(A/N: Help, I've tripped and fallen into character backstory! (Spell-check wants to Xingese to 'Sexiness'? Really?)The front-story will begin again after this. OCs ahoy! I was vaguely inspired by the Opium Wars when I wrote this, but it's not at all similar to any historical events. Then again, nothing else is either. Also, Envy + pronouns = AAARRRRGGG!)

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"Tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"About yourself."

"...Hello, my name is Zolf J. Kimblee. I'm an alchemist and a soldier, as well as many other things considerably less mentionable."

"That's a start."

"Was their something in particular?"

"All of it, in particular."

"All of what?"

"You."

"You mean...my past?"

"Yeah. You always change the subject."

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

"I can't just tell you everything."

"You keeping secrets?"

"Nothing like that. It's just...life isn't so simple, to fall into place like puzzle pieces in retrospect. At least, mine isn't."

As an individual, he was logical, organized and analytical. But he had not always been the person he was. The further back his memory reached, the more chaotic and ambiguous the narrative became, until it was like tracing the thoughts of a stranger. The pieces didn't fit together like they should, and some of them were absent altogether.

"'Cause you're weird." Envy said.

"Not as weird as you."

"Twice as weird as me."

"Half as much, at most."

They tended to tease one another on account of their strangeness, having for the first time someone with whom there was no risk of judgement. Their were united in their deviance, if not entirely similar.

"I could at least tell my life's story."

"You tell it then."

"There you go changing the subject again, weirdo. But you're not getting out of it."

"I could tell you some things. Maybe a lot of things, but not everything. Certainly not all at once."

"Okay, just some things then."

"Again, we come to the question of which ones."

"Let's start with this," Envy's fingers alighted on a transmutation tattoo, "how did you learn alchemy?"

"Picked it up here and there."

Envy glared.

"It's true." Kimblee protested.

"You can do better."

"Alright. The first person who taught it to me was my grandfather."

"And?"

"That's it."

"Oh come on."

"He taught me the basics, which I expect you're familiar with." He shrugged. "That's all there is to it. What else do you want to know?"

"Where did he learn it?"

"I don't know. Anything before my grandparents came to this country was never discussed." He smiled ruefully. "The ridiculous stories I told myself, though, when I was a child. I imagined that my grandfather had been a powerful alchemist of noble lineage, fleeing deadly political turmoil that would have followed him to the ends of his own nation."

"It's not entirely ridiculous. I don't know Xing like I do Amestris, but if it's anything like here, alchemists are often people of significance."

"Perhaps. But it didn't do me any good, spinning such idle fancy. I built Xing up to be a paradise in my mind, a fantasy world where all the strife I knew in Amestris would not exist. I used to dream of going back to my 'home country' as I thought of it. Going from rags to riches, as per my family's supposed prominence, escaping obscurity and weakness in one country for a life of power and luxury in another."

"Dunno about the rest of it, but you haven't done that bad for yourself in regards to power."

"True." He allowed himself a momentary grin, although it faded quickly. "But it was naïve. I had to let go of those daydreams in order to make anything of myself."

"Would you ever want to go to Xing?"

"I did go, eventually. Yes, there's a story for you." His face split into a wicked grin. "I went, and I can never go back."

"Why?"

"I ran afoul of a very powerful drug lord. To this day, not only can I not go back, anyone with my general characteristics might be killed and never know why."

"What did you do?" Envy asked, laughing.

"Messed around with one of his concubines for one thing, but that wasn't the real issue…no, I should start at the beginning. When I was old enough to view myself as a man – around twelve or thirteen – I became involved with opium smuggling. It was easy; it came out of Xing, carried by people not much different from myself and my family. I had an advantage over most of them, as I spoke Amestrian. I began as a minor smuggler, but I rose quickly within the ranks and became one who was entrusted with carrying shipments between this country and the other. And so, when I was fifteen, I came for the first time to what I considered my homeland." The word was bitter.

"And you were as much a foreigner there as you were here." Envy said. He knew how human societies worked, and had seen that conclusion coming a mile away.

"More so. Their society is quite ethnically homogenous, as a half-breed I stuck out like a sore thumb."

"Were you disappointed?"

"Devastated. Where I hoped for reprieve from the alienation I felt in this country, I was more unwelcome there than I was here. I saw for the first time that I belonged nowhere, and to no one."

"You belong with me."

He enfolded Envy's hand in his own.

"If I do, it's because of the rude awakening I suffered then. For the first time, I was forced to question my own standards, the standards most humans are born to and live by. Us versus them, my kind as superior to their kind. If Xing was so pettily biased, I wondered, was it really so good to be counted as its native son? Would I want such status, to be counted among people who I could now see were as small-minded as those of any other culture or nation? The answer, inevitably, was no. If to belong was to be as they were, I would rather be alone."

