an altogether distinct form. This one wasn't familiar, a teenage boy with a mop of dark brown hair and a pockmarked face.

But a second later, before the transformation had even finished swallowing the remnants of Mustang's blue uniform, the boy's hair suddenly turned decidedly blonde, growing longer and longer -

Ed didn't have to stay to see her blue eyes, before he was running, slamming open doors, desperate to get away.

He'd thought he was alone.

This was infinitely worse.

"Ed! ED!"

The worry in her voice was so real, so honest. But he didn't dare move, hidden in the shadows of an alley, even though he was trying to summon up all of his rage against the monster who was daring, who was stooping so low to use her...

She's dead, you filth, he thought fiercely, refusing to shy away from the word. Let her rest in peace.

"Ed...please..."

Let me rest in peace...

"Ed...my head hurts so much, please, can you make it stop?"

Ed's heart skipped a beat. Inching closer to the mouth of the alleyway, he peered around the corner and out into the street. In the middle, surrounded by mounds of earth and gravestones that dotted the asphalt road, Envy was on his knees, one hand limp on the ground and the other cradling his head.

The voice coming out of his mouth was still Winry's.

"My head hurts...so much..." There was an audible sniff. "It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!" Envy smashed his fist against his head.

Ed took a cautious step out of the alleyway. Envy didn't seem to notice him, still talking to himself in the voice that made Ed's heart swell and fall in equal measure. He took another step, and another.

"Envy," he said quietly, but there was no response. Almost too cowardly to brave it, Ed swallowed, the action scraping his dry throat. "W...Winry?"

When Envy's head snapped up, his eyes were still bright blue.

"Oh, Win..." Ed didn't even have the energy to be happy; he just slumped to his knees beside the homunculus, wrapping his arms around the blue-eyed figure. For a moment, as he...she...leaned into him, it was like having her back.

And then, as abruptly as the moment had begun, it ended with two hands curling in his shirt and suddenly slamming his head into the ground.

Envy's eyes were wine-red again, dark and animalistic. "What did you do to me?" he hissed.

"I didn't do anything."

"GET THEM OUT!"

"Get them..." The truth dawned on Ed, finally. A terrifying truth, a fate worse than death - "Their souls. All of them."

Envy's sharp-toothed growl began slowly to fade, dulling into something akin to numb fear. "Help me," he whispered in a voice that once again was not his own.

Ed couldn't tell if the words or their tone belonged to someone he'd known - some child, perhaps, that he'd met on the road or at some out-of-the-way town. He couldn't tell if Envy was acting, or pleading, or simply dying.

So, once again, (like a coward), he ran.

The dozy bleakness of the dead city was broken, now, by Envy's rantings. They carried in the silence, and Ed tried not to listen, but the snippets of conversations embedded themselves in his mind.

"Brother? Brother, are you there?"

The mug slipped out of his hand and shattered on the floor as he grasped the pendant around his neck instinctively at the voice, hoping for a moment that the blood seal had called its wearer home.

"Brother!"

But it was coming from outside - Ed flung open the door, and stopped dead.

He looked just like Ed remembered - not the gaunt ghost that he'd seen inside the Gate, but round-faced, soft-eyed...human.

"Are you alright?" asked Al-who-was-not-Al (who could not be Al).

"Am I..." Ed swallowed. "Stop it - you - can't be -"

Al looked down at his hands with a smile. "Brother..." He looked back up. "I...I think I'm dead."

Ed said nothing in reply, trying desperately to subdue the frantic hope rising in his chest. "You're...no, you're not," he said, grinning in an attempt at being comforting. Had he been able to see himself, he would have quickly realized just how flat his attempt fell. "You're not dead, you're right here..." Then again, it wasn't Al he was really trying to comfort.

Al cocked his head, thinking for a moment. "I...I suppose. I don't know. It's...it's really hard to concentrate, you know..."

The blond swallowed, trying to will himself to look away and goddammit don't fall for it -

"GET THEM OUT!"

"Their souls. All of them."

"What happened, Al?" he found himself asking, although it came out slightly garbled through his numb lips.

The young boy's glassy, gauzy gaze sharpened, gold eyes locking suddenly onto his brother's. "The..." He swallowed, the effort of trying to remember carved into his face. "Father used us, but it...didn't work? Is - is that what happened? Did we win?"

Ed clasped Al's face between his hands, squeezing his eyes shut to hold back the tears that threatened to fall as he pressed their foreheads together. "The backlash," he whispered. "I...it was my fault."

"Huh?" The timbre of Al's voice changed slightly, but Ed didn't notice.

"I tried to break it - tried to stop him from u-using us as sacrifices." Each word was another iron weight lifted from his shoulders, a confession he'd whispered over and over again but useless, needless, with no ears to hear it. "And - everything went wrong, Al, the entire thing backlashed and now I'm all alone and -"

"So that's what killed him, hm?"

