tap your heels together three times but don't forget

Ed/Riza, Talking With Ghosts

2008-09-14T23:40:21Z

You know, I got on here yesterday and realized that this entry was just... gone. WTF? And three things I'd had under a cut weren't under a cut anymore.

Title: Talking With Ghosts
Pairing: Ed/Riza
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Out of all of them, she was probably the only one that didn’t regret all the things she had never said to him, because she’d said all that she wanted.

Disclaimer: Just borrowing, unfortunately.

Author’s Notes: This is actually a couple years old. I found it, cleaned it up, and decided to post it here instead of just on FF.net. It completely disregards the movie and all the facts about Hawkeye’s past and family revealed by the manga, since I wrote it before I read more than two chapters of the manga.

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Talking With Ghosts

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Riza visited Edward’s grave once a month. She brought pastries instead of flowers, because she was certain that he would have appreciated them more. She came early in the morning so she had plenty of time to give Edward the latest news.

“I saw Alphonse yesterday. His daughter was with him.” She sat with her back against the headstone and her legs curled beneath her. “Every time I see her she looks more like you.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and closed her eyes, tilting her head back against the smooth marble. It hurts to look sometimes. You’d be thirty-six. Would you have settled down and started a family like your brother? I can’t see it, but maybe that’s only because I can’t see you any older than when you walked away.

They had sometimes gone for coffee or a late dinner together when Ed was in town, and an unlooked for friendship had sprouted up between them. At first, she had felt it was lopsided: she would almost always be the one to talk and he would almost always be the one to listen. Eventually she figured out that Ed preferred it that way, that he kept coming back because she didn’t expect him to say anything. Listening was a skill that both brothers had, though you would hardly know it just by looking.

“Nessa wants to learn alchemy. She found a box of old newspaper clippings and thinks you’re just grand.” A light summer breeze played with her bangs, brought her the scent of freshly cut grass. “She wants to be a State Alchemist now. No offense, but I hope it’s just a phase.”

It had started the day that Riza’s mother had died. She had gotten the call right after lunch, from an old aunt who had told her, simply, bluntly, that her mother had died in the night, and the funeral was scheduled to take place the coming weekend, and could she make it? The colonel had left earlier in the day, and no one had noticed that anything was amiss after she had hung up the phone. She had worked diligently through the last three hours of the day and when five o’clock rolled around she nodded at the other’s goodbyes. When the door had closed behind Havoc, she’d sat staring at the phone.

Her mother was dead. Riza hadn’t even known that she had been ill.

Her mother was dead.

Of course, she hadn’t talked to her mother in years. Her father, a professor at the local university, had not agreed with her decision to join the military instead of furthering her education. They had argued, not for the first time, but it had been one argument too many and she had left. Her mother had tried to reason with her, tried to convince her to stay. Stubborn and angry, she had ignored the woman’s pleas and after that ignored her letters and phone calls.

Finally the letters stopped coming, the calls became few and far between. She spent a whole year hurting, refusing to break down and apologize. She had always meant to resolve things. But there had been Ishbal, and then the blank time after, and then there had been the Flame Alchemist and his vision- the one that gave her hope that maybe her dreams of making a difference were not pointless after all.

And then it was too late.

The door to the Colonel’s office had opened and Fullmetal had stepped out, yawning and shrugging on his coat. He’d looked at her and his eyebrows had scaled his forehead. “What’s wrong?”

She would usually have said nothing was wrong, that she was fine, but he had startled her and she had said, “My mother died.” She’d never been able to figure out what had made her tell him.

His expression had turned sympathetic. He had walked up to her and wiped away her tears with the sleeve of his coat. She hadn’t realized she was crying. “Come on Lieutenant. Let’s go grab a bite to eat.”

He’d helped her gather up her things and then took her to a small café a few blocks from headquarters. It had been awkward at first. They weren’t particularly close. It was the Colonel who dealt with the Elrics the most, the rest of them always unsure of their footing. Edward was a child who had seen too much, all hard angles and cold steel one moment and boyish grin and laughing golden eyes the next. He was intelligent to a point where it was almost unnerving, more perceptive than people gave him credit for. Treating him as a child never felt right, yet for all he had been through he was not an adult. Alphonse was easier. His sweet soul and unfailing manners made it hard to feel awkward around him, and he never minded being treated like a child. He seemed to like it, and Riza could imagine why.

She had asked him where Alphonse was. It was strange to see Edward without his brother by his side, and Riza noticed that it made him seem taller, older. He told her that Winry was in town, and Alphonse had taken her shopping. He had decided to use the time to finish his report, but he’d fallen asleep and the Bastard (and Riza noticed that when Roy was not around to hear it, the insult sounded almost affectionate) hadn’t woken him.

“Can’t be too mad at him.” Ed had said. “At least this way I missed having to buy Winry dinner and souvenirs.” His shoulders had hunched. “With how much she charges to fix my arm you’d think you could afford her own damn tools.”

