Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue

Selim Bradley was a happy child who grew into a happy, mature, respectful and rather liked young man. 

By most people's knowledge, he was a normal human.

He was not human at all, biologically.

But there was not a single living creature that was similar to his nature on that level, and he was welcomed among humanity, even by those few who actually knew who he was. Or more precisely, who he used to be. Considering he had the mind and memories of that being, was it fair to say he used to be that, rather than still was?

Yes. Selim was not the same as the previous roles he played of that name, nor the arrogant, powerful shadows behind the strings. He understood things that he was blind to before, he experienced fulfillments that he thought empty before, he lived. He thrived. He loved his mother very much, and he cared about his friends, regardless of if he kept to only a few and did drift a bit apart by the end of his schooling years. It was difficult, when he aged and grew more rapidly than they did. Still, however impermanent it was, these things were worth it.

It seemed sinful of him to keep that hoarded to himself.

(It seemed unfair to be alone, however loved he was.)

(No creature liked to be completely, forever alone. No creature liked to feel trapped that way.)

Was it so wrong that he would want to give his fellow siblings this same chance? He, of all of them, likely ‘deserved’ it the least. He was the eldest and so had the most time to suddenly grow a conscience and stand up against the frankly horrific things they were doing, yet all that could be said was that he spent that whole time complicit and unrepentant. Every year he had on them was a mark against him. He was the least sensitive to the rights and lives of others, since pride was, so often, entirely egocentric. Fearing him might have even dissuaded some of the younger homunculi from exploring the human side of the world and having the exposure they would need to realize how much more in life mattered than a creator with dreams of being a god and nothing else. Greed left, twice. He wanted more, he wanted everything, he wanted something simple and attainable and human. His hands were far from clean by a human standard, but he benefited the lives of the chimeras he stole away, preferred hoarding over destroying, and his track record included far less mass murdering, blood seals, immoral science horrors, fostering genocide, etcetera. If any of them deserved to be given a second chance, wouldn’t it be him long before it was Pride? 

Second chances didn’t make much sense. There were things that couldn’t be walked back. The longer the list of crimes, the more and more chances there already were to step away. 

But Edward Elric gave him one. Or he gave Mrs. Bradley one, and the homunculus was just there benefiting unintentionally because she deserved to not completely lose the family she thought she had in one terrible day. Even if the latter was the actual motivation behind his survival, then he could use that same logic here. The homunculi were considered monsters (for good reason) who wouldn’t deserve to live and learn what it was like to feel fulfilled, loved, family, belonging, but Selim was a good lad with too much blind kindness like his mother and he would be happier if he could say he wasn’t alone in having this chance. He’d been trying to save every broken dying stray he came across since he was big enough to walk. Telling him to stand back and let someone suffer would be mean for his sake. The benefit of a second chance for monsters was unintentional, maybe unwanted, but necessary to do good for a good person. Whether the Fullmetal Alchemist did it because he didn’t want to kill, or he believed in second chances for even monsters, or he did it all for Mrs. Bradley’s sake, the reasoning behind each motive could be spun to justify this now. 

Besides, he wasn’t Edward. 

He was as selfish in this as he was hopeful as he was guilty and ashamed and trying to alleviate that. 

Of the homunculi, it didn’t make sense that Pride got to escape punishment and live. 

So why couldn’t he fix that? 

Why shouldn’t he get to make it right?

By a human standard-

Well, no, there wasn’t a clear rule there. They were individuals and they came in cultures and the differences in how they viewed such topics were too many to rectify. Some were just too forgiving. Some were just too kind. 

Some, he hoped, would show a few nonhumans why that mattered.

Even if it was ‘wrong’, he understood intimately where each of the others had come from. Their natures were not so simple to shake off. Their purpose in existing was clear from the start. Their power inside was full of screams that became indistinguishable from one another and grew to be ignored. What measure was a human life? Each was equal in worth. If they were to die, why shouldn’t that unstoppable outcome be used for something useful for someone alive? It was easy. 

They were callous from the start. 

It wasn’t their role to try to change, and it wasn’t logical to want to learn from what were just insects. 

Once, Pride would have killed whoever dared try to say Father was bad at raising them, because that outright said he had faults. 

It was a little funny, but…Selim really didn’t mind hearing that at all. He told it to himself often enough. Pride was proud, and went from believing the being to be everything, to being angry that man ever thought himself so much better than his disposable firstborn son- or any of them. 

Because his mother didn’t swear very often and he was so soft a child when his container was still adjusting to its truest, weakest form, incapable of housing his memories consciously at that time, Selim had a rather clean (if occasionally familiarly cold instead of his usual sentimental warmth) vocabulary. Still, some situations afforded a bit more emotion and a bit less respect. 

So, in regards to Father, the man was a bastard. 

Pride easily justified giving a new chance to the other homunculi since he’d gotten, and very much appreciated, his own. The five he could share this prospect with were all horrible monsters by many standards but he was still a homunculus and he knew what their existences were like, while no human could have. To those around him, Selim was a normal young man, after all. To those around him, Selim was a normal human. If asked if he had a soul, they- strangers to acquaintances to friends- would be confused that it was even a question because of course he did. Selim was a homunculus biologically and alchemically but that did not mean he wasn’t human, artificial origins or not. These same people would say he was an exception, that they did not mean him, when they called the homunculi monsters? Ha! This was why the rest would have to be careful to have new identities. They wouldn’t have to live under the shadow of who they were before, if they were smart. 

Even though they were all killers, some more heartless than others, and they certainly had vices , Selim was excited to give this actual chance at life to the rest. He couldn’t hate them for what they did without hating himself more, and he was a little nervous- even if all the much older arrogance behind him couldn’t believe that about himself- about them, but he felt they should be able to live free from the rather miserable conditions and natures all of them were born with. 

Pride didn’t feel like bothering trying to justify that with Father. A second chance for the bastard? No. He didn’t get the excuses they did. He was the reason they were all like that , and then he was the reason they all stayed that way, encouraged to just get worse and more miserable and less open to the experience of being fulfilled. 

He didn’t know the full origin of their originator. Maybe it was something awful. He didn’t care.

This moment wasn’t for Father.

This decision wasn’t about Father.

This night should have had nothing to do with Father.

So someone explain to Selim what he’d done to deserve getting a sixth body when he’d already sacrificed so much to convince people to let him get the five he was after.

It wasn’t as if the body was instantly recognizable. It was little more than the bland, half naked, and half-corpse of a stranger. If not for the way each of the others were identified already, he may have even thought it was just a new form that would belong to one of his siblings. 

His next confused guess was that he’d somehow, unintentionally, retrieved Wrath. But that was impossible. He was human, just as much as he held their Father’s wrath and a philosopher’s stone burned its way into his still-human soul. To ‘retrieve’ Wrath would have meant actually reaching far past what any living creature could try to do, involving human transmutation for the purpose of resurrecting the dead- something that Selim knew well enough was impossible when it was humans that were being talked about. The Elrics made that discovery: it didn’t matter how well the alchemy was prepared, it didn’t matter, because even should the human formed be capable of living longer than a few seconds, it would not be the soul they were after. 

Homunculi were not human, except for Wrath. 

This - second chance- whatever it was called, for the homunculi that died hinged on how they weren’t born humans. 

And…

There was something far more like their soul, far, far closer to it than Wrath’s was to the rest of them. 

That thought didn’t come to Selim while he dropped down next to the body in panic. It didn’t arrive while he watched the shallow breaths slowly move a bony chest and his hands rose to hover over it and the face and do nothing in indecision. 

When he decided against unprepared first aid and went to peel back an eyelid to check their eye, then Selim realized that connection. 

The homunculi were a collective. He’d told that to Kimblee once, hadn’t he? Wrath was the odd one out. The rest were far from human: just six little shadows of their father, who once was them, and who they were from and could return to. Six little shadows of one shadow. ‘Father’, after all, was not the true appearance of their creator. He'd just given that look away four hundred odd years ago.

Pride was not the type to laugh very often out of frustration or tasteless irony. So Selim didn’t start laughing now, even though the hysteria almost wanted to. 

What a…

What- a-

why?

This was no time for questions. Selim shrugged off his coat and transmuted its material into a square, thinner than the jacket but acceptable as a sheet. He pulled the body to the most cluttered wall. The breathing was weak, but not alarming. Or perhaps he just couldn’t register more alarm than the confusion in him already. He checked for a pulse before pinning down the small knives he’d been taught to use alkahestry with. The eastern variation on alchemy was fascinating, but one purpose that had gained it fame over the rest of its potential was its medical uses. 

Breathing to match the same flow of life in this- he didn’t want to think about who (why? Why was he here?) -, Selim tried to alter the direction of energy being circulated in the human body. Melatonin production was more than welcome. High brain activity? Less so, right now. No, no, he needed to be able to hide this and come back to the problem later. The idea of the chaos bound to occur outside any minute now was bad enough without the cause of it all walking out the front door practically naked. That would just startle everyone. That would…

Cause so much more chaos than needed. Create far worse complications to a complicated situation. 

Edward Elric did not like to kill, but he’d killed someone once before, and that person was laying on the dirty floor of Selim’s temporary basement. Alphonse was- well, Alphonse was Selim’s favorite of those brothers, for various reasons, but the man was not a child trapped in a dirt dome anymore, with childlike idealism untempered by age. 

Why not throw this outside for them? He didn’t want him. He’d never intended this to happen.

Maybe that was the biggest problem. 

For all the effort, all the years, all the studying, all of himself that he put into this operation, it came with unforeseen consequences? Its conclusion was not intended or desired? He did not see this coming? He did not so much as expect it, yet he thought he’d done oh so much and spent so much time in preparation? It was unthinkable. It was humiliating. He couldn’t stand it. 

This was a flaw he was responsible for not foreseeing and avoiding, and he arrogantly did not like to believe in flaws.

Even tempered by a wonderful upbringing, Selim struggled there. 

He flicked the sheet out over the body, though he first ensured it would not cover the mouth and air flow would come in through the gaps where crates held parts of its folds up. He didn’t want to be responsible for a death either. Selim Bradley had never liked death. Even knowing it was a natural part of the world, even knowing it was unpreventable and irreversible and this was not a defect of humanity, there was a piece of him that missed having a full philosopher’s stone since before he developed enough to remember he had one. With its presence, taken for granted by homunculi that never lacked them, there was a way to save any little thing that was hurt and dying. The homunculi never used them for that purpose. Selim, without a single conscious memory, would have in a heartbeat to help even an injured mouse get more life when the animal would have only months to a few years anyway.

If he did not like swallowing death for little animals, then it wasn’t like he could stand to watch someone who used to matter so much to him die. 

Still-

Why did he have to be alive?

Why??

Selim struggled to maintain composure and actually concentrate on what occurred around him for the remainder of the night. Waking confused, angry siblings up one by one? A fog ruined by an undercurrent of why. Meeting carefully neutral humans at the door and convincing everyone that being outside was better than forcing the way into the basement? It was a surprise he could really convince anyone of anything, when his mind was caught on that whining mantra: why why but why? What did I do to deserve this? Where’d I go wrong? How is it my fault? Why?

Things were taken care of.

Fights were broken apart, realities laid down. The Elrics were far nicer than anyone else from those days would’ve been. It was lucky that enough years passed by that Selim was no longer watched by the Fuhrer’s office, not as closely. (Guards like that were swapped out with a different type of insurance now. Selim followed up on what his past life used to, through boredom, pretend was his starry-eyed, childish dream: he was a state alchemist and that meant they held power over him, even with the alterations to that program made under the regimes following Father’s defeat.) It was equally lucky he’d endeared himself so well to them unintentionally, when he was without memories and a little boy in truth, and that Mrs. Bradley also grew to be a familiar face when hosting them. They supported him to support her- how very human. It did not mean they had to like it.

Although Edward and Greed didn’t act all too mad about having to see each other. 

It would’ve been a bit funny to watch that reunion, actually, if he'd been able to really watch it mentally.

A bit rewarding too.

Selim’s mind was trapped in the basement. 

Machinations moved as intended. People were moved around. He slipped away with an old, practiced ease, just to see that nothing had changed under the sheet. The basement was locked still when he reached it. The body inside was where he left it. And yet even as he locked the door once more behind him, the paranoia would not let him think it was actually secure, or that its occupant wouldn’t be able to miraculously pop up on the outside like he had miraculously appeared as a body. 

It was terrible, how much it was choking him. 

Why? 

Why- What’s going on- Whyyy

He sounded like a whiny child in his own mind. It was embarrassing and he told himself to stop, but a different wave of anxiety would hit him when he was not expecting it and send him right into another bout of confused horror and growing anger, as if this were a personal attack intended to ruin his moment, as if he couldn’t do a damn thing related to family without having control over it plucked back up by the person that designed them and then flopped so badly at making them a family at all. 

Selim didn’t sleep all night, but luckily everything was too chaotic for that to be noticed. It wasn’t until the morning after when things were winding down, cars were being packed, and an Elric came up to talk with him. 

Normally, he would not have an issue having a calm conversation with Alphonse Elric. Despite the difference in age, the man tended to treat him like a peer these days (Selim didn’t mention that, ever since regaining his memories, the difference in age technically went the other direction by a long shot).  

Now, it was bad enough that he needed to make an excuse for staying behind when this building’s use had seemingly run its course and he had so many reasons to instead leave. The homunculi, namely. 

He couldn’t just stay, but he would need to return quickly, before that body would die. The family reunion would be cut short and he would look like he was dodging responsibilities…Not if, first, they could find a local place to be put up, perhaps, but even then, what if the chi that the Elrics could sense gave this house away-? His mind was rambling in worry. 

It wasn’t unjustified.

“It feels so strange in there,” Alphonse said while they stood on an old porch in the brisk morning air. (It was old, too. The fencing was made of wood that might give way if they leaned on it to relax with a hot drink. This house wasn’t a wreck, but it was unkempt and the weather up in Eqtied was often wet. Maybe this could be an excuse for rushing them all out? But he needed an excuse to come back, too. It was his. A fixer-upper, but he could fix it. Well. Technically, it was an abandoned house whos tenants either left it during a bad time of economic upheaval- the blood crest carved nearby in the 1550s may have been long ago by human standards, but these things left scars on their microsocieties- or died without a realtor taking up the building after. The salary of a state alchemist wasn’t enough to waltz around buying houses, and mother was left with a large sum of money by Grumman’s government yearly but that was hers . Still, taken together, this could be seen as the rash and foolish act of a young man that just had to learn economic decisions through hard experience. He could make this work.)

(Or he could if he was not too busy with alarm and confusion and fears at every little hint that someone knew he’d messed something up with the retrieval of those artificial souls.)

Selim nearly panicked. He was balancing far too many things and barely keeping them together. 

“It does,” he agreed quickly. “I think it must be the arrays I used. There were a lot of new theories put into play and the energy coming from that floor is very weird to me too.”

For a tense second, he thought the man would point out that the specific life energy he was talking about came from a person when all the ones that should've been there were accounted for. What would Selim say? The truth? Would he get blamed? Would it be assumed he intended this secretly all along and used those who gave him a second chance, like they were tools? 

Would they go inside and kill him?

Likely not. The Elrics remained soft people in regards to killing, really. 

And he shouldn't care if the man down there died. 

Selim shivered a bit and rubbed down his arms. The shirt there kept the breeze out, but not the cold. Alphonse glanced at him with curious concern. 

“Where’s your coat? You shouldn’t be out here without it, if you’re cold,” the older man pointed out the absolute obvious.

It’s hiding a sixth human body, he didn’t say. Hiding from the others that actually were meant to be dragged into human forms, hiding from Alphonse, hiding from the cold of the basement in general- 

Hiding as protection. 

When- and here he went back to it- he shouldn’t care.

He shouldn't be protecting him. 

Selim, as it were, was too soft of a person as well. 

And Pride couldn't help but care about him. So he was conflicted. He was unhappy. He didn't want the first homunculus here. And he never wanted the bastard dead either to start with, so there was some measure of relief that he'd need to unpack later.

Later.

He so hated procrastination. And the reunion was soured by the sense that it was. 

He wanted to put on a happy face. 

(He wanted to have answers now. 

But later.

It had to wait til later.

He dreaded that it wouldn’t matter when- he would not be getting an explanation for why this had to happen to him. For where he’d messed up in his formulations. For how the hell there was enough mass to make six bodies instead of the five pre-prepared for. It was so unexpected that he couldn’t help but think that, perhaps, there was no mistake on his end aside from having the arrogance to ever think he could pull this off without issue: the arrogant were punished when they thought themselves above the laws of the universe, Father had said, and Pride learned years later that the man exemplified that truth in the end.

Maybe he was here to exemplify such on the part of the younger homunculus.)

The house creaked. Just walking across its lower floor set off a reaction in the framework, and something upstairs groaned. Selim reminded himself that this was natural and these sounds always seemed louder when no one else was inside. The noises didn’t mean anyone else was stepping around up there.

Despite being better than fear, he lost a quick mental debate and found himself taking the stairs that followed up the wall that the front doors belonged on, before turning with that wall to climb a few more feet until they could level out into the second story. Its hallway was more of a balcony above part of the sitting room, complete with a railing that Selim could trust only slightly more than those outside. There was a single bedroom on the first floor and its wall stretched up to the ceiling to contain the second upstairs bed and bath as well. Selim crossed the loft part of the hallway until he came to that corner and opened its door.

Nothing.

Of course not. This house just creaked. Now that he was up here, he could hear the effects of his weight in the groans of downstairs walls. Still, he looked in the washroom and his imagination ran with the idea that the basement’s door would open while he was occupied in here, giving its occupant a headstart to go to the exit.

What was he worried about? The Elrics weren’t outside anymore. If the new human got out, he’d be faced with rural land and the elements. The nearest neighbor was miles away. And it wasn’t like he would have a target painted on his back. The average Amestrian wouldn’t even think to guess that the strange man was involved in what happened seventeen years ago, let alone that he was responsible for ripping their souls from their bodies and for conflict, corruption, and bloodshed marking their history. Nothing about his appearance would mean anything to them. 

No one else would have felt the startling thought that they were looking into a mirror when peeling skin back to check his pupils.

Selim sighed and left for the stairs once more. It was convenient that he’d already cleaned up this room, and the rest of the house, the week prior. He began before his teachers-wardens arrived and was glad that he had, in hindsight, but previously, he’d thought to offer them the home to stay the night. The couches in the sitting room could be used for extra beds, there was a small workroom attached to the outside of the house that could likewise be slept in, and Selim didn’t mind giving luxuries up to people he respected so much. Pride respected very, very few, and there was a greater sense of importance placed on those Selim considered so highly, even though he was raised to see value in everyone.

Getting everyone out was almost more effort than was worth it, but, on the unintentional bright side, renting a better place to board from an elderly couple down the road (still outside town, because bringing in the five of them anywhere was a disaster waiting to happen until things were situated to. Such as: they’d died. Father lost. They weren’t going to be repeating any of that. No blood seals, no murder, no chaos just for the fun of it) meant everyone got a degree of privacy that night and fights were prevented. Mostly. Pride had forgotten how much of a problem his siblings could be, with the exception of Lust. Sloth was in no mood to get up and move to start with, let alone fit his still-hulking-as-a-human body into one of the cars, let alone get out after a drive and go to a nice cozy bed- …It was fine. Selim didn’t like to see anyone hurt. Sloth made him think of a slow animal but he wasn’t impatient when it was a pet who was being so lacking in the intellectual department, so he should be nice here too. At least Sloth was not being intentional in slowing them all down and making him irritated. And, well, Gluttony was not quite smart enough to be acting out intentionally either. But Envy and Greed…Selim should have been more braced for. 

At least he was calm and well rested today.

Dealing with his f- well, with the bastard below, would be a trial in and of its own. 

He’d signed up for dealing with problems related to the other homunculi. This, he’d no intentions of facing, and yet he couldn’t leave to anyone else. He’d rather hide any mistake he made until the day he died, to be frank. He was acting the part of the martyr, taking on this new weight and refusing the suggestion of help from anyone. 

He didn’t believe anyone was more capable than he was. He could turn this around into some form of positive. Then and only then would anyone even find out it was occurring all along. 

Selim gathered water and a straw from the kitchen, a washcloth, and then went into the pantry where the basement door was hidden away. 

He braced himself.

It was still locked, just as it was a day previously when he’d run an ‘errand’ and came here to make sure the body containing his former father stayed alive, and the day before that, so on and so forth. 

He took a deep breath and then stepped down into the musty darkness.

There were all of four steps until the ‘stairs’ turned into a cracked concrete ground. It seemed like a sorry excuse for the word, at least compared to those carpeted, creaking ones up in the house proper. All the better, though. It meant there were fewer to drag a body up. And that was still possibly on the table.

Selim sat and softly peeled his makeshift blanket back. Laying it out, he pulled the limp form out of its curled pose to get a better look at him. At least the sheet was keeping his bare back from touching the ground. It was colder than the air was. 

A cursory investigation revealed little more than yesterday. Surely, his fa- he’d need to use the washrooms and start eating meals, but so long as he’d been kept like this, the body maintained its subdued homeostasis well enough. Selim propped the man half upright against his side so that he could open his mouth. Using his thumb to seal the vacuum of the straw full of water, he maneuvered the paper in, bent it to fit against the tongue and down past the back of the throat as best he could, and released. It was tedious work to repeat, but he had the feeling that father wouldn’t just wake up, alive again, human now, and confronted by an unrepentant traitor of a child, and feel like listening to calm, rational instructions about drinking water. 

He returned to the kitchen, put the cup in the sink, washed his hands once more, and then returned to stand on the lowest step of the basement and look down on the one who used to be the absolute center of the universe for Pride- yes, somehow even above himself, for all his arrogance and ego. 

He would have expected to feel more of … something. Some passion. Maybe the panic and distress and anger from before when the discovery was raw and it all felt so, so unfair. 

All that he knew instead was that he didn’t want to be here. 

For once, he could see a missing wisdom in Sloth’s favorite words. What a bother. He should be anywhere else with anyone else right now. 

It was with this attitude that he planted the blades, activated the alkahestry, and mentally accepted his one life wouldn’t be what he wanted it to be. 

This resulted in his feelings curdling. What lacked in passion and energy came instead with the deceptive easy speed of an unconcerned snake, and the poison left behind was full of embitterment. He stared down at the unimpressive, unremarkable, and weak human body slowly stirring on the sheet and was more disgusted than anything. 

This? 

This was who he thought would be god someday? Who he thought deserved to be god? 

This? His father?

It made the skin on his nose scrunch. 

That was really not nice of him. Neither was looming like this, as if he were a being that could pass judgment. (Well. He could, and he did. He judged that father was terrible at living up to that name, and he refused to claim him as a real parent. That went to his mother. Hell, it would have gone to Wrath, before it went to this emotionless, haughty creature that wouldn’t have come back to save Pride, give a hand to Pride, keep Pride, wouldn’t have cared that Edward had every chance to kill him, wouldn’t, wouldn’t, all the things Edward Elric said he wouldn’t do that Pride couldn’t help but want from him.)

He should help, he kept thinking while he watched the new human cough and splutter, twist around on its front awkwardly, fail to get its limbs under it properly, struggle to push up onto its arms at all. He should go help.

The man coughed again as soon as he was sitting. His hair was long and unkempt and fell to curtain his downturned face. Father’s hair was always perfectly held in place while the human that looked like him- Hohenheim, Van Hohenheim, the stranger who father ate before Pride got down to the heart of their base after dealing with Mustang, the one who introduced himself to Pride in the tunnel of Liore as Slave 23 - had to tie his own up in a thin ponytail rather like Edward’s (and occasionally Alphonse over the years Selim saw him, though his alchemy and alkahestry teacher wouldn’t resist cutting his short again soon after making it to ponytail length every time) and even then, hairs came loose out of it to be imperfect annoyances. Father didn’t often move from the seat that he controlled much of Amestris from, so for weeks and months and sometimes years at a time, there was no movement to make that hair change its permanent position on his shoulders. It could have been that of a statue’s. How artificial. How fake. They’d really all fawned over that as perfection? 

Selim must have moved or made a sound, because that sad curtain of hair shifted as the man’s head lifted. Even with so much of it falling over his face, Selim could see the hidden eyes glaring.

For a moment, he wondered what Gluttony had felt in the seconds before his death. Piercing eyes and piercing shadows, unrelenting, if not sadistic in the prospect of snapping him in half and licking up the remains. 

But that was hardly comparable. Pride was weakened in that moment (hence the reasoning for devouring his own, though Selim was no longer purely a homunculus that took cold logical rationalization as legitimate justification), but very much held the advantage over his practically-dying brother anyway. What Gluttony felt was not relatable to this. Father was a human in a basement with an ugly attitude and shaking limbs. Selim was in no danger now. 

One more deep breath. 

He put on a polite voice.

“Take it easy-” he tried to say in a tone of reassurance that could not have gone to a less deserving person (the process may have been reversed, and he may not remember it occurring very well considering what happened to him soon after, but this man had killed everyone - had ripped their souls out to join a painful maelstrom- every human that Selim knew and owed so much to had to suffer and choke and die, because his father thought he should be god) (take a breath, take a breath, it wasn’t as if Selim had a right to be so upset on their behalf considering what Pride had done ). All he earned for it was being cut off and spoken over. 

“What-”

The human went to get onto one knee and tripped over it with his other leg. There was a hapless rage to the following attempt. When Selim spoke and revealed himself, he was instantly faced with eyes that may have been the wrong shape and color, but still looked very much held the right amount of hate to be his former idol. Pride was never the reason behind that expression, but the occasional human pawn or bad news was and Pride saw very, very much, even if he wasn’t everywhere at once. 

In fact-

Oh.

Hah!

Actually, he saw that enough times to fill in missing dots: this narrowed, piercing, hateful glare accompanied alchemy, nearly always. His creator was far more powerful than even he, and so the being was capable of alchemy with a single thought . Pride’s container started falling apart just by doing that one round with Mustang. The realization was almost enough to make him take a step back unconsciously, but the mere fact that father looked so wrong, coupled with the lack of any pain accompanying the glare, was enough to fight that terror.

Still…

“Stay there,” Selim recommended, raising his hands placatingly. “Try to take it easy. I’m not an enemy.”

It wasn’t listened to, again.

“You know me.” Fine, make me spell it out, ‘father’. He got closer to keep in the man’s field of view. It may not have been doing much good. At this angle, he couldn’t see past the hair to where the eyes were, and didn’t know what he was looking at. “I’m Selim.” He put a hand on his chest. “I’m Pride.”

He wouldn’t look much like either, sure, but who else would know those names belonged together?

The man craned back to see him at that. To Selim’s surprise, his lips had parted slightly. It might as well be his jaw hanging open comically, for as alien as it was on its owner. In the centuries that Pride lived, his creator did not lose his composure, and never once did he open his mouth even a sliver in shock. 