"That must be hard, for a human."

"Devastating, like I said. The truth is not a pleasant thing. Anyway, in that condition, I and my fellow smugglers were the guests of Yìnzhn-Ji, an outlaw and a drug lord who lived outside any government's authority. He maintained vast fields of opium poppies, acres upon acres of red when they bloomed. We gave him his share of the profits we had collected in Amestris, and received the next supply of refined poppy resin which we would be transporting…"

He felt silent. Envy shifted impatiently.

"And?"

"There's so much I could tell you, about that place. I hardly know where to begin."

"You mentioned concubines."

"Yes. As any outlaw drug lord would, he had plenty of them. So many that their beauty became common. Anywhere else, they would have been jewels, but with him they were pebbles, his to pick up and throw away at leisure."

"Only to be picked up again by lonely smugglers in a foreign land?"

"Precisely. I would have been killed if Yìnzhn-Ji found out, but when one contends with the likes of him, they become desensitized to the risk of death. Anyway, I found favor with a woman named Hua-Fen. She had been one of his favorites in the past, and had born a child. I don't know what happened to that child, she never spoke about it, but her pregnancy had left her with stretch marks on her breasts and stomach. Flawed as such, she was worthless to Yìnzhn-Ji, although so lovely many men would have spilled blood for her, their own or others. I certainly would have, had she asked it of me."

Envy gave him a dark look.

"Are you jealous?"

"Oh, ya think?"

"You should be glad that I knew her. She taught me what to do with a woman. Just as Yìnzhn-Ji had his pick of his harem, they had their pick of his guests, and the only determining factor was that I pleased her. She wouldn't let me inside her until I'd made her come at least once. In the end, I'm just a whore, she'd say. I'm a whore and this is my payment."

"Seems a bit selfish."

"She could afford to be unabashedly selfish. If I complained, her response was simply, fine, be alone then. I never lasted more than a day, before I was back at the door of her chamber like a lost puppy. I wasn't in love with her – I didn't know her and I knew myself even less. But I was as close to love as it was possible to be, in that condition."

Envy still looked sour, and he continued,

"She wasn't the most interesting person I encountered there. A much more colorful character was Yìnzhn-Ji himself. He was the most jovial and generous man you could ever know. Until he was angered, and then he would deal out deaths and tortures which might shock even you. And then he would return to being carefree and good-natured as a baby, perpetually nursed on the finest pleasures. Life had scarcely given him cause to leave his swaddling of riches, and so he delighted in tales of distant lands. In this way, I became popular with him for a brief time. The dialect of that region bore only a vague resemblance to the one I had spoken with my family, and he was almost as amused by my verbal stumbling as he was by the ridiculous stories I invented about Amestris."

Envy grinned. "Do tell."

"The coloring of the people for starters. He was fascinated by the idea of fair hair. Jiro, a fellow smuggler, was part Ishbalan, and he had the telltale ashen hair. Yìnzhn-Ji would simply stroke it in fascination. Jiro, like his Ishbalan forefathers, was both strong and very proud; he was known for punching people in the face if they bumped into him. But he had to sit there and allow it; I could almost feel the rage coming off him in waves, like tangible heat, but to object was to face the worst kind of death. I told Yìnzhn-Ji about people with hair and skin of every shade imaginable. He believed all of it, anything I invented, he was very naïve in that regard. Eventually one of his eunuchs told me to stop, lest they be ordered to find him a woman with blue hair and orange skin. "

"Although nothing you told him about this country could be stranger than the truth."

"True." He said with a chuckle. "I doubt even he would have believed that. Now, Yìnzhn-Ji came from a line of alchemists. There are those who say that opium enhances alchemical ability, and his forefathers turned to the poppy's cultivation for those ends. A few generations later, Yìnzhn-Ji never went a day without inhaling smoke of the flower, and if he had ever known how to perform a basic transmutation, he had long ago forgotten. But he had in his possession the writings and research of previous generations, the culmination of a line of alchemists dating back to the dawn of that ancient civilization."

Envy's mind was drawn of its own accord to the texts of Xingian ideographs which Kimblee often scrutinized.

"Xing does" He continued, "have a more or less standardized system of writing. Complicated, but basically consistent. So although when speaking Xingese with them I often embarrassed myself, my level of reading was actually quite high. And while Yìnzhn-Ji fiercely guarded his women and drugs, he would never have suspected the person I was then of being interested in anything else. It probably would have surprised them to learn that I could read at all.