He hadn’t asked her about her mother, or treated her any differently than he always did. That was probably what had made her tell him. That and the fact that she knew if any one of her comrades knew what it was like to lose a mother, it was Edward.

“I didn’t even know she was sick.” she started. “I haven’t talked to her in years.” By that time, they had finished their meal and she was sipping coffee while he was eating his third slice of pie. Back behind the grief and shock, a small voice was asking where someone so tiny packed all that food away.

Ed had not prompted her to say more, had just listened intently. So she continued. “She wrote me all the time after I left, called me once a day, and I ignored her. I wouldn’t talk to her. She probably thought that I hated her.”

Ed had said something to that, but what it was she could not remember. Maybe it had been “If she hated you, wouldn’t she have stopped calling?” or more likely “If she knew you well, then she knew how stubborn you were, and had probably decided to just give you time.”

His expression had been warm, non-judgmental, and just a little sad, and all the words that she had kept inside for so long just came tumbling out. She had told him things she had never told anyone else. About her mother and her sisters and summers on her uncle’s farm in the south. How she had loved to run through the fields barefoot and splash in the puddles left by the rain. She had told him how she and her father had always been at odds, two strong wills that refused to bend, her mother caught in the middle. She told him about years of regretting the arguments but never having the courage to go back. He had listened, and understood. He’d walked her home and made her tea and exacted a promise from her that she’d lay down to bed and even sleep in a little the next morning. He had left the next morning and hadn’t returned for a week. They acted no different towards each other at the office.

They ran into each other as she was leaving work and he was leaving the library. He’d suggested they go for coffee. It became habit.

“We’re going on a picnic tomorrow. Your brother’s idea. We’re making Roy come along.” She huffed, thumped her head back against the headstone. “And somehow I’ve been saddled with making the potato salad and the chicken. Despite all of your efforts, I never did become a decent cook. But, well, food’s food, right?”

It was Ed that Riza told about her sister’s wedding. About being too afraid to go. “It would make my father so uncomfortable if I was there. And it’s supposed to be a happy day.”

“Wouldn’t she be happy to see you there?” he had asked, the warm but sad expression on his face, and it moments like that when he had seemed more adult than teenager.

“I doubt it.” she’d said. She had went in the end anyway and tried to stay in the back, unnoticed, but her sister had spotted her and dragged her into a happy hug, crying and laughing and forgiving her without thought. Her father had hugged her, too, and said how proud he was of her, and she had cried like a child into the front of his coat.

It was to Ed she confided her feelings for Mustang, of the admiration that had turned into something else over the years. It was Ed she told of her desire to one day leave the military and travel to Xing, Creta, and all the other places she had studied about in school. “I want to see the world beyond our borders.” They found they had quite a bit in common. In their likes and dislikes, their habits, their fierce devotion to a single person that meant the world to them.

She found herself looking forward to seeing him, found that Al’s clanking footsteps coming down the hall or the sight of a red coat and golden braid had a pleasant warmth spreading through her. It dawned on her one evening, while she and Ed sat in her living room and discussed Cretan literature over take-out and wine he was too young to be drinking, that he was probably her closest friend.

“Roy’s not…” She pulled at the grass, agitated. “I know that you loved him, in your own way. It’s obvious that he loved you.” she smiled sadly. “I’m not sure you’d want to see him now.”

Slowly, stealthily, her feelings for Ed shifted, and she found that sometimes when he grinned at her she felt something flutter, butterfly wings shivering against her ribcage. He grew and he changed, his journey honed him down to muscle, sinew, and elegant bones. It should have made him gaunt but it made him sharp-edged and dangerously beautiful. She was not the only one to notice, either. Girls at nearby tables would eye him, elbow each other and giggle. Waitresses twice his age would color when he smiled at them. It had given her a tiny thrill to know that he did not even notice them, his attention focused entirely on her and their conversation.

Every once in a while, as they walked back to the office or he walked her home, she would catch him watching her out of the corner of her eye, and she thought that maybe, maybe his feelings had changed too.

“Is… did you ever imagine things ending up like this? Or did you not allow yourself to think past restoring Al?” She closed her eyes against the sudden burn of tears. Twenty years later and the loss of him could still stop her breath in her throat. Would it have been too hard to continue, had you known what was ahead? Could you have kept walking forward if you’d known you were on a death march? “Did you know, Edward, what it was going to cost you?”

Only once did Ed talk while she listened. It was towards the End- that’s how she thought of that terrible night, the End. He’d told her that he wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but he was afraid. Not for himself. He’d been oddly resigned to the fate he saw waiting for himself. No, he was afraid for Al. He didn’t want Al to be alone. He didn’t want Al to be in danger. He had asked her- begged her- to protect Al, should anything happen to him.

They had been sitting in the Rockbell’s kitchen.

“What do you think is going to happen?” she had asked, scared because it wasn’t like Ed to give up before the fight had even started.