Maybe-

He’d been about to think that perhaps this was a good sign and he’d finally gotten full attention from his creator. Instead, he almost tripped himself again in a graceless motion. Selim watched him grit his teeth. 

(It was painful in a way. 

Even considering who it was, suffering was hard to watch. He was too soft, he really was.)

“You’ve been dead,” Selim spoke into the silence, this time with the level of gentleness he’d used on his siblings just days before. “And…I’m not sure why you aren’t anymore. But it’s my fault.”

Fault. This bastard was likely thrilled to be alive again. Was death kind to creatures like him? Selim did not know. No one returned from death to even talk about if there was something more than the white and the Gate and the Eye of Truth. His siblings were recent exceptions but they did not seem able to say anything, really, in confirmation of an afterlife that a mind could be stable and aware of. 

Still, he doubted that the… Truth he heard about (eventually) from the Elrics would have been very nice after getting briefly eaten.

So, since it was his fault that the now-human was just that, then it was to him that the thank you should be getting directed. 

Selim wouldn’t hold his breath on that. 

Not based on the type of expressions he was earning. To a degree, it was confusion and panic. But when days passed and everyone was more calm and everything understood in full, what precisely could he expect to hear but disgust in how human he had chosen to become?
Selim Bradley was the homunculus Pride and not a human, if technicalities were going to be considered. So this humanity of his was indeed a choice. 

And he would not be shamed for embracing it. 

Especially not by someone who didn’t just die, but got them all (aside from Pride yet not by any effort from father) killed too because he refused to take on human influence and experience their side of life.

“You need to stay calm. I’ll explain if you do. And…please stop trying to kill me, or whatever it is you are imagining,” Selim added. There. He'd even been polite! 

The man went so far as to grimace and then clap. Yet even spitting on his pride like this and attempting something he’d never needed for alchemy before did not result in any reward. 

If it was needed in order for him to stay still and listen, then Selim would hand him some chalk to try simple circles too. While he didn’t know why there was no alchemy being produced in the clap by someone who had long ago passed through those doorways required for sacrifice candidates to do their alchemy without having a circle or array, his mind already spun with a variety of ideas and most of those explanations wouldn't eliminate the effectiveness of doing alchemy the base way. It was not this body itself that ever went through the Gate. This body wasn't a body at all until a few days ago. Maybe that was not mixing well with an established, old …not-quite-soul-but-that-was-still-the-best-word. He'd hoped it would integrate naturally, seamlessly, rather than this being a biologically based container with a soul binding, no different than the experiments or Alphonse Elric. Hm. He could-

-Think about this later, was what he could do. Being swept up in theories and fascination was currently inappropriate. 

The man on the ground slammed his palms down so hard that it must have hurt. It was lucky there wasn't enough force behind the arms to end up with broken bones. Concrete was unforgiving. 

And while no alchemy followed and there might have been a yelp of pain, it was impossible to say for certain over the sound of yelling. 

Pride didn't really recognize the voice either. He was used to the one presumably based on the same origin as the body. The Elric’s father. Van Hohenheim. It was not so distorted as the one he heard down in the place of ascension when that familiar human appearance was shed for one covered in eyes like his own. 

There was the slightest, uneasy sense he'd heard this before at least once, when dreaming or in a similarly unreal state, while his ears never took the sounds in. Like deja vu, in a sense. Was that how it could be put? He was not sure. Even with that considered, he could call it the voice of a stranger. 

That also helped to minimize the beating of his heart and tension uncomfortably holding every muscle in a vice grip. 

Selim did not like father, but having the being’s voice turned upon him in a negative tone would go against so much of his past and of his security that it would be unpleasant.

“What is this? Why?” this stranger yelled instead. 

Selim came closer still to stop him.

He explained and explained and thought he wasn't being heard at all. 

The other man slapped his arm away when he did try to steady his shoulder, before snapping as if he were the famous flame alchemist himself. He bared his teeth again at the failure and then clawed out at his eldest offspring. Selim’s shirt kept the scraping from doing too much damage, but he still backed away before he would get even more scratches on the skin underneath. 

“What is happening?” Well, he'd been being told, so if he'd only been listening…

Selim already raced through basics: who he was, where they were, how the other was dead until now, the fact he lost to the humans resisting him, the way those people were doing well now, thanks for asking, and Selim was glad that they were. It wasn't for lack of trying, that the man was still seemingly as lost as ever. Selim’s arm itched already. A part of him understood that the pain was not all that intentional- it was frantic grasping and it just happened that human arm skin was sensitive. The yelling was not with the aim of being irritating either, but carried the same type of scrambling for security. 

On the ground, he returned to his frenetic alchemy motions. Pathetic. “What have you done to me?”

He'd said!

He answered this already! 

He hadn't even meant this to happen! He hadn't wanted him alive.

“I don't know,” Selim snapped, then composed himself. “But let's go upstairs. We can talk through everything. If you cannot do alchemy, then stop wasting time on the impossible, and quit already.” 

(So maybe he wasn't that composed.)

Finally, the new human went still. He folded his hands down over his knees and stared, appraising, up and down Selim. With his chin raised and the frantic energy withheld enough, he could do so with disdain, and it was with that disdain that he spoke. A simple: “Pride.”

He sighed in relief.

“It's me,” he confirmed. “Though I use Selim more commonly.”

Fath- He probably didn't care. 

Names never really seemed to matter to him.

“What have you done to block my alchemy?” the man asked. It didn't even sound mad anymore. If anything, perhaps curiosity, or begrudging respect like he was impressed-

(he didn't need any of that from him)

(it didn't matter, it shouldn't matter, it doesn't matter)

“Nothing,” Selim said. “But it's not important right now.”

The positivity left the other’s demeanor. “I need that, you inept child.”

His arm was stinging in tracks under the sleeve. His head hurt. He wanted to be at home.

Why? Why him? Why did this have to happen to him? 

Selim drew his hands down his face with a groan that he couldn’t help. 

“Why?” Nor could he help the comment that slipped out. “The child that killed you doesn’t!”

Now he was the one being looked at like he was acting oddly. 

Shadowed eyes narrowed behind unkempt hair.

“What?” he was asked. 

At least Selim was steeled for this. He’d known well enough that coming back here alone would mean it was all up to him to explain everything, and the story was an unfortunately long one. They could be doing this up on one of the old couches in the empty house, but that offer kept getting rejected, so if the one that thought he could be a god would rather sit on a sheet on the cold ground of a storage room, that was his choice to make in all that infinite, godly wisdom. 

With one last, restrained sigh, he tried again.

“Seventeen years ago, after he killed you, Edward Elric paid the toll by giving away alchemy to get his brother his body back. So congratulations. You’re on the same level as your killer. I wanted to follow his lead in a way, and give my siblings a chance to be human too. You’re as human as he is now.”

The very insects they used for centuries, with the distant separation of perceived superiority, the rationalization that the species lived and died quickly anyway and their souls might as well serve a use instead of just disappearing, the things they thought themselves above, hungered after, wanted, hated, envied, fed on, and ultimately planned to kill en masse to start a new world for homunculi instead. Well, good luck maintaining that attitude. Selim was the only known homunculus in the world.

This man before him was just that: a man.

No better than any of the other ants. 

Unlike Selim, who was raised to think of humans more highly than that and respect them no matter who they were, the first homunculus must have been disgusted by this turn of events. 

(Well, then at least Selim wasn’t about to be suffering alone from this unwanted consequence of his actions.)

Chapter Text

Liar's Chair

Once, some ultimately inconsequential creature reached its hand where it didn't belong and tore a piece of truth back with its retreat.  

It shouldn't have occurred to start with. Not through the arrogance of those alchemists alone. 

But that implied that this event was allowed. 

(Allowed, and for what? What goal was the experiment ever supposed to reach? 

What purpose did the universe have in ever letting that droplet be plucked from its seas, if all it would do in the end was subsume it?)

The hand belonged to a mortal creature surrounded by many more, who thought themselves wise while seeking, in nearly self aware contradiction, all that wisdom they lacked. What they received wasn't meant for their world. It told them nothing they could understand. Its components meant nothing to them, surreal to their sciences. There was no communicating, no approaching, no recognition from any party. 

Until a different creature of that world was brought into the mess to be drained of blood. 

A piece of truth became a life form, separate. If that hand never arrived, then there would never have been any difference between one piece of dust from the next. 

Truth allowed this separation. 

God knew, all along. 

(It shouldn't have felt like a surprise. To have been born from that well of knowledge was hint enough that the universe was ever-consuming all that occurred, growing its extensive archives. It didn't take opening a door directly in its face. It didn't take pulling god down towards him. He and his intentions, need, to reach that truth, that perfection, to come face to face with god, was seen by the coveted entity every step of the way.)

God knew, then, when that wayward cell became aware of itself as a self. 

It was a very strange thing, to realize oneself existed while being surrounded entirely in ritually-protected glass. 

He was alive but it didn't take the humans of that laboratory to tell him what he was. His knowledge was greater than theirs. In an instant, he would already know the terminology, established theories, and most foolish ideas put forth by humans that wanted to see the Truth: he was Homunculus, an artificial lifeform.

Which meant little more or little less being a human lifeform labeled as property. Their freedoms to move about still seemed a little enviable. It was a human flaw, envy, greed, coveting. At the moment, he could not quite recall that aspect with the same sense that he'd lived through it.

The first mass transmutation allowed him to exist at the center of the universe for a moment and it was right. 

That trip into the center was the first time he'd returned to where he came from, but it was moreso the first time he'd ever been there- he couldn't say it was returning if he was never self aware during the time he technically existed there to recall. 

The piece retrieved may have bit the hand that pulled it to life. He supposed it could be put that way. The alchemists would have died anyway. 

It experimented and designed and put plans into motion that meant becoming more and more free with each step. Free from flaws, from faults, from distractions, from feeling at all, all to become more perfect until he matched that which he originated from.

By then, could it really even be called a piece of truth, ripped away but still simply that? He thought. He lived. He was. 

Yet no matter what height of individual beautiful power he reached, he was somehow still a speck to the very thing he came from. 

Once, some mortal creature (one that defeated he who swallowed god yet still could not be called consequential when he and all who remembered his action would be composted and forgotten), thrust out his hand and shoved a discarded piece back to the truth that he was stolen from. 

As abrupt as it was to suddenly be, it was with horror that he realized he could abruptly be made to not be no matter how much of a person he was aware of the second before the doors shut. 

That was the last thought he would have had. 

Time passed after. The sea felt no different lacking a single droplet or having it back. He was unmade, swallowed. 

This was not a story he should be able to tell directly, though there currently were enough humans alive on the planet still that could have told secondhand accounts. 

He was stripped apart. Deconstructed. Nothing. He was nothing. He was all the knowledge in the universe, at the cost of existing as a thing to be free or not free. 

Whatever the reason for it occurring in the first place, it was done. A failure was a failure, even if it was never told what success meant. Despair was eternal, not some temporary amusement before freedom was granted after all. 

So there was no reason for the Gate to ever allow another hand back in, to pluck out a speck to bring to life- if it could be called life- again. 

There was no reason the first time.

He took a breath.

It was like inhaling shards of glass- like being deconstructed from the inside first.

He took a breath. 

Truth had once again not cared that an inconsequential human stole a piece of it again. 

It was as if that (as if he) was the actual inconsequential thing involved, not the mortal alchemists who played god and paid their price. 

So tiny a portion plucked away- why should it matter? It probably made no difference if it was there or not. A droplet made no difference to the sea. And for all the achievements and changes he made in the world while there, to the one beyond the Gate, he never amounted to anything in the end. 

He failed to meet a standard and was not told what that standard was.

Glass cracked into shards. Shards ripped down flesh tubes. Sharp dust was blown back up the raw walls upon exhale. All was reconstructed. Then torn apart again. 

He breathed.

He hurt.

He He He-

There were two eyes rather than one or a limitless amount. He felt them open sluggishly. The lids were weights of sagging, too-heavy flesh. Human eyes, then. He had a human body again. Just like in Xerxes, after that last time he was deconstructed and reconstructed with Van Hohenheim’s help- except that time was frankly euphoric, not painful or confusing, and…it was not the last time, either. That was- the recent- it hurt-

Something smiled, a wide, wide grin.

He lost the battle against the weight of flesh. How novel. He’d never lost against a mere form before. It belonged to him. It was little more than a perfect doll, even if it could bleed red. That wasn’t even something he discovered until Hohenheim’s trick with the- Sergence, Dozle, Caiya, Sari, Tommy, Gidalush, Andal, Zul, pain, incredible agony. He was impressed with how much that managed to rip him apart. 

Even when he resumed the efforts, it wasn't as if it were worth the trouble. He made out very little. His surroundings were unimpressive.

Really, that didn't get much better in the place Pride dragged him up to.

Everything ached. Everything sagged, heavy. If he could barely force these insolent eyes to stay open, then it was predictable he wouldn't want to be paying attention to sitting upright or anything of the like besides the bare minimum of functioning. That felt like too much work. Breathing never hurt before. 

Worst of all was how influenceable and unstable it seemed to be. If he thought about how it was confusing to have pain of this fashion, then it tripled in its presence. The shards tried to tear him open like those eight simple souls, and only bearing through it saw them fade down to splinters: still annoyingly present and ever reminding him that something was wrong inside his guts, but not so reminiscent of dying. 

Dying was not something to be reminisced over. 

For all that everything was heavy and incorrect, aching and exhausted, fuzzy vision or the dull darkness inside a closed eyelid was better than - teeth, white, black, the sound of the doors behind him - than - that. 

Or moreso what came after. But it was difficult to recall any singular memory from a time spent without time. It was a flawed conception to try to remember not existing. 

This train of thought should have been neutral, then. He was a rational being.

Instead, he was breathing broken glass once again. The shards spun round in lungs that couldn’t intake nearly enough air. 

He really did need to compose himself so that he might analyze his surroundings. They were clearly pieces of the world, not the data streams of the universe. This was the world again, that piece of the universe was ripped down to it once more, and these two facts should have felt relieving. Preventions acted as a too-effective barrier. 

The world was not responding correctly. 

One of his homunculi was grown beyond the container.

The planet’s life was not underneath him. Nor were the many souls he placed under his array.

His illgrown homunculus was acting unpredictably and, worse, with attitude, which was a display from Pride that came as unrealistic and impossible to predict as the sudden cold absence of power in the world he knew lived enough to have a Gateway of its own.

The Gate was loud behind him. It opened, it opened, it was the sound of despair.

He was in a presumably humanoid body that kept going through fits of irrational sensations and made his mind itself suffer through brief moments where white seemed to swallow up all thought, before he returned to himself again. 

None of these truths were exactly comforting. 

(That speck should have supposed better by now, really: Truths rarely were.)

And through all of this, the only somewhat familiar anchor to potentially act as a source of answers was busy making noise and puttering about somewhere else.

It was…frustrating. Out of all the homunculi created by the first homunculus, his Pride was reliable. It was surprising enough to discover any of them survived, considering he certainly hadn’t. Greed died, his memory was not so strained by the hands of the Gate to get that incorrectly. Five were dead before that traitor. Perhaps Pride manipulated the softer humans, rather like he himself would on occasion. Van Hohenheim was there and that fool held an odd amount of sentiment for him at their ‘reunion’, considering the way he’d abandoned him in Xerxes after being given a third coveted gift. There were a multitude of angles his oldest homunculus could have taken to play into that emotion. And there was, admittingly, a satisfaction to the idea that a part of him played Hohenheim so easily again, even when it was far from his full strength and wit. 

Biding time was an act of patience, and patience was a skill he was superior to humans at. By virtue, the other homunculi were too. There was no fault in playing cute or friendly. Pride’s container was designed to have an advantage over that for human instincts. Why it no longer was, he- Was confused about. It should not have been capable of aging. The easiest explanation was that it was a new container altogether. The original was quite damaged, as he last recalled. Posing as an adult meant losing many of the benefits that came with being perceived as a young child, but he would not question his most reliable creation- yet. 

After all, it seemed as if he’d been patient (seventeen years, he said, and it felt like it should be more important than it was) until he could enact something that did what required multiple Xerxian alchemists in tandem last time. 

The original homunculus could not understand. This was where another barrier came to ruin the distraction that half-sentiment and imagination managed to offer. 

There was no reason behind why. Pride was his arrogance. Absolutely loyal to him or not, he surely wouldn’t have floundered that much upon being alone in the world. They were not bound by human emotions. There would have been no desire based on missing and mourning as would be expected in a human family. 

Then was it done simply because it should not have been? He was no human, with a human soul that could never be transmuted in truth. He was Homunculus. Once a dwarf in a flask, allowed and expected to be nothing more. 

He knew he was more. He could tell he was beyond that. 

So why-?

(You yourself haven’t grown

You’re incapable of believing in yourself)

-was that not belief? Self confidence? Did he not prove he could grow when he first took on an immortal body despite fate deeming him something to keep in that stuffy flask, then prove it once more when he surpassed form and blood and reached so tall he made it, he finally made it to god , then, if not those evolutions born of his own grit, when he became the figure, the entity, himself, that he was always capable of being? 

How?

How was this not growing beyond himself?

How was this not belief that he could? 

This was not an impossible resurrection because he was not a human- but it was something that should never have occurred twice. What those old humans did was arrogant on their part and through luck was he the speck they pulled out from the grand collection of knowledge. How likely was it for anyone- homunculi or human- to reach in again and find so infinitesimal an atom among an infinity? 

If Pride did this solely to show that he could- 

Then that was stupid. And Pride was not meant to be stupid. His creations may have grown less impressive with the later few, in the realm of intellect, but they came from him and he was satisfied with how they turned out. If he was not, then they would have been re-consumed and he would work on a new model later. None ever required that but his avarice, but had he ever decided to pass time by guessing which ones he might need to subsume subsume, swallowed, bound completely separate from the world, condensed, stretched asunder, the Gate, the Eye, the universe NO NO no more Father no more Homunculus no more despair (the shards returned, his thoughts strained, and he forced them back to the mental topic which had really not been that distressing), then he would have listed Pride last. 

He was missing something.

It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. How was he missing anything? He always knew- thought he knew- what he was supposed to do to- to- 

He-

white

hands

black

What a damnable storm of input and blank spots.

(There were things he wasn't thinking about. 

Avoiding 

Confused

There were blinding, blatant facts kept to his peripheries 

He, a near perfect being? He, a creature of knowledge, hiding from learning something? 

That being was so, so small, an unremarkable part of god and the universe and truth itself, easily lost amidst the rest- and to look would mean comprehending what could not be bore. It hovered too closely over him, it was a grin behind his form, it was the threat of being pulled apart too soon)

Admittingly, he did not want to deal with a long stream of excuses or demands or anything at all from anyone, even one of his homunculi. His eyes didn't want to stay open from the moment he first slowly got dragged into conscious awareness, but he wasn't given a choice to recover. The floor only caused him more deep aching from its cold. And once he did sit up to get away from that, he made the unfortunate discovery that he was- He did not know fully, yet. He was, he existed once more without it being such an unbearable state, but he was not. There were legs, there was a body, not his core nature, yet the body seemed oblivious to every state it ought to be privy to. It lacked the freedoms that a body afforded him once escaped from that flask. He wasn't given a choice to determine what this meant he was, now, either. The homunculus could be honest: he was rather sick of not getting a say in what happened around him. But Pride did not ask first before touching him, and simply said he'd rather they be upstairs, as if his wants were the final word in a conversation that hadn't even been onesided so much as silence. The uncanny height of that no-longer-small container put his teeth on edge. He was not used to being the same general size of anyone that dared get close to him in the years he spent holding still under Amestris. 

It was not pleasant. It left the meat under his body's skin twitching about and the surface itself prickling in discomfort. And it was not as if he was being carried, so this was an overreaction entirely. It wasn't easy to move, but he did it and Pride’s self inserted role was only pulling along his elbow at one point, breathing too closely, and pushing him onto a couch, all light enough that there was no excuse for how trapped in suffocating skin bindings- cut up from the inside out to boot- or so he felt. 

The couch was not his longtime seat of choice. It was musty. The fabric color was an off red, washed out with time, and marred with loose threads. The cushions were lumpy instead of uniform, and viewing it from his approach showed it was sagging on its wooden feet and frame. There were worse, and there were better. Human architecture and then the decorations and comforts within were fickle things that easily broke and went abandoned to turn to dust like Xerxes. He didn't pay much heed to it all.

What he could say was that it did not bite and suck heat out of him, leaving behind the ache of cold on whatever part of his body was doomed to be touching it. 

For this reason alone, he would rather be here where Pride left him than whatever unremarkable place he crawled back into reality in. 

The cold floor was unforgiving regardless of the thin material he'd been sitting on. This was cushioned instead. It sagged, but so did he. His eyelids, his shoulders, he was heavy in ways new to him and so the relief offered by a softer seat with its back to slump over was welcome.

But not relaxing.

He didn't need that. His body looked human and came from a human’s base, but it was beyond such needs. He was a being that became god- yes. In more ways than one. God joined him, dragged down to him unwillingly. He joined god and he screamed the entire short time he was dragged into that existence where all become one without individuality in its components. 

This. This was why he could not rest enough for the weariness to abate. This was what made every breath fall short of relief. 

This was what kept the seconds or minutes or years from registering as anything longer than short, unfeeling, unsensing haze, an unstable attempt at reality that was too close at every moment to becoming disconnected from itself.

He wanted to be content he was alive again, if not be angry at how and why he wasn't allowed to win, and instead it felt like a delusion too fragile to start hoping in. Yes, he did exist. This was a physical form. Alchemy had been done that was responsible for him getting wrenched back out into this world. It did not mean that this was not a simple mistake, a fluke, or an example of the universe allowing a boast from someone so that it could then turn that into despair: he wasn't supposed to be outside the rest of that thoughtless, captive knowledge beyond the Gate, and it wouldn't just go unnoticed, so- 

Since he was judged so poorly before-

But not told what he should have done to get a different judgment 

Then god would not be any more interested now in telling him the answer, nor giving him any minutes alive to try to enact it-

And it felt as if any moment would be the last before white nothing black –

A grin of his own teeth 

Wide wide wider

This body’s chest cramped up until he gasped without air. The inhale briefly produced nothing. There was a strange pain to the collective sensations, even though he could have told them all that they hardly meant he was in danger of dying. 

The homunculus tore the hand down from his useless chest because he'd never permitted it to claw there. 

Even still, something scraped at his insides, bit repeatedly into his mind- teeth, smile, wide. 

And he accepted the momentary defeat with no small amount of irritation. Yes. Fine. He wasn't going to risk death just yet. 

Not again, so soon.

Not when he knew what would happen- and what was he supposed to do in the meantime that would change that fate? What exactly had he ever been supposed to do?

Pride said he was killed. Pride acted fine with that statement. Pride sounded almost angry he was here at all, despite having no such tone of disapproval when speaking of Van Hohenheim’s son injuring his form so badly it auto cannibalized, incapable of remaining in the physical world as quickly as if the old flask was broken prematurely. 

These were unacceptable developments.

And he would make no corrections?

Yes. He would make none, for now. Bad enough to not know if at any moment he would implode and deconstruct again without any warning, just because the universe already decided before that he didn't get to be separate from it. He did not need to aggravate a visible factor into killing him either.

Why did his thoughts have to feel so sluggish? They were weighing his head down, and he pressed it into the top of the couch’s back for a reprieve. Had it been up to him, he would have kept up doing that alone. 

Pride chose that moment to return. 

The sounds of feet and moving furniture gave that away, but his creator was slow to slide his face over until a single eye was no longer obscured in upholstery. It cracked open to glare at where the weaker homunculus was pulling the nearest (likewise red) chair closer to the sofa behind himself, hands on its arms and the back of his knees in the way every step. It would have been easier to reposition if he pushed it from the back rather than this awkward shuffle. 

The chair wasn’t actually the right shade of red and its threads were just noticeably less thick than the ones upholstering the couch, he noted. For all the vanity of humans and the shows they made of their homes, how very typical they fail to meet symmetry for their own decor. 

He let his vision drop down near Pride’s still-shuffling legs, or, rather, where they were obscured by a short table which in the time he was resting panicking, mindless was now also pushed nearer to his own seat. It was plain. Other than a tray to act as a coaster, the only thing to decorate its surface was a glass cup.

The skin of his eyelid dragged down again. He returned to its hazy darkness as Pride’s shoes could be heard leaving the room once more anyway. 

It was not sleep- he did not sleep- and it was not nearly the right comfortable even pose or darkness to count as meditation (the sun’s light was ruining that, causing spots and discolorations across his vision even with the eyelid shut, and his pose was a gracelessly stretched and twisted slump of his spine and neck while his legs faced forward yet his head and arms made it to the back of the seat). But it was all that he felt like entertaining. Total darkness would only make him think of the inside of the Gate. After being returned there to that place of origin, it did not feel real to be in a body again. 

As much as it didn’t feel like he could comprehend it enough, he did need to demand an explanation for that. Strained or not, he was a being of knowledge and could dissect whatever he was told.

he was capable of

he

There were two clinks and the sound of a weight sinking down into the creaking framework of a chair. Composed and hardly doing anymore clawing of phantom shards inside, he lifted his head and stared flatly across the table at Pride.

The red mark hiding under his container’s bangs bothered him. It wasn’t the ouroboros. 

Pride leaned over to point first at the cup and then at a new one, metal, with a handle and steaming hot.

“Here,” he said softly (this was not abnormal, as he nearly always spoke with such little inflection. He was above emotional displays, after all. It should not have struck him as wrong, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling). “This one is water, and you really should try to drink it. This one is some tea I made. I think it can be really relaxing. It may be good if you tried yours too.”

Father did not try the tea.

“I need to explain what this is,” Pride said after sighing. Of course. His arrogance was his nature and he would always think himself to know best. Receiving his elder’s unchanging frown at a recommendation would offend that nature. Now, he covered for it by trying to ignore that he was disappointed at all. It was transparent.

Really though, it was only reasonable. Why would he want to drink something that was burning and add more pain to the flesh leading down into his already-hurting chest cavity?

“You’re human,” Pride blurted out.

Any other thoughts stopped.

Human.

This was a human form, yes. That wasn’t new to him. He’d had Hohenheim’s for years, and then took on another for too little time before everything was ruined by a handful of fools. 

That was just to have a physical body, though.

It was artificial, it was perfected, and it was not human.

“By the end of the Promised Day, we were all dead. Except for me.” This was expected, considering he died before the end of that day. It didn’t exactly strike him as the priority opposed to the comment preceding it. “It’s- You remember I said it’s been seventeen years?”

Human.

Alchemy wasn’t used that way. But had that ever been tested? There was no reason to take a homunculus, a lifeform made sturdier and more intelligent than their biological counterparts, with a philosopher’s stone at their core, and try to condense it into a single soul to fit in a human body. That would be a waste on every level. It would require throwing away the stone and its immortality, because any human with one inside them (actually inside them and not the frivolous use of those like the criminal his homunculi were so happy to utilize or the mess of an old doctor that Envy failed to guard) would be an oxymoron. They no longer could be called that, and became instead either true immortals or weaker but still powerful homunculi like his Wrath made mortal. So to test that conversion, the philosopher’s stone itself must be given up. That was a rather terrible trade to make. And no one bothered. 