"So it was relatively easy, with Hua-Fen's help, to obtain access to Yìnzhn-Ji's archives. I had turned away from alchemy after my grandfather's death, but my interest was rekindled to an inferno as I explored his dusty, disused archives. It was a breath of fresh air when I had been unknowingly suffocating. I realized that I couldn't go on living as I was, I had the potential to be so much more, and that potential lay with alchemy. But I faced a dilemma. I had once dreamed of returning to Xing and becoming a great alchemist there. As it turned out, I had to choose between the two. If I stole from him, my only hope was to flee the country, and yet if I did not steal from him I would never possess the secrets I coveted, for what was recorded there was not the kind of stuff you learn from spending a few hours reading by a single candle at night, straining your ears all the while for the footstep of a sentry."

"What made you choose alchemy?"

"I had already lost faith in humanity. Both individually and collectively, as in the case of a country. I placed no value in either. Although I did beg Hua-Fen to come back to Amestris with me. She told me that all that was between us was contingent on the fact that I did not own her, and if she left with me to be my wife, that would change. I wanted her to come anyway. Obviously she refused. Her life there was better there than what I could have offered. So I took the documents and fled, and my fellow smugglers were undoubtedly killed on account of that theft. I do regret that. But if I had it to do again I would do the same."

"And then you came back here?"

"Yes. I lived for a few years on very limited means while I studied what I had stolen. In that time, I also began to study in depth the culture of this country, having resigned myself to a life therein. It was a rough education, to say the least, but it eventually led to the practice of alchemy which I perform now, as well as my ability to pass as a person not very different from others. When I had mastered both arts sufficiently, I enlisted as a soldier, and eventually a state alchemist. And for a brief span of time my life was quite normal."

"And then you met this weird creature and it all got fucked up again."

"It got interesting again."

"So what else? If you considered yourself all-grown-up at twelve, what about your childhood?"

"I'm tired of storytelling. It's your turn. Tell me something from your past."

"Hmm...there was that one time I took on Greed's form and proposed to every one of his girlfriends..."

.

Even when Kimblee slept, Envy often didn't. There were other things of interest. He or she – for Envy was always gendered at such times – liked to curl into his sleeping form, absorbing the slow rise-and-fall of his breath, or sneak gentle fingers against his neck to find the pulse ticking against its fingertips, and ached for want of something it didn't understand. (Humans, invariably spend a number of months being enclosed in the motions of life, their mother's dyadic heartbeat being the most basic rhythm a human recognizes). Sometimes these tempos were soothing enough to lull Envy to sleep, even though its body did not need rest. Which was lucky, for when Envy did sleep it was never for long. It wasn't always amours activity which kept them up at night.

Too often, Envy would wake to chill touch, the breathless whisper of Pride. He never harmed Envy, but knew just what to say to fill him/her with distress, more than physical pain might have.

(I.e:

"I should kill him. I could. He's replaceable."

"Do it, and I'll fuck every man who reminds me of him, just to spite you.")

More often than not, however, it was simply the same old memory-nightmares.

Envy was a walking along a dirt path. A row of palm trees on the right, a moat of hewn white marble with crystalline water flowing on the left. Her butter-yellow hair is braided over her shoulder, her skirt is white, on her feet are leather sandals. It is warm, the beams of sunlight kiss her skin. She is carrying a basket of dates she bought at market, to bring home as a treat for her waiting children. Then doom falls, the sky darkens. Then comes pain, death, and worse, the knowledge she will never see her children again, never give them the dates that will rot in the sun beside her corpse...

Envy woke at a touch on his face. The bedside lamp was on, and it was Kimblee's touch which woke him - as opposed to Pride's, thankfully. Envy knows who and where they both are, and yet is still disoriented. The memory of that petty human life seems, for a moment, so much more real than a humunculi's long, dark deathlessness.

"I was thrashing again, wasn't I?" It's not really a question.

"What do you dream of, that disturbs you so much?"

"Come here." Envy held out one arm. "I'll tell you a bedtime story."

He did so, settling with his head on Envy's shoulder. Their hair mingled on the pillow, a river of undifferentiated shining blackness.

"Once upon a time, there was a magical land in the desert, hugging the banks of a river. It was green and unsurprisingly fertile, an Eden on earth, less because of the river than their use of alchemy, of which even the scraps of recollection are enough to make this country vibrant and prosperous."

"Xerxes."

"Very good." He said with a playful, teacher-like affect. "These people had power, and like all humans, they used their power to their own harm as much as to their benefit. What they had only whetted their appetite for more. They call Pride the deadliest sin, but in my opinion humanity's biggest vice is greed. Perhaps why he gets along with them so well. Anyway, their avarice reached beyond the margin of this very world. They beat against the gate of creation, and from beyond it..."

"Your father?"

"The thing which would become him, yes." He closed his eyes for a moment, and spoke as though to himself. "What was his origin - was he born, and where, and of what? Or does he have a beginning at all? What was his substance, before the physical world? How did he come into it knowing so much about it? I'll probably never know. Maybe I wouldn't understand even if he told me. All I know of him is what humans knew: they named him homunculus, and he shared with them knowledge which mortals were never meant to have." He opened his eyes and continued.