He had looked at her with eyes that were too old, far too old for a boy his age, and her heart had clenched. “I have to fix our mistakes.”

Their meeting with him in Central had been almost surreal. His clothes had been covered in dust and he had smelled of blood and alchemy. She listened to him and Roy talk and realized that the weary, somber young man she had often caught glimpses of during their long conversations was all that was left.

“Good luck.” she had told him as he got out of the car.

“And to you.” He had placed his hand on her shoulder for a second, squeezed lightly. “Goodbye.”

She had watched him run off into the sunset through her review mirror and it had dawned on her that he had never said goodbye to her before, always “Later!” the way that teenagers did. She told herself not to think about it, and there were more important things at hand so she didn’t.

When she had heard that they had found Alphonse she had known. It had been such a bittersweet feeling. Alphonse was restored. Edward had accomplished his impossible goal. He’d died but he’d left behind a beautiful little boy he had loved beyond all words.

He’d died, and Riza suspected he’d taken a piece of all of them with him.

She’d visited his grave the first time with flowers, stared down at the headstone and wondered if he was watching her or if he’d already passed on. She’d asked him, and then she’d told him Alphonse still thought he was alive, and before she knew it she was sitting there while the sun went down, talking to his ghost as openly as she had talked to him.

So it was Edward she had told about her concerns for the Colonel’s health. (she always called Roy “Colonel” when she talked to Edward, because that’s what the young man had known him as) It was Ed she told about her worries during the trial. It was Ed she told about her relationship to Roy, and Ed she cried to when the relationship fell apart.

“We’re not who we used to be.” she had told him. “I think that losing you and Maes broke him. I still love him though, and it hurts to know that it’s not enough.”

It was Ed she told about her father’s death. Ed she told about her promotion to Colonel. She confided how confused she was about Havoc. She told him that he had been right, and maybe she didn’t know her own heart as well as she thought, but that was only because she tried too hard. She told Ed about her marriage to Havoc, and she knew that wherever he was, he was laughing.

She told him that out of all of them, she was probably the only one that didn’t regret all the things she had never said to him, because she’d said all that she wanted- unless you counted the unspoken wish that she’d been younger, that he’d been older, that they could have somehow been something other than mother/son/sister/brother. He wouldn’t have wanted to hear that, and it wouldn’t have changed anything. Besides, she was sure that he had known.

Sometimes she felt closer to him talking to the empty grave than she had before he’d left- yes, left, because now that Alphonse had given up she had started to believe that he wasn’t dead but gone someplace they couldn’t follow. Alive, even if only in their hearts.

fic found in a dark, forgotten corner of my hard drive

2008-06-05T07:02:05Z

In the process of trying to declutter I found old, old fic. I think there was once a time where I meant to go somewhere with these. Not sure if I'll pick them back up again or leave them as is.

Fullmetal Alchemist

(Roy/Ed-ish)

“Ed.”

“Yeah?”

“Was there something you forgot to mention?”

Ed twirled the pen in slender, nimble fingers, deliberately Not Looking at Roy where the man stood, wearing the expression of no expression that came from being too shocked to know what expression to settle on.

“Edward?” Roy prompted, a little desperately.

Gold hair slipped over slender shoulders as Edward bent down, carefully inked in the last few lines of the array. “Well, there were... a few minor, unexpected side effects.”

“Minor side effects, hm?”

Demonstrating that the ‘side effects’ had in no way effected dexterity or resident attitude problem, Edward threw the pen unerringly at Roy’s forehead, shouted, “Who’s so flat-chested you’d never even know they’d been turned into a girl?!?!?!?”

Roy examined the far from flat additions to Edward’s chest, and couldn’t think of how to answer that.

Fullmetal Alchemist
(Ed/other!Winry)

Irina was not Winry. Winry never stared at his false arm with such pity. Winry never squealed and leaped away when he touched muddy hands to her face. Winry never looked so soft or smelled like perfume and books. She never wore her hair in elaborate curls and twirled around, laughing, with her skirts flaring out around her, a vision in blue lace and sunlight. Winry had never held him so uncertainly, kissed him so nervously. Winry never cried herself to sleep in his arms because her baby sister was dead and it just wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t Winry who had looked bashful and unsure as she said, “He asked me to marry him, Edward.” and waited for him to reject her. Winry wasn’t the girl he danced with at the wedding. It wasn’t Winry’s son he’d held so carefully, in awe of the tiny bundle in his arms that had his best friend’s eyes and a stranger’s smile. Irina wasn’t Winry at all. He knew that, because Winry was alive but Irina was dead.

Fullmetal Alchemist
Some Things Are Free snapshot

He stretched numbers and crunched them. Juggled and compressed them. Tried to make them do what he needed them to do and got nothing but a vicious headache for it. No matter how he rearranged them, the facts remained the same.