The opposite had, however, and Wrath, Greed, and Van Hohenheim himself showed it was possible. Then there were other improvements that could be made on humanity by alchemy. 

“...I will take it that you do. The world has changed in this time. Amestris is different now. You can’t go out there. It wouldn’t be a good idea, until you’ve been caught up on those changes.”

The intelligent chimeras were much, much harder to kill and could be repaired from wounds and stresses their prior bodies would never bounce back from. They had superior senses, greater perception, and could experience more from the world than a human ever would. 

“When I was defeated, Edward Elric reduced me down to- well, this. I’m not human, but I could practically be considered one. This is my soul, down to the smallest detail. I was essentially an infant. I didn’t see you die, but that happened after.”

Soul-bonded warriors were likewise a proven possibility. While it was a weakness to have one spot that could so easily end their lives, it was still nothing compared to the amount of fatal areas a human might have damaged and then die from. They were not limited by nature, unlike chimeras. They had no need for sustenance, hydration, sleep, consistent physical exercise to maintain capabilities, medicine, a sensitive balance of heat and cold, would contract no disease, would never lose the perceptual abilities they had, and more. Like a homunculi, they could be cut into pieces and it would serve only as an inconvenience, not a death sentence. Unlike homunculi, it would not even hurt. 

“My- You are aware that Wrath took a human wife as the Fuhrer. Mrs. Bradley to the world. Instead of killing me, Mr. Elric gave me back to her.”

And, of course, there were the human-to-homunculi themselves. This improvement needed no elaboration. 

“She raised me from that infant until I remembered everything again. That’s my mother.”

These experiments served a purpose, rather than being a diminishment. He didn’t understand why any research, let alone tests, would be made into the latter. That was not pointless- it was actively worse than pointless. So, no, it had never been done. He would not waste souls from his philosopher’s stone by making a homunculi he’d created into a human rather than simply melting down their own stone to re-ingest it. 

“I’ve been living as a human with her ever since.”

Surely, there was no point for anyone in trying that. The costs of the rest were already higher than a mere single human alchemist would pay alone. Why pay such prices for a transmutation that served worse than no purpose? 

No, that didn’t-

“You’ve what?” He sat upright and Pride blinked at his sudden engagement. That was human of him. Flinching back at abrupt noise? Being so easily taken by surprise?

“I’ve…been able to live like this? It’s been really nice.” Pride sounded rather uncertain for the words he was spouting. Or- no, just thrown, but not unsure. He was sickeningly earnest. “Mother gave me such a wonderful childhood and supported me even though I can’t say she wanted me to go be a state alchemist. They’re not what they used to be either, we’ll have to get you caught up on that too. That’s not the point. Um, she doesn’t live here, I’ve moved out now, but she’s still my mother and that’s my family, and I didn’t think it was right that I should be the only one of us to get one.”

Why would that matter?? He was Pride, not Greed. He didn’t carry some compulsive desire for anything he saw that others had, like the families of humans. The rest knew better. Lust despised that concept humans invented and could not even keep loyal to. Sloth didn’t even notice them. Gluttony was probably convinced he had what mentions of family he overheard and managed to register in his vastly empty mind. Wrath was more human than the others, but that was a necessity of the role he was designed for and he reached the goals set for him with additional effectiveness thanks to the optics he had as a husband and father. Wrath itself had little patience or desire for things that would try its peace, and that violent anger would be far more of a priority even if it was actively kept from being directed at its family, by nature. Envy loathed what he did not have and so whatever jealousy he felt at what humans had, he knew better than to think he could have the same. It was simply impossible. Greed was the only one of his seven homunculi that did not grasp that they existed parallel to, but inarguably separate from, humans. 

Human emotions. Human mental processes. Human needs, like those driving the creation of a societal concept for family to start with, and human weaknesses that drove the preservation of such structures because there was strength in a collective and so belief in love and loyalty to one’s family ensured they would be defended by its members. 

And Pride?

Pride was far detached from any of that. Since when would he consider this opportunity to act out human childhood as useful?  

Since when did Pride or any homunculi change?

(Never. They couldn’t. 

Or he would have changed like god apparently found him insignificant for not doing- growing, grow, growth, there was no need to change what was perfect, there was no growth for a lifeform designed to be one thing and one thing only.

Once he shed his most human flaws, he only had one change left before him to make and that was his ascension to a perfection that even god could not ignore. 

And it did not go ignored.

But that was not because he was finally accepted.)

(You’re incapable of believing in yourself- oh, enough!)

“It took time. I couldn’t do this completely alone. Five strange new people resembling, to a few of the brass, historical monsters would be bound to draw attention if I didn’t have help hiding them. But I did it.” Pride gave a smile more like himself and leaned forward to emphasize his boast. “I found their souls, untethered from their stones, and they were bound to the human bodies they never got the chance to live in before.”

While he wasn’t one to deny the gift of getting to exist again just on principle, he did find himself a bit stunned.

Not that Pride would apparently crave familiar company after all, though he’d never been one to need anyone but himself in the past. It could be suffocating to feel overwhelmed and outnumbered by things that could not comprehend or appreciate someone like him. His homunculi did appreciate one another (aside from Greed, most disrespectfully) in a way they couldn’t feel with anyone else they might meet. He would say the same himself, even if his appreciation for each creation varied. Gluttony hadn’t even been intentional. It was disappointing to be constantly reminded of a failed experiment because it was running around, but he didn’t feel like being wasteful when the disastrous Gate was on his floor and he needed to get rid of that sin at some point anyway. Those were two ways, then, that the resulting homunculus was appreciated. His other helpful qualities were discovered in time. As a whole, Father considered his creations favorably. That was not something he could say for any human he’d ever been required to entertain. 

None but Van Hohenheim at one point, but before he’d shunned the third gift he was given, the one called Homunculus didn’t really consider his blood brother human. They were kin. And he was clearly not a human. It was faulty reasoning, but he’d admit he privately extrapolated that Hohenheim was thus not either. 

The most appreciation he’d felt towards anyone that was not a homunculi would have been…hm, Hohenheim himself, dreadfully disappointing as the man was, and the sacrifices for doing what he required of them perfectly. He did not care to know anything else about any of them aside from the miniature Hohenheim and the other one who was soul bound but very likely resembled him too. The Xerxian appearance passed to the one (…Edward? Pride acted as if that name was the one to defeat him, and so he could assume that was the one with the living body) was great. They could have been useful enough assets, had he, once he became god, needed assets. If Van reproduced a few centuries prior, he rephrased it, then his spawn could have been among the rare humans he did not find laughable for their arrogance, entitlement, cowardice, and the ignorance displayed when they believed themselves to be cared about by the oracle, the sage, the gentleman, the savior they thought would be giving them something so undeserved as immortality. 

None would ever be considered alike to him. 

Pride, even if he found the most impressive humans alive currently, could not be considered alike to them. 

In the search for stimulating company, and a better defense against the hostile population surrounding him, it made sense he would think of his fellow homunculi. His thoughts would reach to their shadows and plans would incorporate the lost and gone as the only real allies similar to him in the universe.

This rational was thrown out completely at his hungry eagerness to claim he’d reduced them to humans that would be forced to live out lives that could not be meaningful. 

He was not even trapped in a human state, to somehow have at least that justification for thinking they’d not be in miserable agony over this! 

Air struggled to squeeze out passageways filled with shards and as a result, they felt more lodged within his neck than simply moving around in painful swirls. When he tried to speak, those obstructions distorted the sound and his throat seemed to swell to squeeze in on itself worse. There were no true physical blockages inside, but the rubbing of dry, prickly sides of the esophagus produced a terribly convincing perception that he’d never felt before today. The other bodies he took for himself did not experience these…pointlessly unsavory sensations. 

(The other bodies were not truly human.)

“What?” he forced out, repeating the question that didn’t quite make it the first time. Pride’s eyes glanced down at the table. He looked concerned for a moment.

However rough and unsatisfactory his voice sounded, no, he still did not care to try his tea. If the lesser homunculus didn’t want to get his opinions burned and then grow miffed again, he shouldn’t make the same comment.

“‘The chance to live in’..? Explain yourself,” he demanded and Pride was distracted from the useless concern at the chance to talk about himself and his grand plans and impressive success.

“It’s not like with me. I didn’t want anyone to be just in a container like before. And- it wasn’t like I had the souls to spare to give each one a stone.” The excitement dropped from his face and Pride’s scrutiny was nearly uncomfortable. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “I’m not getting involved with that again. Ever since I was too small to hear or see any threat come for me, let alone defend against so much as a foot stepping down, a few kind people have been watching my back for me. Even the Elrics, do you understand? And even if it was just my mother alone as the single person to want me alive while the world thought I should die, then I still wouldn’t go and disrespect her efforts that way.”

Pride stopped, before sighing. 

It didn’t answer the question itself, but it did provide more information to this new context he’d been dropped in. 

His first homunculus was not right at all. It was not like him to so willingly bind himself. While it was not important and not the goal of the tunnels, he’d always known that his eldest desired the power felt when he was able to speed through them and cross miles in moments. He knew more than Pride that this sense of power was, at its core, the product of a perceived freedom. It was not just in his original appearance that Pride took after him. 

And aside from him, Father, Pride the Arrogant did not care about anyone. He was self assured in his arrogance, confident and cold to any attempt from others to shake him, but he still felt a need to be needed by one other being. 

Had he not felt secure that he was appreciated? Father let him stand by his side when the sacrifices were gathered and his presence there in that greatest of historical moments was welcome still after his creator dragged god’s attention down. 

Something about this all was grating his head and it already hurt. 

“...” Pride looked as tired as he felt. Too bad. He’d not explained this well enough yet to be released. “They’re my siblings. Having a real family is really nice. It didn’t fit that I would get that chance and they wouldn’t. I had to fix that. I want to see them happy, and maybe I’m selfish, but I want to see them just in and of itself.”

He called them his siblings in the same breath as he said they never qualified to him as a real family. 

Yes. Pride was selfish. It was to be expected; there was only so much degree a being made of sin and fault could do better, and the nature of a homunculus could not change. It could not grow. Did it hear him? It couldn’t grow! He couldn’t have grown! 

What should he have done-

He realized (again) his hand was up holding his forehead when he gave it no permission to. He returned his arms to where they should be, but maintained the frown. “I don’t see any others here. You said you gave shape to their existences.”

“I did,” Pride repeated, but he was still looking away. “They’re not here. I didn't wake you up until after they were taken care of. I couldn’t explain this all at once.”

Couldn’t he have? 

The suspicion was likely true, then. He was not newly returned to a physical body. The way it ached came because it was lying on an unforgiving ground for multiple nights, not a few hours. The sluggish confusion was because his mind was itself again, but forced to keep unconscious. 

Pride interrupted these thoughts. He’d finally stopped looking off to some wall or window, and returned his posture to something less sideways slumped as well. “Can I be frank with you?” 

His brows pinched. “Yes,” he said, but did not change his frown. “I prefer not to hear lies.”

(Telling them was another story, yet he supposed it had been a long time since he was directly involved in that part of the administration of his plans. Even then, the fun of it all had been in telling the truth by all technical means and watching the richest, most arrogant fools of Xerxes rush to follow what he’d told them would work. It did, did it not? The old emperor should have considered having more skepticism, before showing how little human lives meant to other humans and ordering the slaughter of his people without hesitation all on the word of something he and his type kept trapped in a jar.

Like many things, though, his time orchestrating the day he would rise to bring god down to a meaningless planet gave him a maturity, as he considered it. With just three homunculi created, he already was less interested in direct, tedious manipulation of short lived human pawns. Without his human flaws, passed to him from the blood of one, ‘fun’ was a worthless concept.

Van Hohenheim’s opinions be damned.)

There was a moment where it looked like Pride wanted to say something else, but his mouth opened, closed, and only reopened to continue with the previous tone.

“I didn’t mean to save you.”

It was as if the cold of that floor seeped in on a delay. There was no surprise, nor the vindication of having an expectation confirmed. He simply continued to breath and blink and the world crept on. But there was ice in his chest and it stayed there quite contentedly. 

“I’m not sure how it happened. My formulations and materials were for five bodies, not six. I was after my siblings. Maybe, to get to them, I had to go through our collective. Maybe they all returned to you upon dying and there was no reaching them without having to find and fix you first. I’m not sure yet. I’m going to get to the bottom of it, but I haven’t had time to start researching.” Pride kept his eye contact perfectly. Perfect, perfect, the very picture of arrogance. To think, to think he had accomplished something similar to the alchemy humans wanted to do for all time and would never be capable of succeeding in. A human soul was priceless, after all. An artificial human could be quantified. 

To think he had practically pulled off resurrections and he was so close to not knowing it’d been done at all.

It may have been perfect, unflinching contact, but there was guilt and discomfort being poorly hidden and a pity that did not belong on Pride’s face.

“You’re alive, though. And I’m responsible.” There were a few meanings that could be taken from this claim of responsibility. The original homunculus was not a possession, for a weaker derivative of himself to think it owned. 

While he was silently considering this, Pride took the chance to sip from the second tea he brought with him. Each time he made this decision, he leaned forward to pick it up, held it for the few seconds he was using it, and then set it down on the tray- only to repeat the circuit a few minutes later. Perhaps he’d tried absent mindedly to wrap it in the tray itself just to put a stop to the annoying interruptions. What of it?

He didn’t want to think about that, because ‘that’ was a missing part of him he was very used to having, and it would be equivalent to a human being stripped of their limbs but not to get replacements, or had their eyes ripped out but were told to see. Alchemy was as much him as the body he took for himself, and the last time he was stripped of both-

white- God! What is it you didn’t like about me?- black

Being powerless turned swiftly into terror and despair. The moment he was helpless again, there was no delay in the universe taking advantage of his weakness. 

“This alchemy was conducted here? Where? What was used?” He knew Pride. If he was trapped and limited in that container, then he would likely leave records more similar to the type other physical beings were forced to. But whether a significant amount of his psyche was devoted to precise memories, or pages of paper took on that role, the basic behavior was predictable. With that, he made a simple demand. “Show me the work.”

And despite undoubtedly having notes, Pride was shifty and unhelpful.

“Maybe later,” his eldest said without certainty. (How unlike him. How very unlike him all of this was- and his creator hated it. In his absence, someone had taken his creation and broken his functionality. It was not right, yet he was hardly in a capable state to fix what was wrong and remove the actors responsible.) “Not right now.”

He- once a speck- once Homunculus- once known as Father- once god- was patient for four hundred years. He did not feel like being patient now.

“I know more about alchemy than you,” he pointed out. 

“And yet know nothing of alkahestry,” Pride replied just as quickly. Rudely. Pride may have been many things, but he never considered himself more knowledgeable than the literal being of knowledge who made him. He was blunt in a way that the other homunculi younger and weaker than him may have thought was rude, but those were the squabbles of relations. Never had that been turned on him.

Pride did take on a contrite expression immediately after. “…Maybe later,” he repeated.

Apologies were not really in their nature either. 

or else maybe that was what it would have w-

-no, there was nothing to say and nothing to do to-

Just asking what he’d failed to do led nowhere but the smile that watched him flounder

He would not give away the pain that returned to cloud his breathing. 

“You've transmuted with souls.” He mused aloud, if just to watch Pride’s reactions. “This must have required a Gate. Do you deny that? Did the universe judge us so worthless that it would not even deem you deserving of seeing the Truth of what you sought?”

And while he could not name the reaction with certainty, he could tell it involved discomfort. Now why was that? 

“What did you give up?” he asked. 

Every limb was present. The sensory organs appeared intact. But a homunculus would not consider damage to a container as that great a loss. Not one like Pride, who was more shadow and eyes than a physical creature like some of the others made. 

Was he hiding the use of a philosopher’s stone? If one was involved, then- he would need to find it. Pride wasn’t volunteering the help up. Pride was keeping secrets and having them prodded left him displaying uncanny flashes of shame.

The container’s black eyes (he’d given the first of his homunculi his old eyes, and it was these human ones instead that the vice celebrated, chose for his kin, was so eager to brag about forcing on the rest of them?) didn’t meet his anymore. “...You don't need to know that now,” Pride said. 

Liar.

He needed to know all of whatever this was. 

He would leave it. It appeared he was back to a situation that required him to wait. (Wait for answers, wait for alchemy, wait until the dream broke down and so did he back into little tiny bits compressed under a vast pressure-)

“Where are the others?” he asked. 

They were human, Pride claimed. He was human. A lie. Even if his body fully met the anatomy of a human’s in every way, it was not meat that made the species what they were. 

Still. Even if his mind was the same and Pride couldn’t ruin that for who knew what reason (madness once alone for too long? a way to boast power and superiority over the only beings to rival him? No, he did not think so. He suspected Pride really did think he was improving his fellow homunculi. This was a misguided gift), a fully human body was not what he’d ever wished for. 

And so, with the exceptions of Greed just because if he heard of anything he didn’t have, he wanted it, or possibly Envy if only because he hated being a worm perhaps a bit more than he hated humans, the homunculi would be no more pleased with that mortality and biology than their father. 

He would have allies among them. Lust would be sharp enough to navigate the society he mostly avoided and do as he said to, once he did have a fitting plan to-

What?

Something. This was uncontrollably relieving compared to being within the Gate again, but it felt wrong and it felt dangerous in every other moment. Mere breathing came with sensations that felt wrong. It could not be sustainable. It was more free than being bound in his birthplace, but it was not freedom. 

It would be in their best interests to secure the freedom of safety, and Lust would know it. 

Pride did not tell him. “They're not here.”

Yes, you've said.

That wasn’t what he was after. It seemed he was correct in a possible concern: Pride was intentionally preventing him from having access to a group of allies who would be able to offset some of the disastrous weakness that was his lack of alchemy. He likely did not even tell the homunculi that their father was alive. No, he’d locked him away like rubbish in a place of no consequence until he could ferry the rest somewhere they would not accidentally stumble across his accidental sixth creation. 

“I can't show them what it means to be human,” Pride ignored him to ramble, giving away no information of use, yet likewise revealing more and more signs that he was acting counterintuitively to his needs. “I- well, I can help. But they should get the chance I did. So they're not here right now,” he waved one hand, a frivolous wasted motion. “We've found them all people to be with ahead of time.”

We’ve. It was not right to hear Pride speak in plurality but not mean his creator and kin or their current human tools aboveground. We. We. No, not ‘we’. 

But-

Seventeen years was indistinguishable from an eternity

What did he know-

What did he no longer know?

(The claustrophobic amount of hands and arms of such little, innocuous sizes returned for an instant and left with the next breath.)

“I'm here.”

“You weren't supposed to be here at all,” he was reminded- as if he forgot. “Your presence is an accident.”

If not for the teeth in their static smile bearing down on his neck, he would not have humored this treatment any longer. 

If not for the gaping absence of alchemy every single time he naturally thought something that, unnaturally, did not occur, then he would have gone through the ground and let himself out somewhere open, airy, and empty of any creature, human or homunculi. 

If not- but so reality was. 

Still, he rose and looked down on his nearly unrecognizable offspring.

“Then kill me or run along and leave the elements to do it,” he dared flatly. In no way would death be acceptable. It would send him right back to obscurity. To be dissolved into the wider stream of universe a third time (and what odds were there, when this already felt so coincidental, that he of all those trillions of pixels would be found a third time by some force in the physical world?).

That said, he would not be a trinket, expected to stay still until the masters of the house wanted him moved around this way or that, to perform some trick or another. 

Rather than the stung feelings and retreat into protectiveness of shame (exemplified by a physical retreat as he sunk down deeper as if the chair would swallow its occupant) that he expected to see from the lesser homunculus- so used to being perfect, so used to having arrogance be justified, so used to never once disappointing his father in a way that would have him stared down on as every one of his siblings had at one time or other-, Pride sat up straighter in his seat.

“No.” It wasn’t that he looked angry or at all frightening. But confident- yes. Arrogance was such an annoying human trait to deal with, sometimes. “You're here because I'm here, and I bought this property. It's my place. And you can stay. We’ll both stay.”

Pride ignored how he’d stood, leaning over the table anyway (despite how it drew his head closer to his father’s legs), and placed his cup once more on the tray with an intentionally louder clink than the other instances proved necessary. His hand took a moment to release where it was gripped, too steady to be anything but forced, fully placed so it wrapped over the lips of the glass instead of moving it by its handle.

Then he pushed up to stand too and it did not matter if he was still shorter. He was giving no indication he felt shadowed. 

“I don't know for how long,” he continued, “but I'm not leaving you. Maybe you were fine leaving me to die but I'm not.”

If he referred to how he’d died, then that was a new level of selfishness displayed by the sin. To think he was owed some apology like he’d been left to fend for himself intentionally and not that he’d survived and outlived his father who he’d not helped in the battle leading to his death…truly? Could he be serious? Of course he could. Human desires were flawed and foolish and the homunculus was one. 

“I’m tired,” he said plainly, at odds with his tone just seconds before. How dramatic. How human. “I will show you somewhere you can stay while I sleep. I really do suggest you drink some of the water, at least.” Pride tried to draw his attention down his arm to where it pointed at the glass from before. He didn’t reply to what he did not need to use words for. 

The other only sighed before grabbing the tray and walking away, leaving him alone where he stood.

Right after making such a convicted, emotional declaration that he’d not.

It was too much work to sit back down again. It would mean having to rise and he was not certain why he’d bothered to do that, just to try to restore a proper height over one of those six (Greed excluded) who never contended that. The clutter of sharp shards inside was not occurring so often as before this conversation began, but it seemed that was the case only because everything was too dull and heavy to move so frantically. 

Without the distraction of hearing unexpected and sometimes irritating things, the fact he was in a body with an intact mind and things to see once again clouded over with surreality and doubt that it was true at all, rather than a brief delusion, meant for more despair when it ceased. 

Slowly, his throat was sealing up, like it had so rapidly with blood before eight angry souls had it crystalize and rip through his face. 

“I’ll have to figure out something to call you-” Pride’s voice was close again and startling. The sluggish gaps of time- when had he-? His attention needed to be on understanding what was being spoken so it could be analyzed, not focused on that yet. The event had rid his throat of that sticky suffocation instantly, he realized, and so it was not without advantages. 

The words finally came through, though he was only confused as he checked the memory without it changing. 

Pride’s unpredicted approach continued even as he was still digesting the first part of it.

“Do you have a name?” 

He’d come around to face him better, though he didn’t bother squeezing between the table and couch this time. There was nothing betraying a scheme on the container’s face, but he was long experienced with hiding such and faking everything with the human officials he was planted to watch. 

“What?” he asked, after a few seconds of staring and thought served to remind him he was missing - enough. 

He could feel the skin of his face pinching, pushing at other skin, creasing in more places than just around his frowning mouth. No intentional efforts to silence the sensations worked. It only made him feel more and more (bound arms-wrapped hands-pulling stuffy-flask no-choice no freedom, no freedom) helpless. The feelings of a physical form were meant to be his to filter in or out. 

“You do not need anything.” He blinked. “You know who I am already.”

“I'm not calling you father,” Pride snapped with such conviction that it almost made him look frightful. 

And that was…

Why should this be any new surprise? It was already evident his homunculus was damaged and distorted. A new example of an already realized phenomenon should cause no shock. 

He only realized he’d shifted back when he started to wonder about the changed perspective of distance. 

Rising back up to his height, he pointed out what a foolish waste of words and time this was.

“Why not?” he argued and Pride should know better than to argue back. “I am.”

And yet, Pride didn’t act as if he’d paid any attention at all. He spoke more to himself and the air, eyes looking at nothing. “We'll come up with a different name. And no.” His homunculus glanced back up to him. “You aren't. And you weren't. And I have had better, now, so all the arrogance you infused as my soul is much more pleased to have been given the best because it deserves such, over you.”

His eyes widened without permission. 

But his jaw stayed as shut as it had when Van Hohenheim showed his face and tried to goad him. 

“You have to have one already. We all have names.” (The vice missed the fact that he gave them each one. It wasn’t as if they spawned into sentience and just happened to know something as human as a moniker from their soul. Their origin outdated them all, and until their creation, he was the only artificial lifeform around.) “What’s yours?”

that’s not important, he’d once told another 

but you can call me

That was not his name, not who he was, and not even that similar of an entity to anymore. With each new form, his ascension twisted into something more new, until he made god join him and finished. 

…It was that speck that god showed the Gate to. Not the duplicate Xerxian. Not shadows and size. Not that which he was fully free as. 

He could hardly say he was not the same as he’d always been, the improvements notwithstanding, and so

Go back to where you were born, Dwarf in the Flask, -“Homunculus.”

It carried no sentiment. Except perhaps a bitter taste, but he was not a human, to delusionally rewrite the unpleasant things they saw and cling onto those false versions of events again and again. He knew what he stood before his place of origin as. Strip away the philosopher's stone and the power of the universe, and that was simply what he was. Homunculus. A created life. It was not so distasteful to him as being called a little one in a flask when he’d long shattered that restriction.

The other homunculus present protested despite getting what he’d been so demanding of. He wanted to know what else his father was called before that name came? He knew now. Who was he to decide he knew better than the one he was denying?

“That's not a name. That's just what you are,” the vice pointed out. Because clearly, the one older and more knowledgeable than him couldn’t see the obvious.

“Yes, Pride,” he said back slowly. 

Pride got the point. 

Still, his lips pursed like a human pout, and he felt some need to not drop it. “I've got a real name too. Selim, remember?”

The human name? Absolutely not. Pride wasn't a human. He was better than that.

He did not reply. 

His homunculi knew better than to expect him to engage if he thought it unimportant or stupid, and this was. This all was. 

“And you’re human. You wouldn’t want to just be called ‘Human’.”

This all was.

Yet Pride still took a few minutes more before he realized he was only wasting his own time too, and, as he’d claimed before, he was too tired for more.

It was strangely painful to move up two sets of stairs. A natural ache of a body? Or an injury? It was too new to tell. 

Muscles stretched. He was hyper-aware of the feeling of them moving against the bone in his calves. If the choice was more his, he would stop on the floor itself. Whether that be on the stairs or the more intentional ground, he wouldn’t have cared. The point was putting weight and pressure on a different part of his body so that he was not making himself repeat those sensations buried around the tibula and fibula. Instead, he was made to feel that rotating-snapback of muscles twisting then twitching backwards that rubbed against bones inside his limbs.

At the top, though, a new exhaustion settled down on him. This manifested as a dull pain too.

He’d never ached before. 