"The emperor, you see, coveted immortality. He had, under his will, the greatest civilization the world has ever seen, but he was not satisfied. So, in his avarice, he impelled my father to give him the secret to eternal life. It was something of a hostage situation. Father didn't have the body which he has now; the only thing which held him in this world was a beaker made of glass. If it were to break, just like if a human's body breaks, the soul departs to regions unknown, or perhaps nowhere at all. The Emperor wanted eternal life, Father only wanted life, which all humans have and take for granted. As it turns out, the means to both their goals was the same."

"The Philosopher's Stone."

"Yes. You must have wondered, along with everyone else in the world, what happened in Xerxes." Envy's voice was gleeful, almost sing-song. "The pinnacle of civilization in one moment, a vacant ruin in the next. Everyone laid down and died, and nobody knows why. But I do. What happened was my Father, his birth into the physical world. The Emperor exchanged the lives of his people for an ever-living body. But Father lied to him, and he was the one who got that body in the end. So while a human gains energy from water and air, my life is sustained through the harvest of every human life-force in a nation. And when I sleep, I relive their final moments. Although the loss of human life doesn't bother me, experiencing their death as they did is...unpleasant."

Kimblee was silent for a time, adrift in the sea of Envy's story.

"Immortality," he murmured at last, "and yet whenever you sleep, death. Equal exchange is truly inescapable." Something else occurred to him, and he frowned slightly. "So, all these months I've been experimenting with philosopher's stones in the lab, I've been –"

"Experimenting with one in bed, yes."

There was another long pause as he mulled over this new piece of information.

"I can't imagine those things as being akin to you."

"They're not, really. Those stones are to me what a fingernail clipping is to a human."

"If your father already made such a one, why does he need the help of humans like myself and doctor Marcoh in making more?"

"That was centuries ago, even his memory isn't infallible. And the transition into a physical body jarred his mind. A lot of what happened in Xerxes is lost, even to him." Envy looked troubled for a moment, then, "do you…still think I have a soul, knowing this?"

"Why not? Your Father clearly does, for what else would exist before his body, if not his soul?"

"Just because he has one doesn't mean I do. What if I'm simply an empty vessel he created, and what seems to be a personality in me is just psychic castoff – the imprint of Xerxian personalities on the stone forged from their lives?"

He raised himself up enough to Envy's eyes. Envy felt pinned in place by the sudden intensity in his gaze.

"That's not true." He said, slowly and firmly, as though the words alone could make it so.

"You don't know that."

"If that was the case, your personality would reflect the average Xerxian, and that is clearly not the case. For one thing, their culture was highly paternalistic – I see it in your Father, in calling himself that, but I don't see it in you at all."

"Really?"

"Yes. Women were considered inferior beings, incapable of higher thought or rationality. No Xerxian would be female if they had any choice in the matter. Why would you of all people cast yourself as an inferior being?"

Envy had never looked at it in those terms, not being accustomed to viewing himself within the context of human society. It made sense, though. It was consoling, even in the face of the yawning emptiness which Envy always felt inside.

"Want to see it?" Envy asked, on a whim.

"See what?"

"My core. My center."

"...If I can." It was such a strange concept.

Envy opened his mouth, and his tongue seemed to split down the middle, the pink flesh parting to reveal shining red stone. Kimblee stared, fascinated, and then on impulse reached out towards Envy's face.

"May I?"

Envy inclined his head ever so slightly, and Kimblee slipped one finger into the warm cavity of Envy's mouth, coming to rest on the stone. It was neither hot nor cold to the touch, but there was a sensation that was half pulse, half eclectic current. The rudimentary stones he had handled before had had a ghost of that power, but Envy's was orders of magnitude more powerful. Alive.

Without thinking, he withdrew his hand and kissed Envy instead, with his tongue exploring more thoroughly. The contact was intense, the touch of a live wire; not pleasurable or painful, yet so strong it was akin to both at once. He maintained it for as long as he could before pulling away, shaken down to his bones.

For Envy, it was the most intimate thing they had yet done, and it had happened almost without thought, so naturally.

"You never run out of ways to fascinate me."

Envy grinned. "What base is that anyway? Fifth?"

.

(A/N: If you have a hard time picturing Kimblee as being at all 'like a lost puppy' (dunno why you would) just bare in mind that he was fifteen and in general a very different person than he later became. He was never a nice kid, but less emotionally moderated than he later became. There's a lot to his life which effected the way he turned out that I didn't include here. It will come up, but not for a while yet. And I've always wished the series explained a little more about what Father actually was and where he came from. Thanks for reading!)