“Ed?” Esta called quietly from the doorway. “Ed, it’s late. Come to bed.”

He set down his pen, sighed and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. She was there almost instantly, her arms sliding around his shoulders and her cheek pressed against his. She squinted down at the papers spread before him.

“What are you doing?”

“Our finances.”

Written word she might not have been able to read well, but she could read every nuance in his voice. “And?” she asked.

“I… I can’t see how we’re going to make this work.”

They both knew how to stretch out a handful of cash. Even before he had come to this new, strange world, he had known what it was like to have to scrape up money. There had been some hard years when he was a boy and his mother had not wanted to dip too deeply into their savings- knowing, he knew now, that she wouldn’t be around to provide for her boys in the future –and had picked up laundry and done work as a seamstress to make ends meet. His mother had been resourceful and creative, and they had never felt like they were going without. Then when he had arrived in Munich, he and Alfons had always been cutting corners, eating only what they had to and doing a mad scramble to find the money for the rent each month. Esta had never had much money. Her family had been dirt poor, and then they’d been gone and she’d wandered aimless and rootless, stealing and conning until she found herself a family of thieves and cons. They knew how to cut their expenses down to the bone, were used to going without, but it had been easier when it was only themselves they really had to worry about. They had Anya now.

“Maybe…” Esta stopped, thought out her words carefully. “Maybe we should leave.”

“Munich?”

“Germany. Maybe we should head to Madrid. Or London. If we went to Madrid, maybe I could find work, too.”

“And London?”

“My sister lives there, now. She found work, her and Jal both. I could find work, too, and … and you could ask your father for help. You said he has connections there. He could find you good work.”

Just two years ago, Edward would have snarled out that he was not going to ask that bastard for help. Ever. But he had still been so angry, then. He had been so angry and had still half believed he would get home. He hadn’t had to watch his closest friend die by inches. He hadn’t had a baby to think about, and that made such a difference. What was his pride when compared to his daughter’s wellbeing?

“I’ve thought about it.” Ed admitted. “He’d help me. He wouldn’t even rub it in my face that I needed his help after all.” Ed sighed. “I don’t see another way.”

“Don’t you want your father to meet his grandbaby?” Esta asked softly, playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.

Because she could read it in him anyways, it was easier to say, equally soft, “Yeah. I guess I do.”

Inuyasha
(Kagome/Ayumi)

She had thought that after all she had been through, all she had experienced- getting sucked into the past through a dusty well, meeting a dog eared demon, learning she was the reincarnation of a powerful priestess, and so on and so forth- that there was nothing more that could surprise her.

She had been wrong.

She blinked at the press of soft lips against hers, raised a hand with the intention of pushing the unwanted advance away but ended up simply closing her fingers around a delicate wrist.

“Ayumi…” she said when the girl pulled away.

Her friend just smiled at her, sweet and sad. “I just wanted to know what it would feel like. Just once, I wanted to know what it would feel like.”

Kagome nodded. She could understand that. “Okay.”

The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows, chpt. 2

2008-06-02T08:45:11Z

At the request of rinfang and bella_eve, I am continuing this story.

Title: The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows
Rating: R
Pairings: Roy/Pride!Ed, Riza/Pride!Ed, past Roy/Ed, Riza/Ed, and Ed/Roy/Riza
Summary: "Death came in dreams."

part 1

The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows

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Death came in dreams.

It nipped at his heels as he hurried down crowded city streets, loomed over his shoulder as he trudged through deserted ruins, whispered teasingly in his ear as he flipped through dusty books whose pages crumbled when he turned them.

Death watched and death waited. Patient. Unhurried. Death knew that in the end all things belonged to It.

He danced through fights where the odds were stacked against him, his blood singing in his ears as adrenaline pumped through him. Copper taste on his tongue, red on the blade his arm had become. He scrambled for handholds as the earth fell away beneath him, dodged bullets as hastily put together plans fell apart.

In the background, there was a familiar but not familiar voice shouting, “Brother!” Young and scared, but he wasn’t scared. He hadn’t made things right yet, and he wasn’t going to die until he did.

And when he didn’t fight hard enough or run fast enough and the bullets bit into his flesh or the blade sank into his side, and he slipped closer to Death, close enough to feel Its touch, It stared. Not amused or vindictive but imperturbable. Ineffable. Inevitable.

He escaped Its grasping arms and hurried into other arms. Slim, smooth arms and golden hair like his own. Soft, soft lips pressed chastely against his and girlish laughter when he ran steel fingers up a flat stomach. Strong, pale arms and a deep, low voice whispering things that made his stomach twist in such a good way, rough scrape of teeth down his throat and a hand caught in his hair. Three sets of limbs tangled together under the sheets. A warm feeling he didn’t recognize.