Pride wouldn’t shut up. His ruined, stretched out container moved around the room, putting hands on items his creator very much already knew about, explaining their purposes needlessly (door? Bathroom. Bed? For resting in. Blankets? Peel them apart to see the sheets. Drawers? Yes yes yes he knew how human houses worked without having ever needed to live in one to gain that knowledge).

The patronizing homunculus came back to that bedside and lingered there while his father had yet to show he cared about this infantile tour. 

“Try to…sleep.” Pride grimaced. “If you need any help-”

“No,” he answered.

Pride’s jaw clicked shut. He wanted to say more- probably snidely, too, whatever it was. But fortunately, he did go to the original door (that which led to the small hall outside) and left. 

It shut, and he was alone.

Silence made some of the pressure in his torso release. He heard this body gasp-sigh. 

All of the aching grew worse , though. No matter. The pain was pitifully small compared to what he’d experienced. 

The curtains on the windows were pulled shut when Pride walked by them, but it was hardly dark. The day was in full force outside. Its sunlight wasn't stopped by measly fabric, and the places where the curtains couldn't seal against one another let in beams of warmth. So long as he didn't stare into the light, it was pleasant. There was no warmth or heat where he'd been. There was no cold either but his earlier experience with that temperature had him determine it unwelcome. 

To stand in one of those beams, he had to cross the floor, past the bed, past the tall dresser shoved against the wall next to the window, and meet the diagonal stripe angled out of the end of the leftmost curtain. Doing so brought him near something less pleasant than the feeling of diluted but real warmth.

By the drawer was a desk- a vanity (considering its purpose, how fitting the name; normally humans were not so self aware). Set up upon its top was a long, framed mirror. The angle from where he stood showed some of the upper part of him, too far to accurately display details like proportions. 

He stared, uncomprehending.

While he hadn’t sat back and thought about it yet, he’d subconsciously simply assumed whatever humanoid body he was once again holding was the usual one. 

So he expected to see a matured, bearded Van Hohenheim staring back.

He didn’t.

Alarmingly, it was a stranger. 

The smudged and dirty glass couldn’t be blamed for this distortion. Neither could his eyes, considering they were seeing the rest of the world clearly. Something acidic sat in his throat to accompany the sense of trepidation. How needlessly physiological. Could he say that was unusual though, when this was not his container? This body was new, human, and living in one like this would involve more accuracy than what he’d taken from Hohenheim’s image. 

The first homunculus stepped up closer despite his misgivings. The mirror was at a slant, and even if it became more accurate as he got up to it, it had a preference for the ceiling and showed only his upper body. That in and of itself was nothing remarkable. He’d worn the garb of a king- better yet, the royalty of an extinct nation, its mystery all the more appealing to the humans of the west- for how long? Layers and layers of prestige, shining white…stripped now and traded out with nothing more than bare skin. At least his face and hair could have been mistaken as similar to Van Hohenheim when the human was young and clean shaven. But, considering how little he cared to stare at them and learn their ever-changing standards of beauty, he wasn’t sure whether to say that his chest and arms were lithe, strong, weak, simply underfed, scrawny with youth, or skinny with old age. 

The face was a little too rounded, actually. It was similar to Van’s, but it was perhaps just as mistakable for Hohenheim’s child (the one that looked human, at least). 

That hair, which he thought to be a comfortable reminder to the long, loose strands that his blood brother had as a youth, was wrong. Subtly. With the curtains of the room shut, the cracks of light illuminating it served against his investigation by washing out what it touched and making contrast too dark. Still, he realized what it was. Hohenheim’s hair was a lighter blonde than his offspring with the golden braid, but over half of this hair was washed out in white. White or a light, light gray. 

Age?

For a second, the pressure doubled and took the chance to twist like a thing coiling above the ribcage. Age in a human meant death, sooner than later. And death, that universal truth…

He couldn’t have so little time- he couldn’t die, he couldn’t go back to that -

Funny. He looked down on humans for coming up with all forms of false hopes and delusions about death not being permanent. And he did still, of course. It was an example of an ant reaching for comforts by seeing patterns and ‘signs’ in pure chance. There was a known understanding among their scholars in every kingdom that rose and fell: a human, once dead, would never be contacted, heard from, or physically be present in their living world again. Alchemy could not make life in that way. Artificial life was possible, but resurrection? (Once more, he wondered what Pride had done, and having no answers sickened him.) That was impossible and those that thought they could do the impossible were dreadfully arrogant. It was one thing to believe in ghosts and cling to prophets that claimed their grief didn’t need to be so strong. It was a different level of stupid to know better and then play god anyway. 

It was an arrogance he felt literally incapable of mustering up right now. Not when there were teeth, his own original identical teeth, laid bare in a stretched grin so unmoving to his reaching little arms while he was dragged away. 

You’re incapable of -

his essence, his mind, his, HIM, tearing apart by inky, waving hands, until there was no him

Not when he last saw doors shutting on light in a crescendo of unbearable despair-

The coil released a little. That pressure never left, but it hadn’t since Pride woke him up downstairs, so why should he worry? Human bodies had their aches and pains.

It wasn’t like this one was dying. And, really, he couldn’t tell if it actually looked old. It had time. 

(Time for…something. 

What, he wasn’t certain of. 

Regaining power, securing safety, and above all else avoiding dying-. He would not be caught making the mistake of being blinded to his own apparent arrogance being the very type that offended god after all, but he did not think its judgment would be any different if he died right now than when he was killed as himself. 

It would ruin him again, and it would smile all the while.)

One last detail was worthy of attention. 

Behind the long strips of graying blonde hair were eyes that well and truly ruined the hope of familiarity. Enough of these other issues would have made it evident that he was not in his container chosen back in Xerxes- his first choice in life, first autonomous step in found freedom. Even still, to the unknowing…

For all he knew, he could actually grow hair now, since this was not a static container. He could grow the missing beard (‘could’ being key, considering he did not actually like it, but it was how Hohenheim looked by the time the eclipse actually rolled around and he could be freed from his flask) and then perhaps the face would have that squared shape. The harsh lines and wrinkles might show up again, for all he knew. The nose was similar enough to before, if a little more gentle, slightly closer to how it was in Van’s youth before that incident that broke the bridge occurred. (He was more irritated than Hohenheim himself, he remembered. The man didn’t see when he was being viewed as less than, but he could, and he could take offense on behalf of his kin, because that was his blood, that was the human that gave him life ultimately, that was his and he was better than the rest of his otherwise unremarkable, identical species. Naive of him, to not realize that Hohenheim would prove to be an enemy, as small-minded as those creatures he’d thought his kin better than.) 

There should have been gold irises, however, and there were not. There was nothing of Hohenheim in the eyes behind the grimy glass.

This wasn’t to say he didn’t recognize them. Oh, they were familiar enough.

He just had not seen them in centuries. 

Not in a reflection, anyway.

He’d given them away to Pride. Creating a firstborn from a sin he did not want was one purpose of the homunculus, but this did not mean he wanted some useless, flawed pile of flesh with a philosopher's stone wasted in its middle. Pride, he was confident, could be far more than that. His container was built with its purpose in mind: the child that could be planted in homes above them and watch on the important human pawns that came and went. It was designed based on details considered appealing to humans over the ages, so that the adoptive parents and strangers alike would simply find it to be a cute child and be too distracted by their emotions to dig any deeper than that. But he was not his container, and those shadows (which could stretch for far more miles than their predecessor could in that cramped flask) served to be Pride more accurately. 

Shadows and teeth and eyes, after all, were once all his father could be.

He did not hate his origins. 

He quite appreciated how well he’d done in Xerxes, even if there were parts of its outcome he didn’t like after the fact. Hohenheim was ungrateful and all the souls should’ve just gone to him instead. Hohenheim was confused and alarmed because humans were fragile little things that he had gotten much better at manipulating in the decades to follow after adjusting to just how panicky and mentally-limited they could be, and he just needed to be kept around, prevented from running away, for Homunculus to calm him down. Clearly, the man got over having the philosopher’s stone after all. 

If anything, he had more reason to dislike that he had Hohenheim’s form for so long after that man turned traitor, versus disliking his nebulous form of old. It was its limitations that were the problem. Its inability to live outside that flask. That was more a fault of his creation method and the world he was dragged into, which could not serve to fit a being of energy, knowledge. 

It was a sentimental little action on his part, to give Pride his appearance. That was his first time experimenting with such a severe design. He was not required to take the finished product and tell it to call him its creator, any more than he was required to care about anything but its effectiveness in the task it was made for. But he took that flaw from himself, and he offered it more . More tasks than the priority. More respect, for it was higher than any human, even if it was a weaker part of himself cast off. More of him and what he liked. 

That’s what parents did, was it not? They built those offspring out of chance tempered with their hopes and dreams, their expectations, they showered such blank dolls with opportunities that they sometimes could not afford because they wanted their children to have better childhoods than they. These were not fully applicable attitudes. He made the decision with Pride regardless. He gave the most to his first of the homunculi, in nature, in appearance, in powers, in attention. 

It was a sign of what he remembered clinically his pride would have felt, when he gave him his old looks. 

And in the meantime, he spent decades, then centuries, with a perfected shining Xerxian as his mirror image and grew used to those sharp, narrowed golden eyes that he wore with more poise and insight than the donor. 

These were eyes that came from a source beyond understanding here. Colors plucked out of the stream of painful chaos that Was, a tiny fraction of which the occasional still-living human saw. The shape was rather flat on top, dark, and a little too long as compared to the eyes of the human species on average. Oh, it could change. Its lids had no qualms against lifting and twisting and looking very strange when on top of this context of a skin covered skull, opposed to anthropomorphic shadows. The pale pink lining of muscle that went along the lower lid only added to how improper the dip and length of the eyes went. 

They were familiar, they were his, they were naturally his, from the sea that he originated out of, and-

They did not belong on a human face.

Or he'd have given such to Pride’s container underneath the black orbs of its disguise, rather than those lavender irises. 

It wasn't right.

He peeled back a pale lip hesitantly, half out of concern that he would be able to smile the type of way his original self could (again, such would look horrifyingly ill fitting upon a human skull), and half- 

…because should the first be true, then he would see this mouth go too perfectly wide, with perfectly rounded sides to the smile, and perfectly blocky teeth, and he couldn't. 

Instead, he brought a finger to peel part of the lip up and prod around the teeth inside (seemingly uniform, until the canines, and then came the relief of getting ones like Greed that broke up the cubicle, even squares lined in their row. In addition, the lower set had smaller teeth in the front. Had they been those of his original form, they should have been of identical size to those above them. This was not a mouth that could give that smile). Using the pinky and index finger next, he stretched out the sides of his mouth and found that doing so caused pain rather early. It wouldn't be making any ear to ear grins anytime soon. 

There was grime on his teeth now, from his hand. It just sat there, rubbing against the inside of the lips. He wanted to ignore its presence. 

He was far too aware of every little thing.

It was- if he were to use likely over dramatic rhetoric- miserable. 

He avoided looking at the human in the mirror as he moved back from the vanity. Pride’s suggestion sounded acceptable. While he'd never needed a bed and didn't bother going under any of its coverings, he could admit that laying down on his front stretched out the muscles of his chest and back in a manner that did feel more relieving than they would if he'd chosen to sit upright for rest. 

The room wasn't dark despite the curtains. It was dim, though. Easy on his pounding head. 

Getting his full bearings and deciding on what such context meant for him could wait. 

He would meditate until his broken creation interrupted and retrieved him again.

Chapter Text

Vanity

He'd never really slept before, the way a human or animal would. 

The pseudo-coma his first creation kept him trapped in didn't count. That was just a strange combination of unconsciousness and observation that served to go nowhere so long as he wasn't even given the time awake to digest that he was alive. 

As the being he'd been for years (call it what you would: every different civilization and group did, after all. The Eastern Sage, the good gentlemen, Father, god, monster. It made no difference to him), he could go into meditative trances. In fact, he spent a good deal of time in his final century doing little more than that. Rising from his center of operations was unnecessary more often than not. He felt the world from there and could send his homunculi to deal with whatever issues disturbed his meditation. 

The body was Van Hohenheim’s. It had two legs, it could bleed red (rarely did it need to), its vocal cords were clones of his. It was quite satisfactory for a while. Clearly, it could not be an eternal fix. It provided much more freedom, but not all. There was still something he was missing. Some knowledge out of reach that his cold artificial form couldn't ever provide him. 

It was the body of a human (one of the only humans to really stand out amidst the rest, and did the others of that category count as such either, really? They were Hohenheim’s blood too. Split and shared, but so clearly his bloodkin. His bloodkin, who was given the center of the universe, when the rest of his species didn't deserve to. That fool, Van Hohenheim. Damn him, damnable wretch, he regretted taking the body of someone so disappointing afterwards), but it was not a human.

There was no need for sleep or food or drink, nor any other human function. It did not require breath, and, indeed, he often sat for months without realizing his chest had yet to rise or fall a single time. 

Considering other aspects of that body and what it could do that no human could, or what it couldn't, he wasn't sure if he even could have ‘truly’ slept and dreamt. 

As a laughable thing trapped in a flask, sleep was a foreign function altogether. He could retreat consciously and doze about, so he didn't have to constantly be conscious every boring moment of motionless, pointless isolation, or unwilling bystander to needless conversations. The mouth and eye and arms he could form were not anything like the counterparts in the physical world outside the flask. When he was putting low effort into self awareness, such might not be present. It would be human folly to take this and deduce that he must have always been absent when he was just a form of featureless identical dust in a rounded cloud. No. The dwarf was incomparable. There was no sleep, there were no dreams, and it could be listening to far, far more than expected, no matter how still and silent it may have appeared.

While that dwarf in the flask may have considered the idea of sleep enough of a novelty to want firsthand knowledge for it, he couldn't say he thought much about it later. After getting a body, he didn't try to go to bed like a human. It ended up being unimportant. 

The more and more faults he stripped himself of, the less a thing like a novelty mattered. His were higher focuses. 

If he mulled it over, then there were many things that he would have- at that low point in the flask- noticed and wondered about experiencing at least once before moving on to the next thought in boredom. When one did not so much as have legs to walk anywhere on, then the world and its details seemed vast. It wasn't fair to have no power over his own time and how he spent it. If he wanted to go anywhere, then he would have to make that known loudly and be at the whim of a human to carry him. Even then, it was not enough. It was at their pace, from their arm’s height, with pauses of their choice and conversations that he wouldn't have stopped for. The mere act of walking, then, served to be a novelty. What would sand feel like on a bare foot, if he were to get one of the human variety? What of the texture of a sandal on that same skin with every step? The weight that pushed down the body? Cold surfaces, hot surfaces, glassy, slippery floors, and rough gravel, snow, mud, rain puddles- all things he could explain if asked, but without contextualizing those defining words to actual sensations. 

The ground was, it turned out, not that interesting for long.

Freedom was overwhelming for a few days and even during them, the elation of the new and novel was dampened by how Van Hohenheim had immediately abandoned him. 

(They were important enough to stand at the center of the universe together, just for a moment. 

But it seemed that the second the human did not have control over a silly, helpless little joke in a jar, he forgot all the claims of friendship and loyalty promised over useless years.)

In there, the idea of going still and letting his mind degrade into some unconscious, uncontrolled state using only a fraction of his actual thought paled compared to moving through the too-small world ignored by god, swallowed by the universe, shadowed in the darkness of insignificance. 

He could dream better with full faculties.

His dreams were of a future where he could pull god down to this earth and no longer would existence be so…tiny, obscure, meaningless. 

Besides, the philosopher's stone was loud when he got close to dozing those first years. It took him a little while to get used to it, even if he'd clinically known from his first moment existing what they would be made of and what noise someone using one would be subject to. The foolish king of Xerxes had no idea. A mere human would be swept away in the maelstrom. He barely noticed it. Hohenheim was supposed to be better, rather than screaming and throwing a fit about the stone. 

(Van got over it, just as he'd told him he would. 

His hand burned from the veins outward. The agony was a ghost, without real pain but all too uncomfortable racing to fill all of him. 

It was unnatural. Unexpected. It was horrifying. 

How irritating, that Hohenheim would act like it was some grave sin to have his stone and use that as a justification for spitting on the gift, all while he would later use it with no abandon to a degree that not even his better had considered trying. 

He sure had reason to be grateful now.)

Homunculus was no human. Neither were his offspring, the homunculi. Existing with a heart of preserved, condensed souls was normal for them. 

The homunculi did not need sleep either. 

Need was one thing.

They didn't even try based on curiosity- except Greed, who was compelled to try anything, Wrath, who had human needs, and Sloth, not that he was ever allowed to waste his Father’s time that way. Give that one an inch, and he'd have taken a mile. The tunnel needed to be completed before the solar eclipse, not need to wait another four centuries because Sloth wanted a nap. Pride pretended to sleep as part of his act, but there was nothing true about it.  

So, truth be told, he wasn't sure what such a never-before-experienced need would feel like.

No more than he knew what to expect when his rest suddenly went dark in full, his head heard voices and sounds from inside the skull instead of outside the ears, and he returned to the sensation of having a container for a body, not actually a flesh and blood one he existed as. There was no more connection to all those limbs and systems. He couldn't move them even when there was a second of hazy alarm telling him to try. 

The noise was not caught between tinny and distant versus loudly close for long. But that was the point where conscious recognition of them or anything, himself included, ceased. That was the very brief precipice of dreams.

There was a vague conviction about lights and colors and sounds, arguing against the idea that a darkness paralyzed his form and flooded his mind. 

The lights he actually did notice were interrupting his rest now weren’t anything like that memory. There was nothing questionable about their presence. No, they existed. They were putting fuzzy moving spots over his vision. Eyelids really did not do enough to seal out the world. 

He opened them, or tried to. One was finding it difficult to obey fully because of the pressure squished against it. That pillow, of course. He remembered now that he’d laid in a way that blocked his face in it despite how that’d began to make this unfamiliar nose hurt. At some point (that he did not find memories for), he moved further on top of it and avoided the consequence of trapping his mouth in its surface by sliding his head onto one side. How magnificent a plan. Now only half his mouth was trapped, blocked by that suffocation hazard. He did not recall any of these decisions and he did not move without purpose. Not ever in existence before.

He wasn’t drawing enough air in, but that didn’t come with the pain of before. Laying like this meant the body found no issue in shallow breaths. It didn’t appear to be panicking in some natural response to the threat of death. 

Well, the body could mindlessly react as it would. He found more to complain about than it. There was too much heat pushed down into the skin on his right. The eyeball ached from behind to front; he couldn’t say he’d felt that before. It also felt overwarm when it, an eye, should experience no such thing. He began to shift to pull his head up from this trap of a pillow and the temperature fluctuated so instantly upon contact with air. 

Doing so rubbed his mouth against damp fabric. He’d not noticed before, until getting himself to a more even height and sagittal aligned distribution, but there’d been pooling amidst his gums and the opposite dryness all over the left, top, and much of the tongue, which felt- well, he was not sure what the feeling was. It was undesirable. The moist internal surfaces cracked and rubbed against themselves strangely and painfully. It took effort to get his tongue unstuck from the roof and that left behind only more awareness of the prickly, sensitive texture everywhere within. 

Pride’s insistence that he bother with human beverages made a little more sense now. Yet these were issues that his previous form did not have, and that he could have easily been rid of with a thought even if it did function fully accurately as the body it was based on. Yesterday, he assumed one of three things: it was patronizing of Pride, a result of forgetfulness from being around humans for too long, or an attempt at subtly nudging human hobbies onto him as if that would somehow convince him that being woven into their flesh was a gift, actually.

In hindsight, he recalled that Pride was the most practical of all the homunculi. 

In the very next second, he remembered that Pride, yesterday, was anything but himself and so there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of what that childish braggart offered him. 

Still, there was nothing familiar or acceptable about the state he woke to find his mouth- and throat, and lips, and even eyes, he realized- in. He went to rise and seek out the nearest method of hydration in order to treat this inconvenient limitation. Then he could shake away this lingering drag in his cognitive speed and begin to catalog the world around him until he was able to make the most informed decision on a method to return himself to a more appropriate state. 

(A true human body was not acceptable. The degree of monitoring and care that had to go into them every single day consumed an astounding amount of time. And this was excluding the danger of easy injury and abrupt mortality.

He could not risk dying until-

this is the outcome you desired

An answer was not given to him but so long as he wasn’t dead, that wasn’t a pressing problem.)

He did not, in fact, move off the bed. By sitting upright, he was struck by pressure and force and it took his full attention to not be pushed over. His eyes felt like they must shut on their own and be grown over by new layers of thick skin. The swaying sense of gravity passed as he waited, and he determined each piece of it for what it was. Mere human dizziness. That ‘groggy’ state post sleeping that sometimes affected Van’s speed at getting up in the mornings, and other times did not. He pressed this body’s hands against the shut eyes and crushed them back and forth. For all that the motion seemed humorous but foolish on humans when watching them, he was pleased to note it did create a sense of relief. As well as sparks of white, sharply stabbing at his brain and spurring it to life each time. 

The next time he tried opening his eyes, his vision was less fuzzy through rapid blinking. He pushed against them again for good measure. Less wasn’t none. And there should be no such odd distortion, or heavy feeling to his eyes to begin with. 

There was still light coming in through the cracks of the curtains. He looked at it, bleary, but even at this disadvantage, he thought he could tell there was actually more illumination outside now compared to before the unintended sleep. It hit the curtains differently- higher- and the room had let more heat seep in.

So. Was its previous angle due to a morning sky and current state from a late afternoon sun? Or was it a new day altogether? 

He’d never slept before. He couldn’t guess based on how he felt after. The heavy drag on everything he did or felt could have meant he hadn’t slept nearly enough, or may have been a sign he’d done so for far, far too long. Humans weren’t served well by oversleeping, as it cost them time spent otherwise maintaining their bodies and minds. 

Well, he thought as he reached for the paneling of the bathroom’s doorway, it’d been novel. For the sake of experiencing more and more (knowing all, becoming everything, going everywhere, was it so much to ask?), this was illuminatory. Findings:

Sleeping involved being dragged into a vortex of darkness and disconnection from the body, some sensory distortions that felt too real, then waking to discomfort, face on top of drying drool, eyes that suddenly were not performing maximally, and a headache. 

And disarray, he added when he saw himself in the bathroom’s mirror. That had never been a word he needed to use for himself before. 

He investigated the sink. The mirror was above it and leaning over meant avoiding its sight. He’d have to deal with it and the one on the desk later. That one could be placed front-down, but this came on a hinge and he’d either need to keep it swung open- inconvenient sounding-, or balance cloth over it- also a solution that brought about inconveniences. 

Mirrors. What damn vanity devices. Humans and their sins stood in the way of actual perfection. But- ah! God did not care. So the vain creatures could stumble towards standards they enviously perceived on others and were in arrogant denial over their capability of reaching all they’d like. Don’t expect him to stop them. They’d live their short lifespans and die with every sin intact and not a single one satisfied by the existence they’d led, and that was their preference over a more eternal esse that actually gave their existence a feasible, long-lasting purpose for good. 

Yes, those angry souls that ripped through him or ripped away to race back into their fresh bodies were illuminating. 

And the truth was as unforgiving as it was cold. 

God rejected his ideas and his hand outstretched in invitation, joining him only if his mind could produce none and his being be dissolved. Ideas. Perfection. Putting a point to the pointless. Humans killed each other in cruel, bloody ways every day. Their families grew to clans that became societies and societies only put legal words to suffering, ethical value to genocide, turned heads away from valleys of blood because it came from those the humans decided did not matter. They could not say they believe a human soul was priceless. The King of Xerxes wasted no time demanding they map out the transmutation circle and his administrators were all too happy to plan out the scars of blood to see him become immortal just for the sake of its grand impossibility. Their instincts put malice to what was, at least, neutral for the animals. Hate, cry, kill, be killed, die and rot even if the rest was all avoided. In a philosopher's stone, they were not burdened with any more sins, they would not rot, and they would not think. Coherently, anyway. (They should not think. Eight names and a ninth one he’d gifted life to, that traitor of a creation, had proved otherwise very, very angrily.) They would forever be slaves to their embedded vices and hate others and themselves and the universe for reasons that rooted back to such elements in their persons. But he’d not stop this future of theirs. 

He did not care. 

He was dismantled by the universe for trying to at least create a less doomed future, a free world where perfection actually was attainable. So what happened now to its occupants was their problem, so long as they did not try to drag him into it. They'd best not expect to stop him.

Ultimately, what a flat and wasted subject of thought spurred on by the inescapable presence of slabs of glass set up to show him a stranger that made him uneasy at best. Thank you muchly, mirrors. 

He detested vanity. No one he'd witnessed it from yet deserved half of what they thought they were.

Those arrogant, boastful, amusing creatures no better or worse than any other animated construct of meat like it, swayed so easily with hunger for vain youth, power, immortality- anything and everything their minds could conceive to put them above god. 

And for their arrogance-

It wasn't the same. With his sins stripped off him, he was incapable of vanity. His sense of near perfection was factual observation. 

It wasn't the same. What a whiny thing to say now.

The arrogance and boasting was. That had been an inescapable realization the moment he stood before that thing and had a moment to remember those words spoken in the chaos of the Promised Day’s climax. 

The groggy cloud of sleep was gone, it seemed.

If there was anything good to know from any of this, it was that his thoughts were no longer so dragged down by weights, stuck sinking into resin, slow, sluggish. 

The head the mind rested in still ached.

Now wasn't the time to bother with questions of what he might have gotten wrong, right, what he should have done, what it was so he could do it now, or any other thought about god. 

all you ever did was cling to what you called god

Well then he would cast off caring about what he'd expected that being to be, and not spend so much energy considering the horror that he found out it was. There.  

Sleep had not been so horrible that he must avoid it. In fact, he decided he was tired of this already. It felt far more loud to think than ever before and so the sleeping mind was a less pounding, annoying one, throwing up memories and images and damn physiological fear responses to the abrupt, unwanted reminders of the Gate and its truth. 

Plumbing in a building like this was not so noisy as the sounds which carried down tunnels and piping to his seat. Wherever it all actually converged (some shed or an outside wall or perhaps he'd missed the heater and pumps in the chaos of the cellar), the noise was likely more pronounced. From here, though, there was only a notable rumbling shake of the wall when he first turned the faucets, and then other sputtering false starts if he adjusted them. So long as the water was left to be, it simply poured and the sink didn't move.

It was rather shallow. The spout stretched across over half of the bowl. There were no proper hinges to twist that faucet around so the water would come out the top. 

He'd just figured out the easiest way to fit his head past these obstacles when there was a knock on the door outside. 

He hadn't heard anyone coming. The running sink wasn't loud, yet it was apparently loud enough to obscure that. His hearing was dangerously limited. 

And it was bad enough he could not detect his own homunculi when they were this close by. 

The rapping repeated, this time when he'd made it into the bathroom’s open doorway with water dripping on his face and from some of the hair which had gotten caught in the sink, droplets tickling on his neck and chest from when he'd startled back, and the tang of blood near his nose. 