Ed's eyes snapped open, and he threw himself backwards as he realized that the face he'd been holding so tenderly was changing again. Stupid, stupid...he reprimanded himself, trying to push away the sentimentality that had gripped his heart.

Except it wasn't leaving without a fight - because now Hohenheim was staring at him with the same strangely vacant eyes.

He cocked his head. "A backlash. I see." Then he frowned. "Except it's coming back."

"What? What's coming back?"

Hohenheim smiled dreamily, and then spoke with a different voice. "Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. Equivalent Exchange."

Ed swallowed the lump in his throat at the familiar words in his teacher's voice. He supposed the sacrifices probably had the strongest presence, but it was still heartwrenching to realize that Izumi - take-no-prisoners, loudmouthed, wise Sensei - was now just one soul in a multitude.

Then the words themselves processed.

"Wait, what?" he nearly screamed. "It's coming back?" Already his mind was putting the pieces together - the white-hot flash of destructive alchemy that had burst from the epicenter, radiating outwards in waves...stopping at the circle that marked the boundaries of Amestris...and like ripples bouncing off the edge of a basin of water, reverberating back towards Central.

There was - had been - nobody to be hurt by the reverbs and aftereffects. Nobody, that was, except for the one who had triggered the reaction to begin with and the being who held all of Amestris within his bursting seams.

Ed, until the homunculus's arrival, hadn't cared whether he lived or died. He was a nation of one, a flagship without a fleet, half of a whole with no reason and nothing to strive for.

Yet here was a survivor. Here was a companion. Here, although in any other circumstance Ed never would have considered it, was somebody to protect.

"Envy. Envy!" Ed grasped 'Hohenheim's' chin, pulling him down and forcing him to make eye contact. "Envy, I need you to tell me...when's it gonna get here? The echo?"

The blank look in Hohenheim's eyes faded, gold drawing away like mist to reveal sharp shards of amethyst. "Why do you think I came to find you, asshole? You're almost out of time."

Even as the words left Envy's mouth, Ed became aware of of a resonance in the ground, somewhere between vibration and sound. "That's it...?" he whispered, his grip on Envy's chin faltering. "I...what do I do?"

"How the hell should I know?" retorted Envy roughly. On the last word his voice shifted tone, but he wrested back control, panic flickering nakedly over his face.

The resonance changed slightly - it was like static, white noise hanging in the air and driving Ed to distraction. Louder and louder and stronger...

"Tell me something!" Ed cried out, trying in vain to hide his desperation, and there was an almost audible 'snap' as Envy grabbed the front of the alchemist's shirt, pulling his face closer.

"Okay," he growled. "Get. Them. OUT."

A stone of fifty million souls against an echo of the reaction that had created it to begin with...The stone would just win out, reckoned the analytical part of Ed's mind, cold and unfeeling.

The part of him that was starved for simple company asked why he couldn't just bring them all back.

He clenched his metal fist to stabilize himself, but a question remained - "Why are they so...Why do they keep taking you over? They shouldn't be..." (cold, unfeeling, analytical) "Before, the Xerxian souls...they didn't have minds." Ed paused, temporarily seized with a horrid thought that by saying it he would make it true, then barrelled on. "What's different?"

"What's different is that you interrupted it, idiot -" Envy shuddered, a pained look crossing his face, and then with a shower of red sparks, another face glanced up at Ed - the prince, the prince who'd sold his soul, eyes open but dark instead of wine-red. Of course. Homunculi didn't have distinct souls. Greed was gone.

"It's like with me," explained Ling in a rather inappropriately lackadaisical tone. "I fought my way to the top and didn't get swallowed. Except you interrupted the process. Father couldn't handle it - so the chain reaction continued down all of his children, until the only one with the...let's say, elasticity to swallow them all without killing off their minds took them -"

Envy regained control, although he kept Ling's face, only his expression changing as he gripped Ed's neck. "The point is hurry the fuck up or we're both going to die!"

Ed could feel the tension hanging in the air, and it wasn't coming just from them. But it was odd. He didn't feel in danger, even with an unstable, unbalanced person squeezing his neck.

He was just so thankful not to be alone.

He placed his flesh hand over Envy's, and felt the created tendons relax under his. He pulled it gently away, guiding it to his cheek. Envy started at that, even as he slowly fell into his preferred form, green locks falling down by his gaunt cheeks again and Ling's face once again nothing but a memory.

"I know," whispered Ed. "But if I do -" He stopped himself, realizing that with Envy's state of mind, telling him he was going to die no matter what...

He couldn't do it.

"...Okay," he said, still in a hollow whisper. Maybe I can...can just save one -

"Pipsqueak..." urged Envy warningly, eyes flickering back and forth. The building in the air wasn't quite an earthquake - it was more like the calm before the storm, with a terrible energy flickering to an inevitable resolution.

Maybe I can just save one. And I won't be alone. God help me, I won't be alone anymore.