And then, after waiting so long and so patiently, after lulling him into complacency, Death snapped out, flash fast, snapping rubber band quick- A man with cold blue eyes and a flat snake smile raising a gun. A girl cowering back, eyes wide and struck through with horror. And he was running, running, heart pounding and everything gone quiet, still, clear as he put himself between girl and man. He met the man’s snake-flat eyes and the shot was loud but not loud enough to drown out the hoarse screams of, “Brother!” of “ED!”-and closed over him, black heavy silence and then white aching emptiness and then-

Pride opened his eyes. Immediately awake and immediately aware of what had woke him.

Mismatched footsteps coming up the stairs behind him. Metal and flesh. Thump clank thump clank thump clank. Wrath.

Pride breathed in, breathed out. Relaxed. It wasn’t Envy or Sloth. It wouldn’t do for them to see him sleeping. Homunculi did not need sleep. Their days and nights blended together, one indistinguishable from the other in the underground city, an endless, merciless flow of minutes and hours, unbroken by oblivion.

But Pride had watched the Child sleep, listened to his breathing slow and mimicked it, closed his eyes and cleared his mind. He wasn’t sure if he slept or just dreamed, but he knew the others did neither.

He straightened up and veiled his eyes, looked out over the empty streets and waited for the smaller Sin to reach him.

“Pride.”

Pride kept his eyes blank, kept them focused ahead on nothing.

“Pride!”

He blinked, turned his head slowly and stared. “Yes, Wrath?”

“Master wants you. Now.”

Pride looked back to the streets, closed his eyes again. Saw, for just a second, the glint of sunlight off steel, heard laughter that echoed as it rose up from an empty shell. “Alright.”

-----

It was wet. It was dark. It was cold.

(“You looked lonely.”

“Can homunculi be lonely?”)

Pride held his arms out, tilted his face up to the sky and let the rain wash the red off. He wished he was like the witch in the Child’s book, wished the rain could make him melt away.

“What are you doing?”

Pride didn’t answer. What could he say? I’m washing the blood off, you stupid fuck, what does it look like I’m doing? The words of someone else, someone gone, rising up like bile in his throat and he swallowed them down. It was better, smarter, if he didn’t answer. Envy preferred it when he didn’t answer.

(“What did you just say?”

“I said, it wasn’t like-”

A vicious backhanded slap cut off the rest of the words.)

Cold hands grabbed his wrists, pulled his arms down to his sides and held them there. “How many people did you kill tonight?” Envy asked, lips against Pride’s ear.

He didn’t struggle away from Envy, didn’t tense up. He answered, with no sarcasm at all, “Was I supposed to be keeping count?”

Envy laughed, delighted. It had confused Pride when he did that the first time, but the more time he spent with Riza, the more he learned and the more he dreamed, the more he understood. Envy delighted in what he thought Edward Elric had become. Master’s puppet. Envy’s whore. A pretty doll that murdered on command.

But Edward Elric was dead. Pride was Pride, not Edward, not Lieutenant Colonel Elric or Fullmetal or Brother or Ed. (Not Love or Lover or Loved. Black eyes watching him and careful fingers moving inside him, heat shooting up his spine and he wanted- he wanted- That warm feeling again, spreading from his center out as he was kissed over his hair.) Pride was Pride, and maybe he was a puppet, maybe he was a whore, but he had no soul to stain, no innocence to be destroyed.

He closed his eyes as Envy pushed him down and reminded himself it didn’t matter.

(What else was there?

Death chased him in dreams, but in his waking moments, It kept Its distance, turned Its face away.)

-----

“I’m cold.” the Child whimpered, and stumbled in his effort to keep up with Envy’s quick stride.

“Too fucking bad!” Envy snapped. Pride saw the older Sin clench his fist against the urge to hit their charge.

Pride didn’t dare suggest they make the boy more comfortable. Envy was already in a foul mood, and Pride didn’t want Envy to turn that foul mood on him. Instead, he just slipped his hand down to the back of the Child’s neck, squeezed lightly. A gentle warning.

Envy stopped when the alley intersected another. With a brief flash and crackle of energy, he changed form, becoming a matronly woman with pale blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun. “You know what to do, Pride?” he asked.

Pride nodded.

“Don’t screw up.” Envy said, pulling an ill-fitting tweed coat about himself tightly and hurrying off in one direction, while Pride took the Child’s hand and went in the other.

When he judged they were far enough away, and was sure Envy hadn’t doubled back to watch them, he stopped. “Are you still cold?” he asked.

The child started a little, blinked up at him. He obviously had not expected Pride to speak without prompting. “Y-Yes.”

Pride unzipped his own jacket, then lifted the Child up easily and settled him on his hip, pulled the jacket shut over both of them as much as he could. After a moment’s hesitation, the child wrapped his arms around Pride’s neck and rested his cheek on the Sin’s shoulder. It was a novel sensation, having that fragile bundle of warmth in his arms. It made him think, of all things, of the armor he saw in Riza’s photos.

“Is that better?” he asked.

The Child nodded.