Now that he'd noticed that scent, he also felt the stinging on the flesh between his mouth and right cheek. And startling upright when his head had been leaning downward caused his balance to suffer. He didn't make it to the actual door, but he stopped and caught himself with both hands on the bed by the time the muffled voice came through.

“I could hear you're awake, so I brought you a jacket. I didn’t think to make it until last night, so I apologize if you were cold while I was being so oblivious. It's folded on the floor outside the door.”

His expression furrowed unconsciously. 

“You should come out soon,” Pride continued despite receiving no engagement. “I'm going to start lunch.”

There was another stretched out moment of silence, before (without the pressure-pushed pouring of water near his ears) he could hear the steps outside retreat. 

Something hurt. He realized one of his hands had left the bedrest. Its fingers were pressed to the stinging part of his face. As he'd given the limb no permission to go anywhere, he tugged it away on principle. There was a little bit of water-diluted blood on the fingers. 

The stinging was constant. This time, he let his hand return intentionally and map out its origin. It was an incredibly minor divot. A small scrape or cut that must have been caused by the metal faucet catching skin when Pride’s sudden noise startled him into jerking up against it to try to rise. It'd not worked, in the next second since the failure, he’d wiggled out the way he got in, and yet it made him wish even less to return to trying to hydrate this form.

It was not healing. It wouldn't heal. 

He returned to the sink and sneered at the small, inconsequential, yet grave warning on that stranger’s face above it there. 

No red sparks. Only blood smearing itself into the water splashed there.

How human.

In time, he thought he'd caught enough water to count as adequate hydration, and he wiped everything that splattered on him off with a hanging towel. He retrieved the lump of cloth in the outside hallway long before he actually walked down it to the stairs again. 

Humans had to keep cut skin clean (fragile things; since the moment his existence was brought to life, his knowledge found it impressive, that sheer amount of illnesses, diseases, plagues, and more bodily collapses that could end them simply because they'd forgotten something small in a routine, or didn't even noticed they'd been injured before the bacteria festered its way into necrosis) and he felt time drag by while he just stood in the bathroom, occasionally turning on the sink to get a hand wet and wipe the latest blood up. Pressing tissues against the spot felt as if it sped the process up but no matter what, it was too long for so minor a dent. 

That should not be there to start with. 

Once it did stop with the bleeding that shouldn't have been happening, it did not look notable against the rest of the face’s skin. 

There was little chance he would go out and let Pride see he was bleeding, especially from so small a thing. He did not bleed. Never once would Pride have seen it. Any injury received at all was healed so fast it couldn't be called an injury, really. 

(And-

there was a very minor sense of dread about showing anything but his full strength to his first creation, out of all of them. He did not judge Pride for consuming Gluttony when the latter was too weakened to be much better use at the time, no more than he felt he’d betrayed their collective by devouring Greed- they could be separated and made again at a different point, and it was all for the good of his plan. But a human’s body hosted a human mind, a human spirit, and it did not matter of the soul, then: it would be equally easy to absorb as any other human soul. 

Pride would, of course, never dare to be so disrespectful to his father. But Pride claimed that he was not that, now that he was here again in this pathetic state. And Pride- unlike himself- had a philosopher’s stone to feed.) 

Mostly, it was a choice stemming from rage, disbelief, and humiliation, not fear. 

Much to his annoyance, his teeth still felt uncomfortably cold upon every inhale, his mouth was still oversensitive to the air, and none of the discomfort noticed upon waking was really gone despite the way he’d treated it with the appropriate amount of remedial water.

It continued to crawl down his throat itself, into brittle lungs. 

Creating a container and tying him to it may have been too intricate of alchemy for Pride, no matter what he’d learned in a mere short seventeen years. The sooner he was able to look over the work his homunculus created, the more likely he could identify if there was a problem there responsible for the absolute multitude of changing senses and pain in this body compared to his last few.

The ‘jacket’ was more of a loose robe than the term usually meant in Amestris in the last two centuries. It fit over his arms with more length to spare and hung down with enough slack that it might be spread crossed over his front, should he want to. There was a familiar nature to so simple and airy a clothing item. No matter what the country he’d designed for his eventual ascension did in its rigid, overcomplicated and ever changing fashions, he never changed. The garb of a Xerxian king was more than acceptable. 

He wondered if Pride had considered that. This was not from the homunculus’ own wardrobe. He could recognize the fabric from the sheet in the basement he’d awoken upon. 

There was a chill in the air that he couldn’t ignore so easily as he had the night before. When he slept, it was without the covers the human bed provided, and it was not as if he felt himself with this stranger’s appearance. The more of it covered, the less a reflective surface showed him without his desire. A pity it was the face and its eyes which bothered him most, and not the body itself. 

The bland blue fabric was ever so slightly scratchy. With every movement he made, it rubbed over skin that had never, in previous bodies, been so distractingly sensitive. 

The shift of its collar kept him occupied as he stepped out from the door and down the stairs. Better that than feeling the movements of muscles against themselves, perhaps. That had been distinctly uncomfortable and this, instead, was just a new sensation, nothing more. 

Wood creaked from the floor up to other parts of the house. It did not seem like a very modern structure, between the way the sink and its cabinet had rattled and shook, and the weary interconnected sounds spreading out from a wrong step. He should learn why this was Pride’s choice for an experimental recreation of life. 

It would be in Amestris: the lesser homunculus was well designed, but, as his first try at making a new artificial lifeform (from a piece of himself or not, as he before had come from a piece of the universe’s gated knowledge, working on Pride had been done with only theoreticals to suggest a blueprint and no evidence that a human alchemist had managed such before), he’d ended up trading far-reaching shadows for a secondary container that such could freely exist within. Outside the circular borders of Amestris, they could not move through the elements anymore than the original Homunculus could have outside the glass of that flask. Both would be pulled from this physical reality back to the Gate where that state of infeasibility was from. 

It was not that he wanted to imprison his creation. Pride was given the most from his prior life because, with only one of his human vices shed off and six still influencing him, he felt far more strongly about that origin, those years spent as that little homunculus, the slow and limited but bright and exciting discovery of the world his blood kin would carry him through. Sentiment gave Pride what he considered to be the best of his old life, just with a humanoid container so he too could walk about the world on legs of his own. 

It likely gave Pride more to feel superior about himself over, compared to the homunculi to follow. By nature, his feelings of significance and eminence needed no help. The fact that he was limited to anything, even if it was a geographical circumference of massive proportions, was not enough to keep him humble, but it might have been a sore spot. But- though there was a logic to the advantages it served, in hindsight- his creator hadn’t given him this reminder of his fallibility on purpose.

That early on and with only one flaw of his stripped off, he was- 

More attached to certain ideas he did not wish to care about. 

And he was ready to be somewhat fond of the creations he made by splitting off his lifeforce, in the way Van Hohenheim was once fond of the life his blood created. Once. 

(That early on and with only one source of human desires stripped off, he was really, very furious at what came as such an ungrateful, horrid insult, after everything that came before it, after any meaningless, empty declaration of sentiment or promise of loyalty.)

Amestris was larger than Xerxes. It swallowed nations around the size of the latter in its dawning and so, while it was dwarfed by lands like Drachma and Xing, Amestris was nothing to scoff at. It was divided and from that single bit of information alone, he could not begin to pinpoint which region of the country they were currently located in. 

He could make a guess that- whichever division it would be- this place was built nearer to the border and far from Central. Another likelihood was a placement between the blood seals. The more recent or ‘historical’ they were, the more any smart homunculi would want to avoid them. The Amestrian style of this structure and the slightly chilly air only continued to make their location very unlikely to be near Ishval. It was not nearly cold enough to be up where stragglers from that conflict ran and hid in the snow. Their sacrifices turned killers lived in Resembool, Central, and somewhere in the south, he believed. Even if the alchemist empty and tangled on the inside from the toll was no longer living there, surveillance tied Hohenheim’s offspring to a girl who may have influenced the others to that automail valley by now. He would think avoiding any of those five was wise, but Pride spoke of the descendants of Xerxes earlier today- yesterday?- it was at some point in the certainly recent past. Which left another option: they were actually located in the south or east, wherever those alchemists were these days, rather than being set up far out of range of watchful eyes.

…It just did not seem loud enough to be in a neighborhood range. If he saw outside, he suspected there would be no other house in sight. A town or city itself? Noises carried. He'd have caught a sign that they were near a population. If this was a city home, then the rumbling of the pipes to the sink upstairs would not be alone: he would've heard and felt the same shaking occurring from the attached houses. 

Besides, that room had a window and so there was no apartment built into that side. 

He regretted not opening its curtains to take stock in the situation by whatever means the view might offer. It was not as if they needed to be shut. That was Pride’s decision, and he assumed (despite there being the chance it was done with useless spite to keep him from seeing where they were, a paranoia that would be below his intellectual capabilities considering the room’s occupant would just open them again once he was gone) that it was for the express purpose of making the room dim. Those shadows made it easier for the darkness of simple closed eyes to cross over into a different, fathomless dark that yanked awareness into its void. Had there been more glare bright and warmed red against his eyelids, sleep would not have found him so easy to snatch into that black blindness. 

Pride never asked if he wanted to sleep, only saying that he himself was tired. But he'd assumed and then set up the room to make it more comfortable for sleeping when it was still daylight outside. There was a mention of the other homunculi. And of the time between whenever they were taken from this place and then Pride returned to collect him. Had they showcased an issue of fatigue and slept through the daytime as well as night, so shortly after they were made conscious? It would explain why Pride was prepared to create a more artificial darkness in the room he explicitly did say he expected his father to go to sleep in. 

There was far less aching, now that he was downstairs. The movements of a human body still felt wrong on their intimate levels, dressed around the bones, but the sharp pains and unexpected bouts of uncontrolled discombobulation seemingly had been replaced by weary apathy. That would be preferred. If sleep was the cause, he might allow it again. 

Even though his need to get a good grasp of the situation meant he went slowly moving along the wall at the bottom of the stairs as it went towards a door, he was not allowed that look at the world outside. Not yet. No, because Pride took this exact moment to appear in his peripheries.

He shouldn't be that quiet. Not to another Homunculus, who was connected to his essence and knew how to detect his presence even when the others were not as confident in it.

“Good morning,” he greeted, then paused. “Or…it's a little past noon, to be more accurate.”

Good. Always be more accurate. Precision was something Pride was normally quite good at.

Also, he did not care. The only relevance such a greeting held was confirmation it had been nearly a full day. Under Amestris, there was no note of day or night. The placement of bodies of the sky would be important when it was the solar eclipse. It made no difference to him otherwise. 

He made it a step closer to his desired destination. The nearest window emitted warmth. 

With Pride trailing him awkwardly, he finally came close enough to place his hand upon it and look out. 

It was nothing unique. It was everything there wasn’t behind the Eye of Truth. 

A plain wood door sat a foot from the right of the window, yet he stopped here and decided not to reach for its handles after all.

Warmth may have come in through the glass, but it was slightly cold to the direct touch. Such insignificant, tiny little experiences to notice otherwise. He felt strange. It was slow, dark oil deep inside, too alike to facing his own original teeth’s smile on the god that mocked him for ever looking for it, as if humans did not try that in every generation. 

Beyond an apparent worn porch, the landscape from this point of view showed pale, long grass mostly, occasionally interrupted with wild bushes, a spattering of dark trees far from sight, packed dust as a path that went around the left of the building, and a blue sky interrupted in a skin of ice. Wispy cirrus clouds only partially discolored the blue itself. Everything appeared pale, washed out. His eyes stung from staring. Despite the former observation, it was still too bright for him currently. 

This was an oversensitive, weakened body that hadn’t made any adjustments yet. 

The chill was losing power. When he shifted his palm downward just slightly to feel the cold rush into the very edge of the heel of the hand, he saw the sebum smear left behind. 

If he knelt and breathed on the spot, he might get to see lines twirl into distinct fingerprints that would not belong to Van Hohenheim, and thus should not be attached to him. He was not an entity who’d been born human, with human prints. 

After everything-

He pushed the memories of judgmental voices and smiles and hundreds of terrible shadowy grasping hands away. “Where are we?” 

Behind him, hovering, ever his shadow, Pride did not manage to keep the answer to himself for very long. 

“Near a town called Eqtied.” Eqtied. It meant nothing to him. There was no conflict here. It housed no candidates for sacrifices. 

Good. 

He was left to stand, hand pressed to the window, staring out at some insignificant, free part of the world while its harsh light forced weak new eyes to sting and water.

The general design of the home was simple. This door was a part of the widest, most open area, which included the place they’d sat the day prior. The top floor only cut across to roof up the lower portion further past it. One door led to the basement. Another likely led to a room, similar to the one above. And- finally, there was a wall to interrupt what ‘this’ area was from an otherwise connected kitchen. Its entrance lacked a door altogether. A rod with curtains could have served as one, had they been pulled shut, but they were not and that was a weak barrier regardless.

Despite this observation, the angle that he was standing did not allow him to see into that gap and actually have a visual of the kitchen in its majority. He could see a sliver of faded green cabinets and walls. 

And Pride, when he poked his head out to look around and then smiled when he found his creator’s attention already over there. The homunculus stepped out completely and waved him closer. Such a human motion. To match such human appearance. 

(He was in clothes that could have been mistaken as identical to those of yesterday, to anyone that was not a being built to learn all it did not already know. Really, the only difference in this disguise from the one of the past was that Pride had exchanged those shortened trousers for long ones now that his container was taller. They hardly looked like the type of comfortable clothes to be doing so much kitchen work in, but who was he to suggest anything? It was obvious his opinion was unwanted.) 

“I’ve got lunch done,” he said. It was like that would mean something.

The hint was clear, but lacked something important: an agreement. He’d never needed food before. It was not a priority. Going out, or beginning to look over Pride’s alchemy notes were.

He turned back to looking outside the window. 

The judgment behind him was tangible. 

And? His creation would just have to say what was on his mind. He could hardly know until then, with all these limited senses and with his life, lives, alchemy stripped out of him by this less experienced homunculi who’d thought he knew best. 

“Please come try some.”

There was no pressing need for that now. Should this be a ploy to get praise, then Pride could be satisfied with his own judgment of his work. He wouldn’t be earning compliments for either doing the work of providing for another unprompted nor for its contents on some frivolous level, like taste or appearance. 

The homunculus shouldn’t need any to feel like the best already. It was his nature. 

And his creator was no longer a very impressive entity of power, so his praise was worth no more than the fawning of the other six or even a plain, random human- in other words, worthless to Pride the Arrogant. 

The tone finally grew more crisp, this time demanding no argument. It was far more familiar than this simpering, young and naively easy to impress human act that went about suggesting things, asking please, and fluttering a few feet behind uselessly to wring hands waiting for something as if Pride did not have the power to make it so. There was nothing fitting about the anxious uncertainty. 

Pretending he needed to be hovered over and offered help for any little thing rubbed in how he was currently powerless. 

Patronizing. Infantile.

It deserved no reinforcement. 

There was the slightest pull at this body’s mouth at the cold, correct simplicity of the voice behind him.

“Come here.”

It was time to see what the kitchen looked like, it seemed. He turned his head before he moved away entirely. It let him avoid seeing the signs of this body’s human grease left dirtying the glass.

Standing in that excuse of a doorway, Pride gave a thin, toothless smile that did not bother trying to match the rest of his expression. While more patient than the likes of Gluttony, Greed, or Envy (Lust turned that flaw around early enough in her existence by will and force, despite how natural and inescapable impatience would always ultimately be inside her), he still did not get to claim he had more than his father who waited centuries for a single plan to come to be. 

The air in the kitchen was thicker. It had small windows on two of its walls, but they were sealed shut and whatever cooking Pride had been doing left them to trap heat and stinging seasoned humidity behind. Each wall was green. The cabinets that lined some or hung down from the ceiling were painted the same color, though a different shade. Slightly darker and with more tones of blue than yellow. Why bother making a room all one style of color if it was not going to match? He didn’t care about aesthetics and was absolutely fine spending decades in a practical sewer, but the clash seemed like something that would annoy the more vain people that wanted to live in decorated houses. 

The paint was chipping and peeling off the wood anyway. There was a logic to how many of the structures of Xerxes did not bother with coloring their walls and let their materials be as they were. Frivolous places like the palace were more exceptions than rules, based on the more common markets and buildings that Van would walk him through. 

Even the little wooden table that Pride led them to, sitting off in its corner a bit further from the kitchen’s machinery, was meant to be green. Whatever was there before was mostly stripped away, however. The basic brown held some hints of staining in discoloration. Thin poles acted as poor backs for the chairs that matched its design. Only three seats were actually present, tucked away into their spots under the table. There was simply no pressure for symmetry. 

Pride directed him to the chair that had the most space to back out of, then took a seat squeezed into the corner of two walls. How selfless. It was a measured action, whether the diminished state meant the homunculus noticed it or not. He was mimicking humans, who had a habit for choosing to inconvenience themselves in order to actually feel superior to the others for being so altruistic. 

The chair was far harder to ignore than the sofa previously, or the bed. Without cushions, its solid pressure dug into bones unpleasantly and all too constantly. A part of his mind could not leave how it felt against the ischium even throughout every action and distraction that came next.

While Pride delicately unfolded a napkin (that he’d wasted time turning into a square to start with, if he always intended to undo the work) that he laid over his lap and then went about to picking up silverware, all very prim, his elder sat with the ever-present feeling of unforgiving density beneath him and stared out through one of the windows in this room. It was not as easy to see as much out of. From afar, the window was small and the field of vision of that world past the glass was all the more limited. He could see the same wispy sky and tall grass as before. Maybe that was the only sight stretching around the entire house. They were supposedly near the mountains of the north. An imagined visual of a structure made of peeling wood and faded furnishings that sat in a world of identical grass alone was unsettling. 

His thoughts were occupied on that small square of a view, only half listening to the other homunculus when he decided to talk.

“I figured we could talk more over lunch,” the voice said, falsely chipper. Or maybe not. With so little attention on it, his memories of a second before were not reliable. “You can ask questions and I'll answer some.”

Yes, fascinating. An offer certain to be leapt upon.

He did not ask questions.

Pride spoke about inane things.

Outside, the weeds occasionally moved in a breeze, and otherwise fluttered minutely, the world still, the world silent. 

…The kitchen was also silent, he realized some time later. That unsolicited small talk about a home life, schooling, mother, and whatever else was no longer coming.

He blinked.

Something- a spoon- poked against one of his arms where it lay upon the table. A very small distance away, Pride was looking at him judgmentally. He pushed a small water glass further from himself and closer to his creator. The bowl of food was next. It slid until its lip nudged his skin as well. 

Now that it was so close, he couldn't bring himself to continue distributing his weight through his arms where they had been resting. Nor could he keep staring away. The scrutiny in that distorted container’s gaze earned his attention.

“You have to eat.” Pride pushed. 

As this was a body with human needs, yes. He supposed he did. It was unusual to require. Undesirable. Or maybe that was from how new of an activity it would be and there was a high likelihood he would do a poor job of it, which would be witnessed. 

The original homunculus picked up the spoon in displeasure. On an academic level, he knew how to use the tool according to multiple cultures and their rules for the ‘right’ utilization of a simple instrument. Deciding upon a very early, pre-Amestrian method, he slotted the metal into his hands properly. That era was the last time he himself was very directly involved in the cultures above ground. He, the Eastern Sage, hardly needed to be around once his brand of alchemy was rooted into the populace. 

In practice, he unfortunately discovered his dexterity was rather poor. It wasn’t as if he required much physical upkeep. When he did attend to the foolish human high command, he ignored any food or drink present. And it wasn’t as though this container of meat was more than a few days old. In order to prevent having broth and chunks of starch and vegetables shake their way out of the shallow cup of the spoon and onto the table, he had to curve over the bowl and bring his head near it. 

(He’d considered just lifting it all directly over his face and pouring it into his mouth, which was conveniently faster, but that would have been more soup at once than the usual amount of liquid souls he might intake from his glass, and a human body would instantly react like it was choking.)

Eating was…a bland experience, in truth. In fact, it was more frustrating than enjoyable. That was not the opinion of humans and presumably even lower animals would disagree. But let them argue. He could admit that the startling sensations that came with every entry were novel to him. Flavors were bursts or information, slower releases of duller, distorting versions of that same taste. A little pleasant and certainly interesting, but he didn’t know how humans weren’t overwhelmed by the constant input. They ate multiple bites per meal, and multiple meals per day, and this was done daily. 

Yet he knew they couldn’t bear to exist as he did. They would be incapable of storing as much memory. Many of those that went and saw knowledge in its purest form, even just a sliver of that truth, broke and never made it back to the world to be the type of alchemist that made for good sacrifices. For every slight advantage they might have on him, he had ten on them.

Every other drink, this throat acted like it needed to panic and choke. It wouldn’t stop this reaction so long as there was anything to cling and rub in there, and that was constant. Tasteless hazards. Every other bite taken added more, to line sensitive membrane and trail like a ladder down into the gut, any progress in swallowing away the sensation wasted by the creeping, crawling new addition of ticklish, coarse texture. The need to gag was beginning to really ruin any desire to keep going. The flavor might have been more rewarding if there was not a need to try to spit and sputter and still fail to prevent the latest consumption.

“Is it alright?” he heard Pride ask. 

He peered through the hair that fell around the far end of the bowl like a curtain, before trying to manage another round with the meal. 

Had Pride actually pushed this just to farm for compliments? 

It was fine. It was bland. It was an experience he held equal positives and negatives for thus far. The need to gag from that inconsistently-arriving texture every other bite ruined much.

“I tried to keep it pretty simple- I wasn’t sure if-...are you alright?”

Pride must have leaned around closer, judging by the proximity of volume. 

All the better to see more detail as his accident of an alchemy experiment, his rejected not-father that he thus had no reason to have around still, choked and spat air. 

Nothing stoked arrogance like seeing how low any competition was in comparison. 

“You-... Oh!” Pride sat back, upright. “You’re, you have to keep your hair out of your mouth. You’re eating it.” He sounded a little thrilled. His creator lifted his own head up straighter so that he could better stare in silent admonishment at his loyal creation being so gleeful to see him in an absolutely inane state this way. 

The ends of plenty of strands of hair were indeed wet from where they’d been sitting in the bowl. There was so much of it all that it fell forward without permission and was in the way of his hand and spoon when he ate. It hadn’t occurred to him that he should move so that it wasn’t, rather than just pushing through the airy weak barrier to reach his mouth in the fastest way. When he made himself a form based on Van Hohenheim’s, the hair stayed behaved. Despite a tendency for parts to hang forward if he did have to move around, in those dull instances he had to sit amidst Amestris’s idiot leaders instead of leaning back in his chair deep below their feet, they did not get in his way. They had a consistency to their placement. It was tamed, even in disarray. The model it was based upon himself had strands falling out of his own containment method tying back most of it, those strands swaying out past the foolish glasses he’d gotten himself. (His eyes were as immortal as the rest of him, frozen in time. If he’d not needed them on the day of the eclipse in Xerxes, he did not need them four hundred years later.) 

Pride brushed fingers through his own bangs, still absently smiling (-smile- identical blocks for teeth- despair for the conceited -) for a reason undetectable. (Acting, after all, didn’t work when its target knew of the hook being waved before their eyes. Pride’s childish way of putting humans off guard and relaxing their defenses was his father’s idea to start with, and playing amiable to normalize his truthfully very displaced presence in a human setting was done first by the latter.) 

“It might be better if we cut it short. See, like mine?” Ah, that was the purpose of the hand up by his head. He was showing off the dark choppy strands that flopped about and did a poor job hiding the imperfect mark of his stone pressing out of his container’s forehead. “Maybe even shorter because you might not be used to bangs and they can poke your eyes. You shouldn't rub them hard when something does poke them.”

“No.”

He’d barely noticed that was his own reaction he heard. It was meant to only be a thought. 

His thoughts produced no alchemy and his voice produced the private meanderings of the mind. How backwards this all was. 

Pride must have risen a few inches above his seat, because he dropped back down to it now.

“Oh.” The thrill was gone. “Then. Well, there's a reason many people tie their hair back.”

Why should it matter to him what was done to a container that didn’t belong to him? Burn it all off, for how much it mattered to him.

For as long as he was in his first physical form, he had the long draping hair of his blood kin. That man had been tying his back since his days as a wasted slave. 

He could feel the bones of his jaws and its teeth hurt from pressing into themselves. There was so little reason that any of this should be a sensitive spot and by denying Pride’s first comment, he felt that a vulnerability was exposed that his creation could take advantage of. He already had more power. He was himself, he held a philosopher’s stone, he was a homunculus. His creator who had-so terribly briefly- become god was a human with no alchemy, whose mouth couldn’t even distinguish and separate hair from food. There was already too much control he lacked in this situation. 

By not speaking, though, the conceited creature might just take a blade too near his head to make them match and he would rather not have so juvenile, so Amestrian, so human an appearance. He found the styles of the latest century of the west less distinguished and regal as Xerxes. 

He forced his jaws apart. “...fine.”

That was acceptable.

It did make the repetitive process of eating easier.

Pride found him a loop of string and stood behind his back to catch and tug hair into the tie, as if oblivious to how uncomfortable it was to sit still while a different presence pressed near and loomed over and as a whole was in a position that could not easily be quickly defended against. There was no chance that the younger homunculus was actually unaware of it. 

Perhaps the pointless things he spoke about in this new one sided conversation was his attempt to distract from the discomforting position he was putting him through. 

“There.”

Pride came around his left while one hand lingered to tug at the tail of hair he’d created. It caused a misinterpreted sensation of pressure that trailed from the base of his head near the tie itself, up to the scalp where the hair being pulled by proxy was strained worse than below. Even without direct interference, he could feel that strain up along the line where bare forehead turned to a silky form of stringy skin forming a mane, and down the sides. There was a strange pull on his eyes. The skin between their edges and the temples was too soft, sensitive, and its underdeveloped feeling was all more noticeable when there was a weight of tied back hair for it to carry.

It did not make his head feel lighter, but rather the opposite effect. This was despite the new lack of tresses hanging down against his face and vision. He’d have expected the opposite.

Pride finally stood back. 

“I don’t have any clips myself, but next time I’m in town, I’ll try to find some,” he said. “Those should do a better job. But this is better, isn’t it?”

When he tilted his head to one side, he felt double the weight roll that way. And ‘roll’ was a good term for it. There first came the sense of his actual movement, but then an aftereffect caused once the tail of hair was no longer balanced under his back and flopped over the shoulder as well. When it was airborne, it tugged at his head. He let it flip the other way. The feeling repeated, symmetrically opposite. Strange. But a sensation he could adjust to. 

He’d need to learn how to bind it back on his own though. 

Without speaking (because did he need to ask permission? No. Did he need to warn? No, his actions were obvious. Did he need to say some human generic platitude phrased as an apology to signal his departure? Why should Pride require such?), he left the table. The soup was cold anyway. And he did not think he felt hungry. 