Ed clapped his hands together, willing up a spark of alchemy, and the noise, metal against flesh, thundered like a silent crash in the emptiness. Envy made no sound, watching Ed's hands with a curious, hungry look, and with a rising sense of guilt (that he shouldn't be feeling; Envy was just a monster with a thousand faces, who had killed Hughes) the young alchemist pressed them against the homunculus's chest.

Ed's eyes slid closed as he focused on the array taking shape in his mind - a simple one, just a release of power.

What a waste, chuckled a voice.

His eyes almost sprung back open, but he tried to keep his concentration. The voice was irritatingly familiar, though. It would have been years since he'd heard it.

All that energy - all of us and you just want to release it?

I'm trying to set you free, spat Ed in return. He was just going crazy, except -

Brother's right, Edward. You could do more...

It was the Stone. The Stone, trickling into him, and these voices - they were two boys he'd met who'd stolen his name, tried to use it for experiments, but in the end, they hadn't been so bad -

"Xenotime," he gritted out.

Russell and Fletcher Tringham chuckled, and somewhere behind his eyes he could see their faces - memory or magic? He didn't know. He'd never used a Stone before.

The promise he'd made to Al suddenly came back to him, heavy and foreboding, and he almost pulled away, but only the fear of backlash, ingrained deeper now than even the fear of the Gate, stopped him. The rush of power was starting to build inside his chest, swelling and pulsing like a second heart.

There's so little of us... whispered Fletcher, and another voice, startling Ed's eyes open, finished the sentence.

Make things grow, Big Brother.

"Elysia," he murmured, and he suddenly realized his cheeks were wet. Make things grow. Make things grow. Make things...grow...

The earth shook, and he looked up at Envy. "I'm -" he started to sigh, and then realized that the homunculus's frame was shaking with the attempt to suppress his cries of pain. "No - I -" He tried to pull his hands away, but Envy gripped them and held them in place.

"Get - them - out," hissed the green-haired homunculus, face glittering with red sparks where he was struggling to keep his own shape -

-and suddenly, suddenly everything was red, a storm of faces and hands and souls.

He was inside the Stone.

"N-no...this...this isn't right..."

Yet, inside the place that was red sky and sea wrapped into one, there was another place. It looked like another Stone, but that wasn't possible.

He could feel his feet on the ground and his hands on Envy's cold chest. Yet here he was.

Nothing was impossible.

Ed reached out and touched the Stone, and was suddenly assailed with a whole new crowd of voices. These ones didn't give voice to words or thoughts the way the Amestrian ones did, nothing but long screams. They were the Xerxians.

Somewhere in the screams, Ed heard something else. A confession. The deepest wish in Envy's heart. (Because this was his heart, wasn't it?)

And just like that, Ed couldn't kill him. Just like that, he knew what he had to do.

He just had to hope that it would work.

Throwing his arms around Envy, he held the homunculus tightly against him, ignoring the other boy's surprised gasp as he poured every bit of energy he had left into the transmutation, sending it not just through his hands but through his entire body.

The reverberation of the backlash that had killed every living being within Amestris's borders, save two, came thundering back to its centre like a wave of pure lightning.

And just in time to match it and meet it, a swell of energy rose from what had been Central headquarters. It roared with a thousand voices and smashed into it, cresting like a wave and then diving into the ground.

Every tree in Central began to bloom.

Grass broke through the asphalt and concrete, and the parks with their benches started to grow so green that it hurt the eyes, if there had been anybody left to see it. Moss spread across the rocks, thick and lush like a regal carpet.

Elysia's soul skipped and laughed among the flowers before passing on; with her came the legions of children whose lives had also been cut short.

And in the middle of it all, Edward finally slept, because for once, everything had gone right.

"What have you done?"

Ed blinked, opening his eyes slowly to see Envy struggling to his feet, looking around in shock. "Oh, hey," he said dreamily. "It worked."

A second later he was being shaken, teeth rattling in his head. "Why am I alive?" hissed Envy, purple eyes sharp and piercing. "Why am I -"

"Why not?" Ed fired back.

Envy ran his fingers over his body, eyes widening. "I'm - you -"

"You're human," finished Ed with a grin.

"Fuck you, runt! I'm going to get you for this! -"

"Why?"

Envy paused, glaring at Ed, and then stormed off in a huff. Ed watched mildly as he sat down with his back to a tree a fair distance away.

It was funny. He couldn't bring himself to be scared of Envy anymore.

Because they both needed somebody. That was the truth. And now they had a whole new world to explore; Amestris's soil and growth sent into overdrive with almost fifty million souls. Not trapped, no; not like Father had had them. Free.

Ed reached for the blood seal around his neck, and suddenly realized that it was blank. The blood that had marked it for so long was gone, wiped clean.

"I...I guess you're gone for good now," he murmured, grief threatening to close in on his heart again. But instead, he pressed his lips to the blank circle of metal, and broke the leather thong, digging a little hole in the ground and laying Al to rest.

Once Ed had finished digging his final grave, he strode over to where Envy was still bemusedly looking around.

It was time to stop surviving, and start living again.