Pride started walking again. “We’ll find you a coat.” Pride was surprised Master had not thought to give him one, with how she usually coddled him. She was growing more and more distracted of late. Pride saw the plans moving behind her eyes, the gleam of madness growing brighter day-by-day.

They came onto a busy street crowded with cheerful shops. An outdoor grill belched the stink of fried onions and some sort of meat product, a large truck rumbled past, spewing black exhaust. The Child looked around with wide, fascinated eyes. His nose wrinkled at the unfamiliar smells, and his hands held onto Pride a little tighter. Pride reflected that the boy had likely not been out of the underground city since his mother had been lured down there with him in her arms. How long ago had that been? Pride did not know. The child was nearly six years old, how long…?

“Where are we going, Pride?” the Child asked.

“We are going to meet Lust.” Pride said. He saw a man with shifty, red-rimmed eyes bump into a young woman, then duck into an alley across the street, remembered the Child’s lack of outerwear. He crossed the street quickly.

“What-?”

“Shhh.”

The Child went silent. They followed the man down the alley, then across another street, down another alley. The city grew seedier around them. Finally, when he deemed it was deserted enough, Pride jumped and grabbed the bottom rung of what was left of a fire-escape ladder, pulled himself and the Child silently up. From there he leapt to the roof of the building. He set the Child down.

“Wait here.” he said.

It was an easy matter to sneak up behind the man, reach out with his small hands and snap the man’s neck, rifle through his cache of stolen wallets and take the cash he found for himself, then return to the Child and head back to the more crowded streets. It felt strange to be doing something that he hadn’t been ordered to. He hadn’t realized he could do things on his own initiative.

He took the Child into a shop that sold children’s clothes, bought him a black down coat, bright orange knit hat and gloves, jeans, a t-shirt, a pair of sneakers that weren’t a size too small. (The Child tugged on Pride’s own jacket and scarf, said tentatively, “Now we match.”) They still had a couple hours to kill, and there was a small deli across the street from the store. Pride bought them lunch, and ended up giving his to the Child. He didn’t need it, and the little boy was starving.

Again, Pride wondered at his Master’s oversight. The Child was important to her plans, and yet she had grown so careless of his health, leaving Pride and his fellow Sins to care for the boy. But homunculi do not get cold, do not get hungry, do not get tired or sick. Once Master had been sure to check on the Child and make sure his needs were met, but lately the Sins had been growing lax with their care of the boy and Master had not noticed.

As they left the deli, the Child took his hand, smiled up at him hugely, and Pride wished he wouldn’t, even as he smiled back.

When Lust saw the Child’s new apparel, she looked between Pride and his charge, her gaze speculative. “Get the urge to do a bit of shopping?” she asked.

“His clothes were too small.” Pride said without inflection.

Lust raised a perfectly arched brow. “Hm.” She straightened from where she was slouched against the wall, smoothed down her coat. “You know what to do?” she asked.

Pride nodded.

Lust looked down at the Child. “Come here, boy. Do you remember what to do?”

The Child nodded, released Pride’s hand with obvious reluctance and made his way over to Lust.

“Good. No mistakes, now.”

But they had already made one.

Five blocks away, at a small café across the street from a popular deli, a man was staring down at coffee long gone cold, face pale and mind numb with shocked disbelief. Because he had seen Pride and the Child leave the deli, and he had recognized the face Pride wore.

I need to punch something.

2008-03-30T06:18:46Z

Fuck you FF.net. Really, fuck you.

What the hell happened to all my line breaks?!?!?! Every chapter of every fic is a solid block of text! And my Word is fucked up, I can't go back and fix them!

lust_sama!!!! Help!!!!

The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows, chpt. 1

2008-01-04T00:17:21Z

We finally unpacked and hooked up our computer. (Only took us, what, a month?) You know what that means?

New fic!

Title: The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows
Pairings: Riza/Pride!Ed, past Roy/Ed/Riza
Rating: R
Summary: The dead do not come back. Not as anything you'd want back. Not as anything you'd want to come back as.

Author’s Notes: This idea came to me somewhere between Oregon and Montana. But I couldn’t actually get started writing it until Nebraska. Due to the massive mountain of boxes teetering just a few feet away, updates will likely be sporadic.

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The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows

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It wasn’t Ed. She knew it wasn’t Ed.

“Hello there.”

Edward was dead. She had seen Archer pull the trigger, watched the blood spray over Winry’s jacket, over Winry’s face. Watched Ed’s body jerk with the second shot, spin with the third and fall with the forth. Gold eyes wide with shock, hair and coat swirling with obscene grace as he fell, the world slowed to a crawl.

“You look cold.”

She had heard Winry’s scream, she had felt Alphonse’s scream. Grief and horror that tore through her, that echoed in her ears still. She hadn’t even realized she had reached Archer, was shooting him, again and again and again, until Havoc came up behind her and grabbed her arms, took the gun from her hands and tried to pull her against his chest.