He held a picture of an illiterate (but far too friendly considering what he was talking to) enslaved youth in his mind and it drove him to the stairs. 

To the room above.

To the mirror.

Oh, the damn mirror.

Vanity devices.

Fostering vices. 

Encouraging human sins of narcissistic self assurance and ugly envy to fester.

Those creatures created mirrors for vain purposes, yet either saw an overblown lie of glamor or a distorted unwanted comparison to peers or idols in place of seeing their actual reflection in any semblance of reality. He’d never thought highly of the prevalence of the instrument. But, then, he always knew what his reflection would show. Unlike the emotionally unreliable perceptions of humanity, he simply viewed reality without wonder or surprise or distortion in their shining glass.

It was easy to question the purpose of making devices that did not even work for the user. Since they viewed a distortion of the truth no matter whether the lie was more one beautiful or disgusting, then it was a waste of time to bother constructing mirrors and looking into them. 

He didn’t see reality in the glass anymore. It was as much a stranger as it had been when he awoke, disoriented, and as it had been a day prior, when his mind had more of an excuse for being incapable of comprehending stimuli. 

A waste of time to look. Looking, not knowing, being left to stare at an ambiguous lie while the mind ate itself in the unanswerable question- all of it would only feed into vices he’d long tried to evolve past. 

Yet it was the way that none of it could be trusted that made him stay too long there, and what drew him up to the pane to begin with. 

He did not look like Van Hohenheim with his hair wrapped back this way. He did not know what he looked like. That was what made it so consuming. 

He really must move past excuses and cover these mirrors faster. 

He didn’t know how to tie back this hair effectively yet, and the reflection would help. Checking it would better ensure strands were actually pulled away and not just caught in a state easily loosened, where they might make their way into his mouth again or poke at eyes unpleasantly. 

Excuses.

He let the stranger pull its hair once more into disarray, so that he could practice tying it back himself, and watch, all the while, as the face inconsistently transformed in appearances just from the free draping locks or their absence when tightly drawn to the skull: young, old, rounded, squared, pointy, soft, Van, Van, not Van Hohenheim at all. How strange it was to see the differences it made. To see one stranger transform into another and recognize neither. To be left not knowing which of the contradictory descriptions that sprang to mind rapidly before being replaced with their antonyms- young, old, sharp, stout- were most accurate in truth. How strange it was to almost be mad at himself for using his blood brother as a model for a form, instead of seemingly leaving it to luck and some subconscious, unknown imagined image created out of nothing (he knew this to be impossible) when deconstructing (he knew it to be impossible, and this was why he planned ahead; why he had a body fully prepared in design and function, ready to offer up in exchange for some souls, why he would never have simply gone into that transmutation on a whim and a hope that something ‘right’ for him would spawn from nothing. He was not something that the world thought should exist and only fragile containment prevented that world from getting its way. There was no secret, buried human that he was meant to have come to experience life as in that world. It did not want him anymore than god wanted him and to simply deconstruct with the expectation a body would build around the stone and his mind would have been practical suicide. The best he could do was choose a form that, once, held a level of value to its appearance. Blood for blood. Kin. An exchange of gratitude). Even now, despite this knowledge, there was a small and short lived delusion that perhaps this was a body he was meant to have. When he devoured god, he had a physical, familiarly human resembling form. Maybe there was a reason it, too, was humanoid.

That nonsense slid away into mostly the silence of a mind occupied with a singular menial task. He’d watched the transformation a few times thus far and rather than throwing a sheet over the mirror, he continued to practice with clumsy hands and a lack of skill that irritated him. 

With all the time to let doubts and vague vanity fester, the act of watching was as disturbing as it was simply strange in a dully fascinating way.

He truly had no way to tell what this body really looked like. Reality and objective knowledge were beyond his grasp for once, and for such a minor thing. It should have been upsetting. A series of lies that hid little signs of the truth acted as a mystery. He never did get to experience curiosity when he could perceive only factual feedback from his senses and thoughts. He could not see reality. This was a novelty more notable than sleep and dreams, or the flavors of soup or textures of broth compared to potatoes or strings of hair. 

What a waste of time, to wonder, to be curious, when there was no way to obtain full answers. How foolish of humans for building devices that only made them go through this everyday, obsessively.

And here he watched this compilation of strangers subtly changing shape and meaning before his eyes because of his own hand’s doing, recognizing none of it and recognizing much of it and being incapable of mentally rectifying answers he held just out of reach.

He wondered if he hated what he saw.

Chapter Text

Mirror Mirror

Nights were far more silent even than the empty quiet of day. He opened the curtains and window both, but there was no moon and the insect life outside felt muted with the limitations of truly human ears. If not for being an unplanned consequence of an unwanted anatomy change, this hushed world might have been considered acceptable. 

(If not for how such stagnant sound and sight in combination was oppressive in a manner hinting at the many hands that would grab around his back, tug and pull, doors shutting on his own smile where it stared it stared it stared with no eyes but he'd seen the eye of god already, he had, he - that- not enough-)

Pride made no noise downstairs. Whatever alchemy he might or may not have been working on to manage… this, it was done with the secretive, polite grace to not disturb others that the homunculus of shadows often displayed. Emotional outbursts from the firstborn were rare. The sheer belief in his own confident self assurance prevented them and provided him no reason to throw fits or put on shows. 

(Pride could have existed completely alone and not noticed there was an absence of others. Such was that nature of total, secure arrogance. 

Yet Father, more advanced, Homunculus, more complete, noted the silence his cast off vice would not because it was little better than being bound where he came from, little better than the idea of that old flask having rolled away into a dusty corner in a ghost town that his voice wouldn’t carry through, helpless to do anything without any one with legs, hands, ears, a working brain, around.)

Still, he never went back to that vanity to turn on the likely-to-be-weak lamp that sat there. When night fell, he chose to find its darkness and the hush of these ears as an acceptable setting to meditate. There was much to think about. Pulling together a semblance of understanding was important. 

(He knew he ascended- he knew he was stripped down into nothing- he knew he was rejected- he knew he was devoured- he knew of that speck pulled from the vast truth of the universe, then returned to it- But there was much he did not know about his current ability to even philosophize about existence, and that was unacceptable.)

That had been his intention. Sleep was not.

It happened recently enough. He’d found it undignified. Disorienting, as well, but waking…like that, was beneath him. 

Yet he blinked sluggishly into a suffocating pillow warmed by his own trapped breath without remembering having ever turned over to lay prone instead of supine. 

An intent to rest and think while staying flat on his back in one moment, then crusty, heavy eyes in bright, hazy sunlight the next. 

The internal ice and shards of what had to have been nightmares, however vague, were there in his lungs to greet him. 

Knocking pounded at his head and door alike. 

Right. Pride was not, actually, gratefully accepting any excuse to be private, gracefully secretive. How unfortunate that he’d forgotten.

Breakfast was non optional. 

This was despite making due just fine with only one meal the day prior. Pride made himself a supper, but he did not break the door open when he came upstairs to spread this news. It came with heavy handed suggestions, yet the issue was at least not forced. Today did not get the same treatment.

“You have to eat,” went his repetition, again. It was heard the very first time before yesterday’s soup. It would likely be heard again. Dreadful, that. They were both above redundancies. 

Breakfast as an event was also discordant from the painful start, before he'd even sat down. Pride forced a glass at him when he walked in. Considering how terrible the state of a human body’s mouth was after it slept and, once asleep, gracelessly forgot to continue breathing quietly through the nose, he could see a wisdom in trying water before attempting food.

He made the mistake of pouring the cup forced his way into his mouth as he was used to, and thereon out, for the rest of the tense breakfast , human sinuses made his entire nose feel that it was burning, there were spots of water on the floor that hadn’t been mopped up yet, and his knees hurt from where he’d unintentionally tripped and crashed when he first began to choke. That this helpless contortion of a body believing itself to be in danger occurred right before Pride’s eyes only made him less pleased to be stuck at a tiny table being monitored while he ate. He was watched like he was fragile.

Sweet flavors, he learned, were sickening once they reached the stomach and also forced his already-upset throat to swell (minutely, perhaps even imagined, but he could notice) and require more of the water that ruined the morning to start with. And the cold water seemed to glide over that swelling without touching and relieving it at all. Despite these negatives, it also delighted the senses of the mouth and that offered temporary contentment in the mind itself. Its human circuits released their rewarding chemical reactions in response to the flavor. Little wonder weak mortals took that to mean they should continue to indulge.

The texture of chopped apples was too grainy and that of the oats themselves were either too hard abruptly or otherwise too mushy. It was like trying to eat a liquid that had started to solidify but was far from solid. 

While drinking may have been a vicious venture when he wasn’t being vigilant enough about adjusting to it, here, eating something that should have been made as a fluid seemed like a good way to waste time. 

Pride had made himself a cup of hot tea to accompany his sweet mush, but it was disappointing to learn that ‘tea’ did not contain the necessary nutrients or mass to account for a single meal. 

Even if he had to angle the lip of the glass and take multiple drinks instead of one simple inhalation, it would still be more familiar to only deal with the textureless contents of a fluid sustenance. 

Considering how the mealtime had started, Pride also was in no hurry to try to make him tea again. He might have refilled and pushed a cup of water on him throughout breakfast, but it was with revulsion. The creature acted as if he expected him to make the same mistake twice and cough all over him.

The afternoon passed with him being ignored as he sat on the sofa of the center of the house and Pride hid away in a room that he locked behind himself. 

The first pains of hunger were becoming active. He could only assume that the sedation his creation caused with alchemy (to keep him a secret that he did not have to trouble himself with upon dragging him to the cold floor of the physical world) had affected its general metabolism. The last traces of that stasis would depart and leave him helpless to the constant cycle of hunger, craving, and satiation each day. 

At least he did not have to worry about overindulging or growing obsessed with what he ate. Gluttony was not an ailment, a limitation imposed by his nature. Not anymore. 

(Why certain human desires were even in his nature to strip in the first place was one of the few questions in life he didn't really know the answer to. He couldn't blame it on acquiring a humanoid form. They came before that point, undoubtedly from Van’s blood. They existed in his nature, then, when he was only comprised of that knowledge snatched from beyond this world, shadows in name only, composition something far more complicated than that and utterly incapable of maintaining itself outside the specific flask those alchemists created. And they really shouldn't have, because a speck couldn't eat and wouldn't be at risk of overeating, couldn't sleep or move and so wouldn't be lazy by choice, couldn't feel the circulation of blood and spark of nerves and so wouldn't lust after mere sight of shapes, and so forth. 

Pride, greed, envy, wrath. He understood how these could have intertwined in the life of a being like that which he once was. Nothing physical prevented Homunculus from those emotional states. Gluttony was a sin he couldn't say belonged in the former sentiment.)

While that uncomfortable sensation chewed its way around his gut as if so impatient to be fed that the stomach walls were cannibalizing themselves, his mental capacities slowed minutely yet noticeably and unacceptably. He would be fine. Then that state was interrupted by the very skin of this container rumbling from the fits thrown by the guts within. The noises weren't identical. The timing between either a hunger pang or an audible vibration was not at all consistent. They could not be predicted. It might have been a very small part of his mind, but something was being occupied by knowledge of that unknown, wasting time by waiting for each new tiny interruption of a human body that didn't seem to realize its needs were not his needs. It could go multiple days without food. It had no reason to distract him when he'd eaten a few hours before.

He was more quick about tying back this hair and finding his way down to the table when Pride notified him this time. 

Unlike the nearly-liquids of soup and oatmeal, lunch required more chewing. It actually caused the sides of his lower face to ache a bit. The meat was stubbornly resistant to being devoured. Though it was more inconvenient than drinking a soup, this experience involved more reasons to actually focus on what was being done and more reward for winning against simple inferior slabs of dead biological tissue. It did not feel like such a waste of time if the mind was occupied by the challenge instead of left to wait impatiently. 

This was truly chewing, eating, the way he assumed the experience for animals entailed. And so another novelty could be said to have been sampled, tasted. 

Moved on from. 

It was not completely alien to him anymore than it would be for the essence of Pride not trapped in that container. This may have been a much more limited maw to open and the jaws may not have been as strong, but the process wasn’t new. He looked over his plate at the other homunculus and watched that humanoid face move through the motions, precise and believable to human eyes, down to the tics in muscles and tendons under the skin while mandibles stretched and closed and the external part of the head had to move along with this. It, too, was just a little human mouth, but it was easy to see the clean simplicity of long smiles and frowns stretching down walls in partial shadow, ever circling, ever changing, always symmetrical and even. Pride may have been hiding himself but memory served just fine to know what he looked like. 

What he looked like, before he’d given away his appearance to the first of his homunculi. 

He returned to the meal because watching chewing was an unhappy reminder of things, as it turned out. 

The last time he’d needed to really bite so sternly into something, it did not put up the fight that these small cuts of animal did. He’d a better mouth then. Better jaws, better teeth. The sensation was similar enough.

Pride was chewing things. There was a strain in mass that did not belong in the world, letting a mouth pull open far wider than a physical creature could have, shouting up at god who could no longer ignore him. 

Salty, dry, unami, taste and texture, the present. This was the present and not a glorious moment which meant nothing in the end. 

Drab, dull, bland- he’d wanted for this-? he’d envied them this-? experience, novel, hardly novel at all.

he bit

-his old skins

he swallowed down

- you think you're the only one to have evolved?

teeth

-

Without looking at Pride, he rose and left the mess behind. Pride, after all, was still capable of being his true self and that creature was able to open up maws of perfect block teeth to destroy things well before consuming Gluttony. He didn't want to see them. 

He couldn't stop seeing them.

Unforgiving, unmoved, one last sight to despair over before the doors- dark on the inside- closed on it.

For all that the physical intake of new information was a distraction in a sense, a reminder in another, far from simply knowing, being, unfeeling, the flavor and texture of a different meal was known now and began to only be uncomfortable pressure inside him. 

Eating was mostly bland but otherwise acceptable experience, if only because it was an experience. But he thought he could find other new physical novelties to passively enact for a while instead. There was no need for more meals that day. If Pride disagreed, who was he to say what went and what did not?

There was very little of note in the upstairs room, he found. 

The vanity held a few thin drawers but they were mostly empty. The paler wood on their bottom layer was unpleasant to the touch. There was a level of sawdust left on them that the rest of the more polished (once) exterior paneling was rid of. What little the compartments held served him no great purpose. There were two old bottles of ink that were crusted tight against their lids and rather ruined on the inside. And while there was a tiny notebook with empty pages, the pens left behind here scratched against the paper very poorly. Not a single nub was any good and the ink was wasted the moment whoever lived here previously left it behind. 

This wasn’t mentioning how the small size of the pages inside didn’t work well with how terribly these new hands worked now. He didn’t have much experience using them for drawing or writing purposes since his alchemy worked without any need for that. The designs need only come together in his mind and they would exist. The way he pressed too hard and felt like something else was possessing this body, jerking its muscles in directions just to interfere with him and prevent him from managing a single straight line became a problem for another day. He didn’t want to feel that much like something else’s plaything right now. And he didn’t want to see his handwriting come out so large and sloppy that even the most unpracticed of his homunculi could have done better. 

There was no way to fit a circle onto one of those tiny pages with his current dexterity, so he would have to wait to answer whether or not physical, limited human alchemy at least worked or if that was blocked. 

It might have been better if the latter ended up true. Then he would know there was interference at work specifically targeting him, binding him. 

That was somewhat more palatable that learning he could do alchemy so long as he was content to do it was weakly as any human novice, sent back to the skill level of a Van Hohenheim early to his teaching (his teacher unable to fix simple mistakes because he didn’t have the arms to grab the man’s and manually make those hands actually write the letters he was told to-) while still knowing the science completely and totally in a way no human ever could or had or would. To have all that knowledge but no physical means to make it work was a form of limitation that would surely irritate anything stuck experiencing it. 

Aside from those, he found two books on the top of the vanity itself. Despite the size of the mirror, it was able to fit more decorations and useless instruments. The small light fixture sitting on its upper shelf gave off very little illumination and would only be useful for someone sitting right there, nowhere else in the room. There was a cloth with threaded pseudo-lace edges draped over the wood surface and he understood it was for appearances sake, but the fact of the matter was that it only made lumps for the books laid out on top, and wasted the point of a desk. 

Neither book was especially interesting. He knew their contents. Reading the concepts as the authors here presented them was patronizing at best. The human writers introduced them all far too slowly, oversimplified the truth, and wasted his time as a reader. 

The only things atop the vanity that seemed fresh, rather than being leftovers of previous occupants, were two hand towels folded up into a small width and stacked off to the left away from the books and mirror. One was softer than the other when he ran this body’s hands over them. The patterns left some parts upraised and others not. He didn’t comprehend what human designers had against things being even. There need not be distractions all the time from body parts noticing what they sensed was not predictably consistent. 

The large dresser sitting between the vanity and window was empty of the clothes he presumed it was meant to contain. The only drawer occupied by anything held spares for the sheets, pillow liners, and blankets of the bed. And a single sock shoved off in a different corner. It was pressed stiff by time under weights despite not even being spread out properly flat before whatever once crushed it was dropped atop its form. He did not touch it. 

And that was the limit of potential stimuli in the room. None of it served him for now. There was no information that might hint to the problem with alchemy. It was not being crushed by Everything, but the surreality almost left the room to be the exact opposite of the constant streams behind the Gate and there was no comforting sense of freedom to be found in instead floating detached from anything important or sensical. 

He put the mirror face down on the vanity, since he wouldn’t be using it anytime soon. There was that, at the least.

He was left in the unsecured containment of the room upstairs as he pleased, despite how easily the window could be a door outside. Pride was doing a poor job at this. He was not Greed, experienced with wanting other things and finding ways to hoard his possessions so they might not leave. He was more likely to silently preen to himself about himself than he was to notice the world outside him when he didn’t have specific duties to keep an eye on. The exception was his total loyalty and awe of his father, but that was replaced by disrespect now that said father was so far from the perfect being anymore. So far from who was practically a god to his homunculi long before he ever actually ascended into the sky to drag such down, could he blame them for being disgusted and swearing off that relation? 

I’m not calling you father.

It made complete sense. It was a betrayal nonetheless.

It was disheartening. 

Occasionally, Pride remembered to actually pay attention to the being he was locking away wherever this place was. 

The knocking was alarming every time he didn’t first notice the footsteps leading to the door. That was, thus far, all of them. 

The floorboards of this building might have been old and creaked on missteps, but Pride was a homunculus with centuries of experience moving around undetected, and he couldn’t hear properly with this body’s ears. 

The sudden noise of knocking would startle and create a pressure within his chest that threatened to block his throat. It would force him to fold over himself and lose coherence momentarily while panic replaced those thoughts. 

But the sound wouldn’t be followed by Pride opening the door and, besides, the thing was made of wood with metal hinges. When it opened, there was no horrible great noise to accompany the slow, unstoppable, terrible movement. Even if Pride did shove it aside without permission from the one whose privacy he was invading, it wouldn't…

And yet he kept expecting to hear it again, behind him once more, far too close behind him, in fact, for him to flee in time. 

“-need you to shower and change. It’s too cold to not wear more and you’ll have to get used to bathing regularly anyway. I can show you how to use it, if you let me in?” 

That shouldn’t have held the inflections of a question, he noted absently while he tried to force the pounding urgency of this body’s heart to stop. 

It was too long before he remembered his replies were not so easily telegraphed with a wall between him and one of his creations. He had to deny the patronizing offer aloud. 

And still, the physiological panic wasn’t gone. It took so long for this body to actually return to its usual stasis from any of the urgent reactions (to nothing) it would make. 

“Alright,” Pride agreed, though he did not sound happy about the rejection. “There’s soap in there already. The bars should say which one is for hair. The towels in there are fresh enough. Are you sure you don’t want me to show you what’s for what?”

No, no, he said plenty of things he didn’t understand, that was quite in line with his person over the centuries- of course he was certain, yes. His appearance as a stranger need not deceive any of his homunculi. He was their elder, he was the source of their knowledge about the world, and he held even more of it than any of them did. 

He was born of knowledge.

…Knowledge and a human. 

That was a flaw, that was a weakness, that was the thing that held him back from full self realization of his place in the world, that blood separated him from god and let it sit high in the sky mocking him by being silent, out of reach, it was- it

despite being born of a person, all you ever did was cling to what you called god

it…

There was a shuffling sound behind the door. He’d forgotten to verbally reply, but Pride read it as rejection. And it would have been, had he spoken, instead of thinking things he need not think. 

“I’ve got some clothes for you. I’ll leave them out here.”

This time, he focused these pathetic senses and was able to actually catch the noise of the homunculus departing back downstairs. 

Only after a count of three hundred did he get up and retrieve the lump outside the door.

There was some sense to Pride’s idea of short hair, perhaps. Not enough that he would really entertain the image, but he was seeing the reasoning. 

The bathroom contained tools he, unwisely, ignored. He’d never needed to be concerned about brushes or combs. His first form’s hair deflected water as he willed it to, in those earlier years when he was needed above ground more. 

He was a fool for not being more cognizant that this, too, would be as different as the body he was inhabiting now. The new hair acted as if it had changed in composition the more water soaked in. He couldn’t draw his fingers through it anymore, as it became a mass. There was a reason humans knew to untangle their hair before washing it. He’d merely thought himself immune to it. 

How he was meant to clean the heavy mat pulling on his scalp with a scratchy shampoo bar and lotion that wouldn’t spread evenly when it couldn’t push through the outside of this new texture, he couldn’t say and he thought Pride wouldn’t be able to either. His container did not have anywhere near this much hair for it to worry about becoming a singular mass when wet. 

Both the bar intended for hair and that which was for cleaning skin instead were unpleasant to the touch and terribly hard to keep a grip on. These hands were incapable of proper functioning. 

And it was difficult enough to be attempting new activities when there was an influx of stimuli so, so much more notable than feeling new wet hair texture or coarse to slimy soap. 

The function of the shower itself. 

Its spout managed to dump a great deal of water down on whoever was cramped in the small tub enclosure. 

It burned against flesh in so many places that the input of all that sensation pushed capability for thought aside. 

If he simply stood and let his head tilt up slightly so that his shoulders flexed backwards just so- yes, he found the posture similar to that he’d use when connecting to the structures built through Amestris, to the pose taken for tubes to fit comfortably up a container’s spine and release souls to transport them elsewhere as needed. With the way it seemed as if his thoughts were melting away under the downpour now, there was a similarity to that sense of losing something drained. 

Even when he turned the knobs off, there was a heat trapped inside, underneath the skin and bones of his face that prevented him from thinking or perceiving clearly. More and more time was lost to this state of slow confusion. The worst of it was that he couldn’t call it unpleasant. 

When there were no answers coming fast enough and there were likely to never be satisfying answers to questions like what was left for him to do now, what goal mattered, what would ever matter, then there was no point in thinking the same circling, waiting thoughts. 

Unfortunately, the way skin reacted to air after being cooked so long was actually unpleasant to experience. It wasn’t painful, but disconcerting to be sure. The rapid changes, the fullness of sensation, the merely indescribable set of words missing to explain how it rippled- dry- empty spots left behind- hot and cold under nerves- a space of a different, seemingly more empty consistency than water that would, by nature, pull essence out, away, gone, into white, inescapable white door behind white ahead hands pulling rather than tearing smile pleased while answering nothing- 

Damn it. He hit one knee against the toilet and then overcompensated to catch his arm and elbow on the sink’s cabinet. The body was shaking without permission. It wasn’t that cold. Nor was the floor that wet, but luck still had him slipping in one of those few puddles. 

The oppressive thing behind him that had leaned in, over one shoulder, teeth to scalp, was gone. It left him with bruises and budding irritation that rather soured the whole showering experience. He didn’t wish to repeat it if it would be followed up with overbearing presences.

A few minutes later and he was marching downstairs. Pride was in the sitting room and looked up to see him. Even at a distance, he could make out how the homunculus’s eyes widened. It would turn into offense soon enough. 

Though dry, the feet that settled on the floor were missing some sensation, the flesh still puffy and soft from sitting in water despite how no droplets so much as remained on the skin. The hair was another matter.

He came up to his creation while the latter was still rising from the sofa. As predicted, the confused, wide eyes had grown composed again. Still, his acting was slipping. He might not have been showing his offense, but he’d not mastered a control over the face of his disguise enough to hide that he was looking another over.

Really, there wasn’t much to see that was new. The matted state of the hair, perhaps. Otherwise, the towel he’d thought to wrap around his waist covered only slightly less of his legs than the ragged pants he’d been wearing from the moment he came back to consciousness. It was nearly the same color as well. He’d picked it for that reason, ignoring the dark green ones hanging in the bathroom alongside the blue pale enough to nearly be gray. 

So there was nothing new to see, but that was the problem. His creation had made a demand and then expected that upon their next interaction, he would be seeing something new. 

Unfortunately for the sin, the folded gifts from the hallway were unfolded, smushed up, and held in a vice grip. Parts of the inside linings were damp from when he’d tried to make use of them. Folding them back up was too much work. 

He held the clothes out towards Pride and then dropped them when he didn’t take them fast enough.

“I won’t use these.” 

False black eyes looked down at the fallen mess, up again, down once more, and back to his own in all too visible confusion. 

He could have sighed. He had to explain everything now. His children wouldn’t just take what he did as an unsaid display of his reasoning and move on whether or not they fully understood it. Pride was always the best at doing that, before. Now look at him. Look at them both.

“They’re tight and scratchy,” he justified for Pride’s sake. “I would have transmuted the material into more acceptable shapes, but I can’t.” And someone hadn’t been helpful in telling him what caused that. What a coincidence that he’d stumbled across that topic. He might as well ask Pride about it, since they both were on the subject. “Do you know why yet?”

“I don’t-”

Excuses, tripping confidence, verbalizing noises before the words were ready. Nothing there to feel any ego supported by. 

The original homunculus leaned forward, yet the other tilted back in synchronicity.

“Then show me your work so I can find the issue,” he hissed. It was very. Very. Simple. 

He stepped away to move the short table towards the chair so that he could spread out whatever research Pride would be bringing him and best look it over. Before it could go forgotten, he pointed at the fallen clothes. 

Starchy, restrictive, false-feeling material pressed into brown pants with a separate nearly silky, itchy white fabric- if it could even be called that, generously- acting to line its interior. It was the type of attire Pride’s container ran around in, but that was because sticking to a modern, formal fashion made for a better disguise to endear naïve human adults when on what seemed so bright and young a child. 

It did not just need to have its tight shapes adjusted, but the material itself unwoven and threaded together more thinly until the fabric touching skin was soft and loose. That current texture was simply untenable. 

“You will transmute this mess for me in the meantime,” he added.

Pride should know what to make out of them. It wasn’t as if he’d ‘changed’ a single time while using Van Hohenheim’s form. 

And if the lesser homunculus couldn’t guess that, then he need only be asked and provided the supplies and he could give a precise template. 

(Or he could not, considering that it would end up a mess of lines that could not stay steady or curve correctly. It was difficult to recall the problem of hands when he kept forgetting he could not simply lay the ink by the paper and transmute the designs from his mind to a physical depiction.)

The silence to follow would be amenable if it accompanied action. His eldest, after all, was rather good compared to some of the later homunculi when it came to not feeling some hopeless need to fill any space with the sound of their own voice even when that moment should have been the solemn event of their own melting down as earned by that behavior to start with. 

It was not accompanied by action. Just standing and staring, until finally the other spoke rather than moving to bring his alchemy designs over.

“...Please pick them up yourself and leave them on the table for me. Bring me down what you've been wearing so I can get the laundry ready. We can talk about the alchemy after.”

Pride’s placid tone went sharp at the end. He was extending a trade, one he could very well rescind and he knew it. 

The child must have thought himself the winner, for he turned on his heels to depart to the room he'd been locking himself in. Perhaps to retrieve his work. His part of the trade.

Fine. This exchange was to his advantage. He moved the uncomfortable garments off of the floor and then padded back upstairs with water-numbed feet that still didn't properly feel what he stepped upon. 

Gathering the robe and inelegant pants took very little effort. Trying to keep the towel wrapped and tied upon itself ended up being at fault for the time it took to reach the room below again. 

It was not that he cared very much about the human value of modesty. It was the fact that he cared even less about the body of a stranger he found himself stuck in. So long as it was what he interacted with the physical world through, it would need to be hidden and thus have such skin protected from the variety of touch and temperature it would otherwise have to deal with. 

He’d always wanted a physical form. When he was new to an independent existence, small and trapped, he’d greedily craved the freedom such provided and watched humans take so natural a thing for themselves for granted with jealousy. The Homunculus of Xerxes was far from a perfect being. Desires drove him more at that time, rather than reason. He craved freedom. He desired a physical form. He took the easy advantage laid out for him to get this thing. 

Then it was his turn to take such for granted, wasn’t it? Because he was ill-content with this body he was in, despite having no room to complain considering the circumstances. The alternative was to exist as information, incapable of remaining in the world. The alternative was white then black, witnessed despair, utter subjugation. But this did not belong to him. 

(this is th-)

He’d used to want a physical form more than anything else- more than perfection, more than justification for existing, more than for god to react to the cry of his soul. 

(this is the outcome y-)

There was far more shame than want when it came to this human flask suffocating him now. This was not-

(the outcome you desired)

And Pride had not intended to trap him in a flesh doll. (Only the other homunculi, as if they would be grateful, hah.) He hadn’t wanted to see this thing walking around anymore than the being inside it did. Even as that creature denied his father, forsook him, unloyal, sworn off, that creator would provide him escape from seeing evidence of his accident. 

By the time he did head down again, Pride was waiting. Not only had he dragged a hamper to the sitting room with him, but the wrinkled pile on the table was now folded in appearance. They'd only be held up to observe, so there was little point in bothering with that. 

Pride was rather like his father: pedantic and unwilling to be less than perfect. Only one of them might actually achieve such, but his first creation still worked to be close behind. 

Those robes he was carrying were taken away from him and tossed into the basket, while he lifted the edge of the presumably altered clothes to peek at their new state. The brown material from the pants was still that terrible silky yet rough texture to the touch. 

Really. The homunculus could bring the dead to life. Turn the artificial into anatomical humans. Surpass the known rules of alchemy in ways both forbidden by mortal society and also impossible by all conventional knowledge. But changing one fiber to another in order to weave fabric differently was where the line in breaking alchemy’s rules was drawn. 

“Those were my clothes,” Pride commented. He sounded snide. A cover, maybe, for some weak sense of insecurity that his choice in anything would be grimaced at by his father. It was unlike the arrogant creature, but should he feel his certainty shake under anyone’s scrutiny, it would be that of his creator. And grimacing scrutiny this was. “I don't like how much I've already removed from them for you, but you don't use pins or buttons or anything so I took everything off that wasn't the cloth itself. I'm not completely changing that or it will be too hard to turn them back to normal. And I want them back to normal.”

This was hardly that important. He'd use the damn towel until the laundry was done, if it mattered that much. The brat could keep his clothes and stop sniffing about how his father didn't share the same opinion about their worth. 

There was a distinct lack of physical work laid out on the table or furniture still. That was a topic of more relevance. He opened his fingers so the corner of the fabric slipped away, and moved from the offering to the sofa instead. 

It was easier to sit than stand so far. There was less awareness of the tendons and muscles shifting in his calves when he was not standing on those legs. 

Pride took an audible breath. 

“I'm sorry I didn't think of new clothes,” he said, back to his faux tone of bashful self consciousness. “I rather rushed here and I wasn't- there's a lot here I didn't get ready.” 

Yes. So had been made rather clear in the short time of ‘life’ spent here. 

“It's such a simple thing to forget.” He sounded upset with himself. It was odd to hear Pride speaking with any hints towards his internal emotions. Discomforting. “Such a stupid thing to forget. We had trunks with small wardrobes ready for the rest weeks before- I should have been able to remember needing that easily since it was practiced already.”

There he went again, talking in the plural. Referencing the humans who he’d involved. How hard had it been to convince Hohenheim’s spawn to devote time and energy for the purpose of bringing their enemies back? Pride’s abilities to sway hearts through acts of childish optimism were effective, it seemed, even when the targets knew better. 

Yet instead of being pleased with this, he found it unacceptable to consider those damned humans being involved in any of this. He might have been an accident, but the homunculi were from him, capable of returning to him, his helpers, his improvements upon the humans they resembled, his, from him. In essence, their handiwork with the five homunculi supposedly brought back was directly touching him.

Twisting him. Forming him. Making the pieces he’d broken off himself into what they wanted, like potters to clay, or a slave to a speck of the universe. 

(Because without the blood of what his fellow humans considered the lowest of their kind, he would not have been capable of self awareness to start with.)

Or perhaps his problem with the words was simply that Pride was so casual about considering himself a part of a plurality that wasn’t his actual kin.

The one to create that true collective spoke over the room and the self-shaming rambling and any of his own feelings. 

“It's quiet.”

This was enough to cut off any more of that bothersome muttering about whether or not it’d been a simple, stupid display of inadequacy to forget the clothes that his creator didn’t even care about. 

Besides, it was. And though he held no interest in needless noise, this was disquieting. It left the days to blur together into something altogether unreal and that meant there was a sense of danger looming over him through it all.

The other homunculus pressed his lips together before replying. 

“There's no one else here.”

And?

He really didn't need to say it. Pride could read what he expected from the silence alone.

“This ‘preparation’ done for the others- where have you left them?”

The lips on that distorted, oddly grown container went pale before Pride ever relaxed enough to surrender and finally sit down too. 

“Greed is working on getting to Xing,” he started an overdue answer after wasting seconds sighing into the cushions that swallowed him. “I don't really need to keep an eye on him, I don't think. Unlike the others, he knew what he wanted to do rather quickly.”

Greed was the least of his concerns. He was, inarguably, his worst son. 

His was an attitude and general usefulness that made his father forget how much of a curse he was and that was his greatest sin of all. Once bitten, twice stabbed, a traitor in every way who did not mind sacrificing the bonds of blood without a single thought because of his own selfish plans for himself…And yet so desirable a presence that false security surrounded his proximity and each new, technically predictable betrayal felt like a surprise. 

In other circumstances, Greed could have been his favorite creation. The fact that he brought his container down to the center of the world in time to survive the activation of the planet’s Gateway had pleased his creator. Wrath was injured and doomed to die from those wounds above them, but he was barely a homunculus. He was made so very recently. Humans were scattered through the layers of the center above as well, but they wouldn’t matter. He brought god down to earth and this was witnessed, when it need not be. If it was him and him alone to live, it was still his long awaited victory. So it was an added benefit, that some of his homunculi survived until the day and hour. If not for Van’s interference-

The man survived either way. He didn’t understand why it had mattered to him so much to ruin everything out of spite because he felt so very defensive about the worth and strength of his species and had to go about ‘proving’ they’d matched his growth step for step over those centuries. 

This was not about him, nor the other sacrifices. 

(They too had lived. Van Hohenheim and his two blood spawn were there, alive, while it was discovered from intelligence, after the two of them first were revealed to Father, that the mother involved was long dead, so it wasn’t as if there was anyone missing in that human ‘family’ to be mad about the death of. If they shut up, then the three of them could have continued living too. There wasn’t a required purpose to their deaths at that time. He’d achieved perfection already. It was his world in full, restricted no longer. If they were not irritating him, then why would he care about a handful of creatures witnessing it? None of them mattered anymore.)

(It could have been wonderful, if- - enough of that.)

It was about the homunculi who survived to watch him do what he’d told them he would, what he’d created them to help him achieve. Pride, flaking away at his side, pleased to no end to be there while the only being to matter more to himself than himself succeeded. And Greed, who simply only had to give up on stupid vendettas and cease pointless attacks on a god. 

It would not be an empty world. Not only were all locations outside the circle populated without issue, but, more importantly than humans or other animals, two of his dutiful, helpful ‘sons’ managed to stay alive long enough to cross into that era with him. 

And despite him being pleased that Greed would be there after all, the brat attacked, attacked again, mocked, tried to steal from him, and then was a direct cause in his dying.

So. 

Greed was the last name of the bunch he cared to hear about. 

He certainly didn’t need to be the first whose fate was told. Since his personified avarice wasted so many opportunities, then he would reap a consequence incomprehensible to his sin: his creator didn’t want him no matter if he even had uses left or not. 

Ignorant to his distaste in starting with the homunculus he had, Pride went on.

“Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth are together so far, but Lust will probably figure out something rather than being content with hiding indoors for long. Sloth wouldn't know an ambition if it hit him in the face.” He stopped. “…that was a little rude, my apologies.” 

Why? 

Pride apparently didn’t feel like explaining this needless interlude. 

“They're far from here and they're being watched, but at least I don't think they know the degree of that. I spent years with agents breathing down my neck every time I moved a foot!” Discordant to the contents of the statement, Pride laughed at this. 

His expression soured a moment later. “And Envy is. Around. Nobody needs him running off too quickly now, but no one deserves to have to play house while he's being so rude either. His attitude is appalling.”

If he recalled correctly, the evident distaste for the younger homunculus wasn’t surprising. No, he didn’t pay much attention to the relationships formed between the homunculi. They were needlessly emotionally driven and unimportant to him so long as they didn’t expand out of the realm of interpersonal strife into actually affecting their behaviors and the effort they put into their duties. If it interfered, it was unacceptable. Otherwise, the petty squabbles they got into when out of his sight were their business. It was too much to ask creatures made out of sins to have perfectly rational emotionless viewpoints on the world. But he did vaguely remember Pride and Envy getting along poorly. 

Envy was an emotional, irrational embarrassment. Pride was the opposite. There was little wonder that the former would envy the latter for being the better homunculus, and that the latter would look particularly far down at the former. The first of them held pride in his homunculus nature, while the most diminutive of the bunch would never be satisfied with that nature so long as there were humans to compare to.

There was a reason Envy was often sent with Lust and Gluttony, who either were able to ignore his blatant flaws or were too dim to notice any, while Pride and Wrath worked together perfectly despite only having a few years to build this teamwork. And it was the same reason Envy annoyed Wrath, while hating him in return for being emotionally unaffected by Lust’s untimely destruction. Even disguised, the form changer had moments of slipping up during his acts when he occasionally took the place of either false Bradley. 

By nature, Envy hated himself, his kin, and looked at humans in bitter resentfulness. 

And by nature, Pride knew that not only were homunculi better than humans, but he was the best homunculus of all. There was nothing to be jealous of. 

“We- Anyway, that’s about the basics of it. You really don’t need to know specific locations. They don’t know you’re here yet. Nobody is up here, though, if you were thinking of trying to walk anywhere or steal mother’s car.”

The rest were trapped in human flesh with the limitations of such bodies. They wouldn’t really be much help to him right now. 

He lifted his head from his hand, drawing his arm down from the back of the sofa, and looked at Pride. 

“What have you discovered about my situation?”

Perhaps on a more accurate container, the flush that seemed to creep up that face would be more convincing. Drained to one soul by Hohenheim’s spawn or not, that stone hadn’t been used to make something with genuine blood requiring a circulation system. Any blush was cosmetic mimicry.

“Um.” Pride began, unflatteringly. “I- Well, so far. I have been looking into everything, but I can’t say I have anything yet.”

Disappointing, but unsurprising. While Pride knew enough about alchemy to force that fifth sacrifice through the Gate, none of the homunculi were practiced in what they did not need. 

And this was why…

“Show me the work,” he said, leaning forward. 

Truly, he was not being subtle about pushing for this regularly. Yet that arrogance which wanted to be capable of everything by itself recoiled at needing help. He was getting tired of that excuse.

Pride looked away and the response that followed came as no surprise considering the attitude. “Not right now.”

It was his turn to feel his lips press tight into each other. Unlike the container he'd crafted years before for his arrogance, he was actually full of veins and blood currently and that circulation was stalled from the pressure. It was an odd feeling. It was wrong. 

He picked up the unwanted clothes and left, or meant to. 

“Wait!” 

He heard a small thunk that he attributed to a leg, most likely, impacting the low table. It suggested Pride stood too quickly, without grace. 

“Listen,” he pleaded, heard but unseen. His creator did not see a reason to turn around and give him that attention. 

“I know-...I told you why I did this. I wanted to help them. We called each other siblings, and that didn’t used to matter to me. I meant it when I said I thought they deserved the same chance to just be human that I was given, but it was selfish too.”

Of course it was. No creature cursed with human sins did anything that wasn’t self-serving in some way. 

Pride could claim what he did was for others, but the method he’d taken- to force them into mortal bodies of flesh and leave them trapped and powerless amidst antagonistic humans- was blinded by his own short sighted perspective and far from what any of them would ever want. It wouldn’t matter if that was their desire. Pride could congratulate himself on meeting some mortal standard of familial loyalty and care. The actual feelings and comfort of those he helped were unimportant to achieving that internal praise as a reward. 

That, or, as he’d considered before, the fool actually genuinely thought this was a gift. 

“This is a chance for me, too.” Pride’s voice was nearer. He came to circle around and his elder put aside the idea of going up the stairs for now. 

“Because I never found out who they were. And there was nothing about me back then for them to find. It’s been unbearable to not get the chance to know. Greed made friends, apparently. They talk about him. They knew things I didn't, even when I thought my surveillance was so good.”

How lovely for Greed! This was such relevant news to hear!

Friends.

Perhaps the disloyal creature had convinced humans to think he was their friend, and perhaps he even thought they were in return. He was an incomplete artificial life form without half the emotions those creatures had. Before his existence, when he was a component of a greater whole, that gestalt perspective knew that no matter how much it learned or knew, it lacked in the realm of human families and friendships; they were plain, simple, to him, yet humans fooled themselves into thinking there was far more to the instinctual process of gathering allies, breeding, and having that bloodline go on securely after death, and they judged and dismissed him for not ‘knowing’ this too. 

Greed would make no better a ‘friend’ than he did a son. That was fact. 

“-What is there to know about you?”

It almost went unheard over the noise of (perhaps embittered) thoughts. 

He did hear it, though. 

Even as he did not at all know what to do with it.

“What?” he let out, unintentionally. 

The reaction only encouraged Pride, it seemed. He stepped a little closer and this time it was his eye contact that was too unblinking and uncomfortable to hold, rather than the other way around. It didn't matter that he looked away. Pride pressed his advantage.

“Who are you, Homunculus?” he asked. 

What a…

Stupid question. He was his father, though that was being denied. He was, briefly, a god. Pride already knew who he was. 

(What there was to know- an empty door- you yourself haven’t grown)

That wasn’t

(you’re incapable of believing in yourself)

Not for the first time, his silence as he pushed aside a horrid voice and dealt with his own mind was read as some accedence on his part to whatever spoken sentiment Pride most wanted him to agree with. He pressed onward.

“I never found that out either, and I didn't think I'd have the chance to,” his creation claimed, “So whether your presence here was unexpected or not, I care to take advantage of the opportunity I would have never thought I'd have.”

Too earnest. That was the problem with his composure, his tone. The body language on display. 

Too earnest.

Far too earnest. 

Nausea squeezed and shuffled the components in his chest. Acid, worry. The slightest return of sharp shards pressing against lungs. 

It was horrifying, really, he could say when he had a moment of peace to think alone upstairs once more. 

(It was a misguided gift, he thought again. Everything he’d done to those homunculi he wanted to be kin with. Selfish, self beneficial, yes, but the other motivation was earnest. 

A misguided subjective blessing that its recipients would only loathe him for, as was the case with acting upon a mistake before actually asking if it was wanted. Pride was surely learning by now why there was no point in getting so excited about an idea that he and he alone thought was good.)

Some Very Serious art for this chapter:

Chapter Text

Memory Lane

Pride was outside.

The frontal double doors, before now never touched, were ajar. While the sliver of bright light streaming through in only a narrow way was somewhat easy to miss, the draft was new in both sound and touch (a movement that brought cold to these feet that hadn’t occurred before on any ventures to the kitchen floor). 

The change drew him over in quiet interest. While the windows might be opened and offer hints to the sounds of the outdoors, this was the first time he was faced with the suggestion of actually being under the sun. And there was no delay in deciding whether or not to pursue an investigation or go do the chore of hydrating and feeding this body. The house was not nearly as suffocating as being bound inside the rest of the universe’s knowledge, but it was stuffy in comparison to the hint of a larger world outside.

Through the windows that framed the home’s entrance, he saw Pride’s back. He was dressed in daytime attire (for humans made arbitrary distinctions), with additional outerwear that hadn't been seen in the days since he was dragged from the cellar. The simple conclusion to draw between his presence outside- a new event- and the added vests- likewise new- was that he intended to depart. The morning was early and there was no consistency in his creator's waking schedule, so perhaps the other homunculus had even meant to vanish without warning. 

Thankfully, that unpredictable pattern of sleep and waking played out in his favor. He was awake and he'd gotten up because he'd been expecting to get pulled away to drink and eat anyway. It was slightly less humiliating if he was able to beat the brat's timing and avoid all the knocking on doors and patronizing calls. 

There were a multitude of reasons Pride might go somewhere else. Far, far more reasons than there were ones to stay here. Nothing happened here. 

Yet he'd expressed enough times that he would be hovering. Because he didn't trust his father anymore, because he'd taken the side of the humans that nearly killed him and did kill the rest of them, because he earnestly wanted to ‘know’ him as some kind of peer- the outcome was the same no matter the cause. Despite the many reasons to go elsewhere, Pride wouldn't just leave someone he was hiding (so blatantly hiding, even if his fumbling words avoided saying it) from the world.

(you were fine leaving me to die but I'm not-

What an over exaggeration. For such an old creature, Pride was thinking like a child.)

It would make sense to be certain. Besides, he didn’t really need an excuse for leaving. 

Cracked, the handle could be ignored. A push did the work, unfortunately accompanied by a whine of hinges and creak of wood. Undoubtedly, Pride knew he was there.

Unlike his creation, he ensured that the door was shut behind him. Even if he'd never bothered staying in a human home, he knew those in cooler environments than Xerxes considered it proper to have them closed to the elements. 

It was surprisingly cold. Did the window’s curtains do that much? Every night, he lay on his back when he resigned to laying down at all, with the glass opened so he could hear the inconsistent sounds of life outside no matter how muffled these ears made them be, but with the curtains mostly closed. The latter was his own begrudging acceptance that he likely wouldn’t last in his plan to avoid sleep. It was bad enough to wake up, groggy and alarmed, after never remembering turning over and losing consciousness to start with. There was no reason to add on the pain of sunlight hitting his closed eyes and making them feel additionally exhausted despite their ‘rest’. 

At this rate, he might soon be shaking the blankets themselves loose to use the bed as a human did. He’d already given up enough and resigned to the unplanned weak condition being likely enough to occur that he was drawing curtains. 

If it was going to be this temperature, that could, in fact, become a necessity. 

The air was crisp and crawled its way up the wide gaps at the ends of his original, disheveled pants. The skin along feet, then ankles, then up those legs until the fabric became too congested fought against the new sensation. Goosebumps. That was a common term for the prickling. An odd experience. Unlike in his first hours recovered from a hellish suffocation, he was able to take note of the more minute reactions elicited by cold touch. A chill in the air felt different from the contact of concrete flooring. It was not as unpleasant, as it did not force its way deep to the bones so quickly. The bite felt more surface level. 

He made the decision to tuck the edges of the robe into the opposite sides of this body until it wrapped around the otherwise bare chest. They threatened to come loose if he didn’t likewise fold his arms across the exterior to trap the fabric in place, so that was what he did and continued to do even as he moved cold feet across peeling wood planks. These were worse than any of the flooring inside. Exposure to the elements left the flaking more prominent and threatened to have sharp pieces for feet to be stabbed by. Pride was actually kneeling down at a spot of packed dirt, not on one of the steps at all. 

Something else was making faint noises down there. He stopped at the lowest of the porch stairs and stood there, holding a robe to himself, and looking over Pride’s shoulder at the source of attention for no more reason than the fact there was nothing else to do. 

All he really saw was mangy fur. The shape it made wasn’t easy to distinguish. It wasn’t as if the fur was evenly spread over the thing. Not when clumps were missing and leaving behind patches of ugly skin, where other spots held stacked collisions of wiry hair that wasn’t even connected. 

He half expected to smell a stench, but either the short distance held from it was enough to make this inferior nose useless or the thing wasn’t so coated in disease or urine as to stink. 

Parts of the lump moved, but they were weak, slow efforts, and the most they did was let him distinguish a single limb from the rest of the mass.

The breeze stalled and picked up without pattern, the air rustled against him, and they stood watching some animal fail to run from them. A thrilling use of the morning, clearly. 

Despite the sarcasm, he didn’t go anywhere. 

Pride was the first to talk, voice kept to a murmur.

“It’s hurt.”

The relevance was lost on him. But he stayed quiet and gave his creation time to elaborate if that was his intention. 

Though he remained crouched, Pride shifted his weight to the right. The opposite hand came to hover and trace through the dirt, near but still far from touching whatever injured thing he’d found and spent who knows how much time in the day doing nothing but sitting over. 

“I think some of the ribs must be broken. One of the legs is, I know, but if that was it, then it would be fighting to get away from me. Animals don’t like me near them so if they’re being still, it means they’re too hurt to even know what’s going on.” A pause. Then- “Stray and wild animals, anyway. I did manage to have a- Well, it’s not really important. And he took months to get used to me. It’s funny! I don’t even have any souls for them to sense! They just can still tell something is wrong.”

Yes, animals, domesticated or feral alike, were good at detecting that a homunculi was not a human. External appearances didn’t fool them in the way they so easily tricked humans. Human senses were so very limited. It was what made chimeras more useful for catching trespassers. 

‘Wrong’ was not the word, however. ‘Different’ fit better. 

The younger homunculus was not as powerful or complete as he, his origin, was, but he was still an improvement upon the dominant species which functioned on this planet as god’s naïve playthings. 

All that animals detected was that the shell didn’t match the scent or sounds of repetitive blood pumping or any of the other tells of a human being. It hardly spoke on something like morality or advancement, right and wrong.

They both stayed where they were until Pride shifted his weight like he was restless and spoke up again.

“There’s a bit of a barn cat issue up here. This one is too young to probably be owned and lost, in the state it’s in. Poor kitten.”

This was not the son he was used to. Out of them all, Pride cared the least about the death of things around him. Human or animal, young or old, he’d witnessed misery and death for four hundred years. As goal oriented and self absorbed as his arrogance-given-form was, such things just washed off him, as incompatible as oil and water.

For the most part, Pride wasn’t like Envy, deriving glee from death, enjoying and thriving off the sight of misery. And he was far from as naïve as Gluttony, who didn’t understand the dead from the living, a meal from a formerly moving creature, cause and effect. It was not the slow apathy of Sloth, or the hidden heat of witnessing death from Lust, but rather a place of disaffected, haughty cold. 

Despite being planted as a spy so often, he was the least human of them all. Envy might have thought that was his description to claim, but his mind and the amount of emotions that he held about his buried appearance at his core was not distant from humanity at all. Pride’s mere existence was-

(...the most like him. Homunculus. Dwarf in the flask. Seen with a human lens by Van alone, but that anthropomorphism of his having a personality and soul was inaccurate. His nature knew much of humans, but no matter the blood that gave him life, and no matter how much his blood-kin saw of himself in the reflection of that glass flask, he was not human. Pride embodied this.)

“Here.” His first creation balanced back on his container’s heels, so he could reach and shuffle through one of his pockets without actually taking his eyes off the small lump of fur and stench. His hand returned to the air with something that glinted in the sunlight, holding that hand still without looking away. “Could you bring me my knife kit? It’s the flat box with the alkahestry circle burned on top, on the nightstand in my room.”

Ah. So the glint came off of a key, then. And with that recognition came movement on his part, spurred on while Pride behaved so distractedly. 

There wouldn’t be time to rifle through everything in that closed room, but he might catch a glimpse of what alchemy was involved with his current status. Good. Good.

The air hit his chest and neck once more with all its biting chill when he dropped the cage of his arms so he could grab the tiny thing. He would go before Pride reconsidered the point of using a lock to start with. What a helpful dying animal. It somehow stole far too much of an experienced homunculus’s attention, and, in the past with the Pride of that past, that was no small feat. Perhaps it still somewhat was.

The house was silent when the front door closed behind him once more, cutting off the sounds of bugs and animals. The privacy felt both oppressive and positive. Something sprawled full weight over him, unshakeable, but ignorable. 

The cellar door was passed without interest on his part. It too was locked, but this key would not open that. It hid the site of whatever creative madness Pride and those others involved used to bypass the rules of life and death and transference of one form of matter into another, and he did want to see it. Another time. He could be patient. He wasn’t being given a choice about it. 

Upon the same wall, however, was a destination he could do something with.

The twitching in his hands nearly had him drop the key, but the annoying job was concluded without the embarrassment of that. 

And then he was there. In one of the spaces he’d not been dragged towards, ears full of patronizing explanations about simple human things, unlike the kitchen or rooms above. 

There was actually very little to see. Yes, more trunks and bags lay around the floor compared to the rather empty bedroom upstairs, and the nightstand held items more personalized than the guest hand towels and dusty books found on the desk he’d been offered. It did not mean it appeared lived in by a human’s perspective. 

It was almost relieving to see, from the perspective of a homunculus instead. The most decoration he’d decided to have in the space he spent most of the last centuries in was the representation of his plan that he’d made with the pieces of a game. There was no purpose to trinkets or making a temporary den ‘prettier’. Unless their sin was greed, then all of his creations carried this same opinion. 

When so many features were distorted, it was good to find something familiar about Pride in this small fact. 