“It’s raining.”

She had broken away from him, ran over to the crumpled form in the middle of the alley, fallen to her knees and dragged him up into her arms, out of the puddle of blood already forming around him. His eyes had been open, glazed and sightless. She had closed them before Alphonse reached them, before Winry pushed herself to her hands and knees and crawled over, and with them closed he’d almost looked peaceful, almost looked like maybe he was just sleeping.

She held out her hand, ignored the wetness on her cheeks, told herself it was just the rain.

“Why don’t you come inside?”

She knew it wasn’t Edward, but it looked so much like him.

The scantily clad figure curled into a ball at the mouth of the alley looked at her with wide, eerily blank gold eyes, studied her offered hand curiously.

“Come on. I won’t hurt you.”

An arm covered in intricate black lines unwrapped from around the creature’s knees and a small, cool hand was placed in hers.

-----

“What’s your name?” she asked him, because she didn’t want to call him Edward, not even in her head.

She had given him a towel, and when he had only stared at it blankly, she had dried him off herself. He hadn’t protested. Now he had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and he was sitting at her kitchen table, his eyes tracking her every movement.

“Pride.” he said. His voice was soft, without infliction. After a pause, he realized it was his turn to talk, and he asked, “What is your name?”

“Riza.” She smiled at him.

He smiled back automatically. Childlike and innocent and utterly unlike Edward. There was no wariness in his eyes, no aggression. There was nothing at all. He swung his legs back and forth, watched her set the kettle to boil.

“Are you hungry?”

He seemed to have to think about this, put one hand over his stomach and tilted his head, as if trying to decide. “I… don’t know.”

She fed him sticky buns and tea. She did not think about-

“Hey, Captain. Wha’cha writing?” Edward asked. He plopped himself down in front of her, snagged a pastry out of the bakery box.

“The General’s To Do List.” she muttered.

“Oh yeah. You’re going out of town tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Yes. To see my grandfather.”

“Huh.” Ed popped another pastry in his mouth, reached over and patted her arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep General Lazy Ass in line for you.”

Riza finished the list, capped her pen and handed both to Ed. She said, quietly enough that only Ed could hear her, “Tell him that if he doesn’t finish this list, he gets no sex from either of us for a month.”

They shared conspiratorial smiles that made the soldiers nearest them scoot surreptitiously away.

-because that was over. Edward was dead.

She made him a spot on the couch. She had never done that before. Whenever Ed had stayed over they’d always shared the small bed, shifted and twisted, fought over pillows and woke each other in the middle of the night with flailing limbs.

Pride slept still as death.

When she woke the next morning, he was gone.

-----

If she was distracted at the office the next day, no one mentioned it. They didn’t take advantage of her distraction either, instead stayed on their best behavior. Just like on the days that Roy stared right through them and they said nothing, just went about their work with their hearts in their throats and a name no one ever mentioned anymore repeating endlessly through their minds.

Two men had been found dead a block away from where she had found Pride.

-----

He came back, of course, as strays did when you were foolish enough to feed them.

So she fed him (though she knew, from consulting Edward’s notes, that homunculi did not need to eat human food), and she talked to him. Or rather, she talked at him. He rarely talked back. He followed her around her apartment like a puppy, watched her fold laundry and change the light bulbs in her bathroom. While she cooked, he sat cross-legged on the floor and played with Black Hayate, who seemed willing to ignore the fact that he was a soulless monster that smelled like blood and alchemy as long as he scratched behind his ears. Pride’s expressions were childlike but muted, and his eyes were always blank.

She told herself, at first, that she was gaining his trust bit by bit so that she could gather information on the other homunculi and their Master.

One night Pride looked up from his game of tug-a-war with Hayate and said, “You work for the Flame Alchemist.”

“Yes.”

“Do you like working for him?”

“Not really.” Riza admitted. “I don’t enjoy being a soldier. But I believe in him, and in his ideals.” You believed in him once, Edward.

“I work for Master.” Pride said matter of factly.

“Why?”

Pride watched Hayate wag his whole body back and forth trying to get the sock from the homunculus’s distracted grip. “Because…” Pride’s expression was blanker than ever. “…she made me.”

-----

Pride became a regular fixture in her life. She was no longer surprised to come home and find him lounging on her sofa, or sitting on the floor playing with Black Hayate. She noticed that as time went by, he talked more. His words had a stilted, hesitant feel. As if conversation was something new and foreign that he wasn’t sure how to go about. At first, he didn’t talk about the other homunculi. He spoke instead of the people he saw while he was carrying out the tasks that his master gave him, about the things they did or said that he did not understand. About the strange little girl who had given him sweets when he got her toy down from where her brother and his friends had tossed it on the roof to be cruel. About the strange man who tried to touch him while he walked down an alley (“He called me ‘pretty thing’ and smiled at me funny, and tried to grab me, so I killed him.” and Riza shivered at the matter-of-fact way he said it.). Eventually, little bits about his fellow Sins slipped through. A particularly nasty thing Envy had said, a strange thing Greed had done.

“He acts… more human than the rest of us. I suppose that is because of how Master made him. The human he was still lives inside him.”

“And you?” she asked before she could stop herself. “What of the human that you were?”

Pride shrugged. “He is dead.” And for a moment- just a moment, the barest fraction of a second- there was a sharp, burning intelligence in Pride’s eyes. “The dead do not come back.” Then it was gone, the blank shield slamming down, intelligence turning to innocent curiosity. “Did you know him, the human that I was?”

Lying was not an option. “Yes.”

“Hm.” Pride tilted his head. “Did you know him well? Is that why you brought me in, that first night?”

“I knew him well.” I loved you. Maybe not as much as I loved Roy, but I loved you. “But that’s not why I took you in.”

“Why did you?”

“Because it was wet, and it was cold.”

“It would not have hurt me.”

“That’s not the point. You were cold and wet, and you looked lonely.”

There was a long silence while Pride digested this. Then, “Can homunculi be lonely?”

“You would have to answer that.”

Pride was silent for the rest of the night.

-----

Pride often went through her things if he arrived at her apartment before her. It was how she finally got unpacked. He would go through the boxes, leave knick-knacks and lingerie strewn about the living room, page through romance novels and leave them in precarious towers near the foot of the couch. One day he discovered her photos, and she found him sprawled on the floor like a child, his nose inches away from the colored prints. She let him look while she changed out of her uniform and started dinner. When the meal was almost ready, she told him to stack the pictures up neatly and come to the table. He set the table without having to be told, and Riza didn’t let herself notice that he knew what dishes to use for the informal meal, or that he snuck a piece of beef from the stew and gave it to Hayate, as Edward used to do.

While helping her with the dishes, Pride said, “He was happy.”

She asked, “Who?”

“The human that I was. He was… happy, and very sad.” Pride scrubbed a pot idly. “I don’t know what it feels like to be happy, or to be sad. But in those pictures he always looks both.”

“You’re never sad?”

Pride shrugged. “I don’t know what sadness feels like, but I watch people, so I know what it looks like. And he looked sad.”

“You looked sad, when I fist saw you.”

“So did you.”

-----

Blood on his thighs. On his face. On his hands.

Blood on her floor, but it was linoleum, it would wash off.

Panic spiked through her, and she forgot for a moment just what he was. (She remembered Edward’s blood on her hands. Alphonse’s scream. Roy’s hitched breath that was almost a sob as he reached the scene, too late.) “What happened?” she asked, already on her knees beside him, tilting his face up to the light to see the damage. There was none, but her heart stayed lodged in her throat. (“No. No no no.” Roy’s voice was a broken rasp. He leaned down to press his lips to the pale forehead, the cold lips, and Riza watched his face, and knew she had lost them both.)

“I made Envy mad.” Pride said. “I told him he was wrong. Envy doesn’t like it when I argue with him.”

“What was he wrong about?”

“While he was touching me, he said that the Flame Alchemist used to do the same thing. That he used me the same way. I told him it wasn’t the same.” Pride looked at her, eyes desperate. “It wasn’t the same, was it? He was lying, wasn’t he?”

“Edward and Colonel Mustang-”

“But it wasn’t the same, right?” Pride grabbed her arm, his fingers digging in so hard she almost cried out in pain. “It wasn’t- he wasn’t-”

“No. It wasn’t the same.”

Real relief in his eyes. He let go of her arm.

A thousand questions and half-formed suspicions surged forward. What if…? The most dangerous question of all, and she knew she should cut off the train of thought. She knew she shouldn’t ask- but there are some things you have to do, no matter how stupid they are.“Pride. How- How do you know it was different?”

“I…” Pride stopped. The sharpness flickered through his eyes. Finally, he shook his head, frowned. “You.” he said. “The way you talk about them. You aren’t the kind of person that would let people you love hurt each other.”

“Why… Why does it matter to you, that it was different?”

“… When Envy touches me like that, I feel hot and cold all over, and my stomach hurts.” Shame, but he didn’t recognize it, and Riza couldn’t bring herself to name it for him. “It hurts, inside.” His face twisted, and he wrapped his arms around his stomach tightly. “But I think about- about the Flame Alchemist, and about what it would be like if he touched me like that, like Envy does, and that hurts worse.”

There were tears in her eyes again. She couldn’t stop them. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pulled him into her embrace. He let her, sank into her with a long breath that could have been a sigh.

She cried into his hair, rocked him back and forth. She cried for him, for the grief she had seen in his eyes while he talked that he didn’t know how to acknowledge or express.

(And for her own grief. For the memory of a teenage boy that smelled like steel and sunshine, that lived life so hard, so fiercely, that gave and gave and gave and died in an alley with a bullet through his heart.)