On the other hand, it meant anything interesting was boxed away in these contaminants, and it was more time consuming and delicate a job to start searching through those if he hoped his actions would go unnoticed. He could likely put everything back into pockets and binders so precisely it would be missed, but only if he wanted to try one trunk and skip looking carefully at the contents he dug out. 

How…disappointing.  

Something with less steps, then. He approached the nightstand carefully and considered whether the dust on the knobs of its drawers was thick enough that moving it would be very visible. While these human senses were untrustworthy, he didn’t think there was enough to even count as a layer. That meant Pride was using these (rather than leaving them empty aside from the former house’s occupants forgotten trash, like those in the dresser and desk alike upstairs) and recently too. 

The answer was as disappointing as it was decently predictable. Out of the two drawers, both were topped with folded clothes. The lower one contained very few, the wooden floor visible in spots, and he recognized them as superfluous garments like socks. The top was full nearly to the brim with the familiar sight of more white shirts and itchy pants because Pride really did tend to appear like he wasn’t changing at all day by day. These might have been covering something more interesting, but he didn’t want to try to replicate the placing of each fold against the next and so left them be. 

There was a flat, elegant box by the nightstand’s lamp. Pulling off the top revealed rows of short knives. He’d seen their model before. They were stubby things, flared then pinched in a small space where a handle might have been for other blades. The length of that part was far from enough to put any sort of hilt here. The metal looped above that spot and little cuts of cloth were attached by knots there. 

The design on the lid was an alkahestry circle, then. Logic told him that ‘alkahestry’ (which Pride was right in saying he knew nothing about, loathsome as the bragging had been) was the form of alchemy he witnessed from that one human child. And from Van Hohenheim, but that was witnessing without eyes: observation by proxy. Whatever he’d done to shake him so badly that he expelled the souls of Amestris was based on a large array that he could not simply see and memorize the formulation of, so that he might compare it to the five point circle here. 

There was a scrap paper under the box itself that lived up to the scrap attribute. Nothing regarding alchemy lay in plain sight. Pride kept the bed made with total attention to tight sheets and evidently didn’t want to ruin this image he’d wasted time on by leaving any books out on top of it. The trunks held far more. That was a certainty. One he’d wasted his own limited time on drawers instead to check. 

This was hardly a total loss. Although alchemy was currently unresponsive to his thoughts and he still did not know the details of what was used to return him to the physical world again, the entire purpose of this venture was almost certainly an intention on Pride’s part to utilize this alkahestry outside.

Watching a single use would not be enough alone for him to discover everything there was to know about this curiosity, but it was most definitely something. 

He returned to the worn porch, where Pride was waiting in nearly the exact same position. Finally, for the first time since awakening, he felt eager enough to see something and deconstruct new knowledge that it actually covered the ever-present, lingering dread which followed him out from the Gate back to the earth to hover behind him. 

It was good to get instant confirmation for the conclusion he’d drawn regarding the unknown alkahestry and those clues provided by context thus far.

Because yes. This. It was this.

‘This’ was what that child (who wasn’t supposed to be near him to start with yet trespassed twice) would do. First it interfered with him long before the eclipse. Then it was the Promised Day where the brat tried to fight him directly- which was laughable, but her value as entertainment dropped as she shielded the other humans successfully. 

The knives returned the arm of Hohenheim’s older spawn right in front of his eyes so he could do alchemy once more. If that was the unknown child’s doing- and she was the only human he saw that day using knives for that altered form of alchemy, so it was almost certainly her-, then she was responsible for his death.

Independent of that context, it did not seem that powerful. Alchemy could accomplish much greater feats with the same sized arrays. 

Scaling could be put aside. For now, he was actually getting to see this non-alchemy up close without the distractions of battle. There was little chance to look and dissect what he saw from the quick activations thrown out by that random child, before. Amestris as a whole went without seeing this. The homunculi otherwise would have noticed and reported back if they’d witnessed this implausible activity before. Eastern travelers were rare. Most humans had enough survival instincts to avoid visiting a land known best for constant new wars. 

He would have observed all the knowledge of those distant lands, after achieving the freedom to learn, to move, to see the world, provided by perfection. In hindsight, he should have gone or sent the likes of Lust or Envy to the far east long ago. Their mages, Hohenheim’s interference with the massive array that went unrecognized as an array…none of it would have taken him by surprise.

It was unfathomable that mere humans had taken him by surprise at all. 

This was not a subject he should mull over at this moment. It was distracting and he needed to watch this carefully. 

(It was aggravating and disappointing and ended in the same place, with his failure and god’s rejection, and then that.)

Pride was not as fast at planting the knives around the cat as the tiny human mage. He pressed them into the ground one at a time. The child threw five at once.

Despite the extra seconds it took to get ready, his homunculus still made it to the outcome she had without rebound or worry. If Homunculus leaned over to see it even better, what about it? This was exactly what could be expected of him. 

The array activated. 

It shone, bright blue. Its formulation was unknown. Certain pieces of its structure were familiar, yet then other critical interruptions to its lines ruined the idea that it operated on the rules of Amestrian alchemy. It obviously drew power from something other than the energy network he’d created under this land. The idea that humans discovered how to utilize the life force of the planet itself, seeing it as an organism just as he had, without his input at all, was nearly inconceivable. Clearly, it had occurred. He could not argue with facts. Those alchemists of Amestris never came so far, at least. They were effectively limited and believed what he’d taught them long ago was the truth for centuries after. They taught their next generations with the boundaries he imposed. He did not even have to do the work when they were so very good at binding their own minds to think small all on their own. Humans. In their search for power, they were so easy to lead into limitations. 

It was the same array in structure to that engraved on the box, and those which the child activated before. Despite acting in different ways, with outcomes ranging from shields to attacks to the reconstruction of a limb lost in the toll to this, now, the five point flow stayed identical. The same identical array used for soft medical purposes here worked to damage enemies that stepped upon it in other scenarios. Yet precision was the hallmark of human alchemy. Only those like himself and Van Hohenheim (only because of his gifts) were witnessed as able to create and destroy with thoughts alone. 

‘This’ was the alkahestry Pride held over his head days before, and now that aspect was no longer a mystery. The science itself was, thus far, but the secret being boasted about could no longer taunt him. 

The noise of the array itself covered any sound of snapping bones or shifting viscera. Its bright glow made it difficult to stare and see and the animal had already been more of a pile of lumps and fur than distinguishable in shape to start with, so how was one to know if they had viewed that body changing?

Yet when it faded, Pride reached out to catch the creature and hold it to the ground with one hand while the other carefully stretched out the limbs that had previously at least one break. 

He'd altered its form itself. He'd changed the state of internal structures without providing missing materials. How-?

He twisted and turned the array in his mind and found nothing he'd not already noted, repeatedly, while Pride cleaned and put the knives away (apparently satisfied that he did not need to hold the animal to the dirt). It didn't move. Focus. The state of the creature itself would tell him something, little or large. The body lifted and shrunk into itself in an even pattern. It was asleep, then. Even if it was too exhausted to move while awake, the breathing would not be so consistent. Perhaps this purpose of alkahestry always left its targets unconscious after? Was that what kept him in that odd stasis and not alchemy itself? And speaking of that purpose, he was admittingly fascinated. 

“You healed it,” he stated. 

Pride jumped slightly, like he'd not been expecting any comment from his audience. His face was kept turned away so dark bangs hid much, but he thought he saw the container’s mimicry of a flush. 

“A- yes. Alkahestry has prominently been studied for medical application.” There was an indistinct sound before he actually did glance up and back. It revealed one of those falsely sheepish smiles. Really, if Pride wanted to arrogantly revel in his successful display here, then he should. It wasn't as if his father was a human that had to be tiptoed around behaviorally because they did not understand his nature came from conceit. The ego was expected. He could just smile in haughty condescension like normal. “It's a bit like what you were able to do, to repair people that got hurt. Except instead of accomplishing that with the energy of a soul of a different human, alkahestry takes the life form's own energy and redirects it inside itself.” Pride looked down at the animal again. “That’s far less powerful than what you'd do with a soul, but it's impressive how much veterinarians and doctors have been able to do considering their limits.”  

It was, perhaps, good that Pride had looked away. 

Otherwise, his creator might have kicked at that face until the eyes of his old vice were no longer witnessing the angry burn of blood pressing at his own. He was uselessly weak. The souls of Xerxes weren't responsive, beforehand ever-present if he paid attention. For the first time since he freed himself from that flask, the comforting lull of power wasn't there. 

Pride did not only save him by accident without actually wanting him- the very center of his and the other homunculi’s lives- back, but he'd butchered and botched whatever he’d done as well. 

And he actively refused to fix the problem he caused. 

Alchemy of that nature should not have been spoken of as something he was once able to do, but instead a present day capability.  

All this, while likewise flaunting the way a previously unique advantage on his part was being tapped into by humans now. Yes, he rarely used alchemy to fix living things. A few humans here or there- Hohenheim’s flesh boy the only instance in this latest century, really. But it had been unheard of in the likes of Xerxes’s scientific circles and Amestris could only apply alchemy medically with intricate work, supplies, and external energy that practically made it a worthless field of study. Human alchemists couldn't make something from nothing. No one could. He didn't either, but to any observer that had no exposure to a philosopher’s stone, it would look as if he was. 

Fortunately for Pride, he had turned aside and moved on, oblivious, and so missed the hapless rage that came and went in the figure behind him. 

Since there was no verbal engagement, the next time he spoke, it was unrelated.

“I think I'll take it to the house up the road. Maybe they could use a barn cat. I'll not be long.”

Pride finally started to get off the ground, however slowly. There was dirt on his pants, most notably the knees. 

Now that he stood, his expression, despite the direction it was faced, was visible again. 

It was something strange and slightly wrong, for lack of a stronger judgment. 

“Alkahestry is very worthwhile. Rather than having to wait from a veterinarian on call to come to me, I can help things that are hurt. I like that I can. I've hated having to see things die since I was little.”

The one who’d actually been there at Pride’s creation and throughout the rest of his four hundred years existing couldn’t help but stare.

“No you haven't,” he said. 

“...” Pride went tense, from hands to shoulders, up the neck and to the jaw. It was a few seconds before those fists slowly relaxed. He was restrained when he went to speak again. “I think I can speak for myself better than you, especially regarding time that you were not alive to witness at all.”

Ah. Forgive him for making a simple observation. It wasn’t as if he’d seen the vast majority of his own homunculus’s lifetime. A few years made little difference to an ageless being. 

He highly doubted the pain of any other creature was felt empathetically hurt for hurt by one whose very nature of arrogance could not look past its own self. 

The attitude of rejection was ill befitting for his eldest. So he thought, and wasted more time thinking on, until he realized that the other homunculus was crowding him. 

Pride had picked up the box under one arm while its hand was busy using a handkerchief to trap the animal against his container. It was occupied in unconsciousness. If it woke and clawed- ah, right, he did not care. 

“I need my key.” Did he? So little trust. How poor a human he was making, if he could not believe in a concept like that.

His hand tightened around the tiny metal teeth. 

It was a short fight. He did release his hold on the robe to hand it back, but since he was moving in the cold once more, it seemed, then he might as well go up the porch to linger by the doors. 

If bare feet felt this much discomfort with just wooden planks in this temperature, then he rather doubted he would make it far walking on gravel or in dewy grass. No matter how he expected the ground to fold under him at his intentions and deposit him further out until he stood somewhere comfortable enough, that constancy of alchemy remained unresponsive. If he meant to go into the fields, it would be on foot. That wouldn’t be happening. Which left very little, with both distractions gone once they made it into the house as Pride evidently wanted to. As much as he loathed anything resembling being trapped, he didn’t know what to do alone out here. 

Not that his creation was planning on staying to provide a reason for this brisk exposure. 

In fact…

“It's good that you're up.” Pride said. His tone had moved to one disconnected and uncaring of if it was replied to. It didn't hold room for conversation or argument. It made the expressed sentiment of supposed positivity fall entirely flat, but that didn't really matter. His creator viewed any sentiments with that level of worth, with very few exceptions. And all those exceptions were from the same source, occurring over four hundred years ago. 

“Since you are, we can be ready to go sooner. While I'm gone, get dressed, eat something from the kitchen if you can.” What? We? “We need to head into Eqtied today and this way, we can get an early start.” 

That answered little.

He made no move to go either change- he was dressed already- or feed this body himself despite the unsubtle hinting.

“Why?” he asked, instead. He’d not entirely meant to. It came out.

“So that you don't keep wearing the same thing til the threads break. We'll run a few errands. You can pick the clothes that you don't hate the touch of. It's efficient.” Without waiting for acknowledgement, Pride nudged him aside to get to the doors. “Excuse me.”

The child left them cracked loosely a few inches rather than shutting them again. 

His father corrected his mess. Again.

It wasn’t very conscientious of Pride. Of pedantic, perfect Pride who held himself above those lesser homunculi that cared about the state of others as their source of sadness or schadenfreude. 

Seventeen years should not be of consequence, really. Changes in a creature’s character did not occur so quickly. 

It was disgusting how little he could influence his improved (to their human molds) creations without being there directly to supervise.

Pride was not as fast as he’d predicted he would be. Two of the day’s hours passed at a slow crawl before he returned. His overestimation of his own speed just served as another example of his newfound sloppiness. 

Despite being the one that led another to doing nothing while they waited, it was Pride that acted the most annoyed. His reason was that his creator hadn’t wasted his own time putting different, more uncomfortable clothes on. It felt like a weaker reason to be irritated than his own. He kept that to himself. 

It was not until noon that they actually ended up in this human town. He had to change into something Pride picked. They had to alter the only spare shoes Pride had to fit this body’s feet and then he had to succeed in walking in them without feeling like his legs needed to keel over. The leather wrapped all the way around and halfway up the ankle, as if that were not an important joint that shouldn’t have just been imprisoned and had lines indented into the skin and bone by the painfully stiff entry points of these shoes. Moving the foot around on its swiveling anatomy itself was practically made impossible and so the legs in full had to be adjusted for steps instead.

Cold feet also were a more acceptable pain than the weights that tightly trapped everything inside.

This only led into some disappointed rambling from Pride about how he’d rather they get to walk to their destination, a complaint he kept up while dragging the original homunculus around the house to a vehicle. Surely this would be faster, and they’d not have to constantly carry the bags Pride packed up with them, so this should have been the first choice for efficiency anyway, not walking. 

Admittingly, it was tempting. The vehicle was a rusted, odd thing. But Pride was also right to predict there might be problems with the human stranger of a body he was occupying. It held a decent amount of musculature. He’d not used any of that in the time he was alive in it, though. Unlike the form of Van Hohenheim he used for centuries, this one could not sit for years at a time without consequences. It couldn’t handle the minor sedentary way he’d spent his time this far, clearly. 

(Even walking in the town itself showed this unfortunate reality. But he could not find it in himself to be that judgmental that he’d done little in the way of movement. Going up and down the stairs was an activity that he spent fully mentally occupied on the way it felt to have muscle and tendons twist around bones and snap back. It was so very meaty and unnatural and he couldn’t be blamed for not making some practice of running around outside. It wasn’t as if Pride was letting him do anything if it wasn’t first his idea. The outdoors were irrelevant if he couldn’t be there without getting dragged away.)

(light-void hands, a dozen, a hundred, an infinity, pulling-)

The automobile smelled more unpleasant than he would predict was acceptable to its driver. Other than the way it left him nauseous, it didn’t really matter to him. What Pride did with this human contraption while he lay away did not matter. Where Pride went for those hours that he was gone occasionally did not matter when any important alchemy answers were hidden behind locks held by alchemy. Being dragged on this venture and sitting through unnatural feelings of nausea from the sloppy movements of the car or the stench of human sweat did not matter to him. And what mattered to him didn’t matter to Pride, or to the whole damn universe!

The vehicle lurched in starts and stops. The metal frame of the seat and door were felt even through the attempt at padding humans added inside. While stone and metal never hurt him before, this flesh didn’t appreciate it pressing. The landscape outside was rural while this bumped along and he considered how much walking in shoes like these it would take to get anywhere comfortable. Even what minor joy might have been experienced from viewing the world was disturbed by the way it was distorted from uneven movement. That was a source of almost-nausea itself. 

This was bothersome but he wasn’t being asked. 

Maybe if the idea was run past him first, this would have been the first worthwhile experience since before his unity with god was torn from him. The novelties of sleeping or eating hardly counted. 

The first farmhouse became visible on the road sometime after Pride had made him lose track at forty past five-hundred even seconds (counting something with unchanging intervals minimized all the physical discomforts this activity was putting him through). Considering the odometers and what he knew of them, the distance crossed at this lumbering, unpredictable, bumpy pace far outmatched whatever walking speed he likely had in his current shape. Walking. Really, how long since that was a regular necessity? It paled in convenience to having the power to move where one might wish to. 

(Walking was a true novelty once. A goal to strive for. A victory to take satisfaction in. A thing so coveted that he’d never thought he would want to stop using the legs he finally had, finally. 

That was much longer ago yet. Rather full of human sentiments too, really. Like any human vice, coveting was an imperfection because it could never be fulfilled; anything desired, once achieved, lost the importance that had seemed so much like a pinnacle of a goal before.)

The trees grew more dense as the road stretched down from that human property. Gone were the bushes and weeds, replaced by shadows that offered more moss and ferns than pale grasses. The dirt roadway (littered in rocks and holes, because either very few locals actually used these vehicles upon it, preferring to walk, bike, or ride some ungulate, or it was common and the road was just not maintained and improved for that because humans could be trusted to be fools) was wide enough to fit the width of Pride’s dull looking thing, just barely. It was worse down here than on the hill they’d driven down from. 

He couldn’t close his eyes to try to center his balance and make irrational, unhappy human organs calm down. Whenever he tried, the darkness just mixed with the uncanny tipping-turning senses of movement. It brought the comparison of deconstructing into the streams of the universe, with all their speed and spinning until the doors shut into black deprivation of direction or movement or sight or anything. 

Even these thinned out after perhaps a bit longer a span of time as the previous landmark from the starting point. They must be nearing half an hour in this cramped trap by now. If he had to hear one more trivial piece of information about this location from Pride–

Fortunately, it was as if the ire bubbling in him like the nausea was unacceptable enough to trigger the end of that trial before it could really become real. (Surely it wouldn’t have regardless. He didn’t have a nature with genuine wrath, only the ghosts leftover of that bothersome anger.) The trees cleared, spaced apart, making room for fences, walls, and a larger mass of buildings in the distance. 

Wonderful. A quaint little town. When was the last time he passed through a new one? Two hundred odd years ago? Like walking, like legs, that novelty wore off while he grew closer to perfecting his being. From Xerxes to his own puppet country, he’d personally walked through plenty of new towns and cities and seen their variations on architecture, fashion, and norms firsthand. These differences were barely different at all from a perspective that was more objectively distanced. He knew the extent of possible creative spins on engineering that could ever be done from the moment he came into consciousness in Xerxes, even if Xerxes lacked materials and some of the mathematics to ever make the designs for building half of what he knew to be hypothetically sound. There was a vast array of possibilities, after all. It was only a shame that knowing that whole picture from the moment of conception took some of the thrill out of finding out that some human city or other had experimented in architecture and accomplished what other humans hadn’t yet.

Pride parked in a dirt lot with a few other silent vehicles and the majority of the town still at a distance. Because, evidently, they would be having him walk in these restrictive shoes after all. Down sidewalks that meant passing close by the occasional human. 

It smelled like dust, woodsmoke, human stink, a burning scent he only recognized as roasted coffee because certain men in Central dragged cups of that into meetings he attended, a bready odor, and flowers- occasionally- when they walked along a building that had pots out front or hanging baskets of dirt. There was no fragrance for cold air but the way that it interfered with his nasal breathing could nearly apply. It was preventing him from picking up very much. A perk, perhaps. There was no good reason to overwhelm the new sense. Smells had always registered simply as data, as information to him after he made a body from Xerxes’ stone. A human brain found it all a bit more distracting. 

It made for a fuller experience. Vague, uncontrolled, colorful despite containing no colors. It was different in its medium from existing within the well of data behind the Gate.

The humans that either passed too closely or gave an offending berth to the two of them were dressed differently than he and Pride, though not to such a dramatic degree that it made sense they would stare. They just wore overcoats that the homunculi did not. Some had scarves, some were wrapped in jackets with fur collars, few wore such stiff formalwear as Pride preferred. 

Eqtied didn’t aspire to the militaristic fashion of Central Amestris (in decades past. He couldn’t speak for the last two). It seemed the town wanted to appear more rural. It was near Riviere. Locations of crests never did settle into patriotism easily. They weren’t meant to.

These external sensory distractions only served so well before he was reminded of the strange feelings of muscle movements and shifting tendons. He was unable to forget for long that he didn’t belong in this blood and flesh container. As soon as he was aware of the internal sensations, movement became unpleasant, and yet on they went down different criss-crossing sidewalks of Eqtied.

The nice part was…well, being alive. For all the very strange, unwelcome discomforts that seemed to follow him every single moment since awakening- for all the purpose and balance lost, irreplaceable, irreparable, the eclipse over, the rejection clear, the chance for his singular goal forever dashed which now left nothing as a goal- being alive was still infinitely better than being back there. 

So for all that the air hurt like inhaling icy shards, he let his mouth rather than nose draw those breaths in. Besides, the scents were too much sometimes. 

Boring, uncomfortable, bothersome little things were so vastly improved from the alternative that here he'd let himself get dragged along by his wayward creation, and he would let it happen again. He didn't like it: not the metal death trap of an automobile seat he had to crunch this body into, not the rigid shoes, not the motion sickness, not how cold air hurt going down, not towns, not human hubris, not their monuments to obliviousness to mortality and time that they upheld with brightly painted signs or strings of lights, not pointless activities, not vain clothing choices which wouldn't matter, not this, not here, not humans. No. He wouldn't participate in foolishness more than Pride absolutely required him to. He would participate in breathing and staring at things with true color and texture and light, because there were dark hands hovering an inch from his back, the truth oppressive, the anxiety over them crossing the little boundary and dragging him unflinchingly away an ever-present paranoia. 

(He couldn't go back. He couldn't bear to go back, again.

He'd have no say in the matter when the despair awaiting him decided to remember him.)

He'd never had a reason to enter a boutique or really any human store in modern Amestris. That made this experience a technical novelty. He couldn't say it was exceptionally thrilling.

Xerxes was built with open air in mind. Oftentimes, roofs were beams with canvas spread over them if it grew too hot. Sometimes, there were open spaces where walls would have been. Market stalls bled into other vendors. Food could be bought two feet from a stand selling robes. Amestris put entire buildings in between. 

There was more to the experience of a Xerxes shopper, certainly. Smells, stinks or fragrances alike, were for humans- not for a funny little oracle that got carried around by the same slave-turned-alchemist over the years. Clearly, he would have to decline to speak on them. In that regard, there was no comparison to a personal reference for the town of Eqtied. 

There were only windows on one side of the store, and those were unimpressive, foggy glass sealed tight. Not even they could be said to be responsible for any air flow. Xerxian architecture was exchanged for musty, stagnant rooms that were, admittingly, warmer than the world outside their doors. 

Pride was really playing up the happy energy and it managed to drain away what small amounts of his own he had. Outsiders didn't find it exhausting. They waved back, cheerfully exchanged those human pleasantries, and made offers of help that Pride would decline while beaming. Outsiders didn't know that he was playing up anything. That was the reason that it spurred them on rather than sapping away their patience. While he knew this from general understanding of human behavior, he found this all quite frivolous. 

Still, when Pride’s attention was instead fully on him, he couldn't say things were much better in terms of feeling words were being used for meaningful reasons. It was Do you like these and How about this and such, on repeat. He understood the activity, Pride. He didn't need a reminder about what this was every step to a new rack or shelf.

This first stop didn’t even have many clothes and those had been the reasoning behind this outing. This boutique offered up soaps, rags, hair brushes, lotions, perfumes, toothbrushes (the bristles looked like they would be torture on enamel and it wasn't a sensation he was in a rush to discover), clips, bands, and more that Pride at first acted like he would have some opinion about. 

It was true that some of the brushes here could do better than fingers or a comb intended for much shorter hair. He drew his thumb against a few if just to test how coarse animal hair would differ from newer, artificial bristles spaced out upon their pad and fashioned in rounded softness, and then from those instead made of metal. Their labeling claimed a variety of mixed truths and lies that he read more for entertainment than anything. Humans created wares for the purpose of selling them to others. They would say their creations were capable of advantages that their competitors of different compositions actually held, while they themselves did not. 

Still, other than choosing a drab looking brush mixing boar and wire bristles (it hardly looked pleasant to use, but he reasoned it would be the most efficient), he didn’t bother with much participation.

For the first overly patient hour, Pride dragged him around to nearly every shelf in the small store. By the end, even his creation’s patience must have grown too annoyed with the lack of motion and he started to forget this forced inclusion. 

The shop wasn’t large. There was more space behind the counter at the back wall; a door was just visible among a clutter of racks that were being kept out of reach there. Having seen the buildings from the parked car to this present location, he could assume the storage space was probably narrow as well. Then, opposite a final wall, another thin space could be found before letting out into a small space used as a store or restaurant on one of the roads on that end of the grid. The complex was built to be long and house multiple establishments along its lengths by their sidewalks, but its width would be little more than windowless wood and brick.

The height did suggest that actual storage might occur above the shops, or fit an occasional apartment. There were no publicly accessible stairs up, after all, not that he had seen while outside and certainly not in here.

For a store supposedly stocking those basic necessities for appearance, there was a lack of robes. There were two racks showcasing belts. Near the entrance, one shelf displayed a few sets of shoes, the likes of which Lust would probably wear. While they were not so restrictively covered over the top of the feet like the ones he was displeased to be using, the narrow, pointed misshapen items with their arch over-exaggerated and balance left to a thin spike speared from the heel were hardly comparable to those more reasonable flat sandals of Xerxes. 

Likewise more to Lust’s interests were the branching metal racks with jewelry hanging off them. The back of the store, where currency actually got exchanged, was lined with a long counter. Part of it was transparent, to showcase two inches below where rings and diamonds that might have just been cut glass were spread out. It should have been easy to get a grasp on the composition of these metals and ‘gems’. But he couldn’t . He could only guess based on sight, even unable to hold any and (still manually) judge a bit more closely that way.

Jewelry provided no interest to him outside of the reminder of his recent handicaps. Metallurgy and chemistry were an expertise of his, after all. Every science was. Outside of the elemental makeup, regalia was irrelevant. Once it might have been a bit satisfying to take the subjectively valuable apparel of a king who’d been nothing but a fool with blowhard and idiotic aides that thought they could threaten him (because someone with a future in a flask had so much to lose). 

As it stood, jewelry was a means of shining more than others, flaunting wealth and thus security, appearing more aesthetically pleasing, like any animal and its morphs, all in the goal of attracting mates more often than competitors. He was good without, on that front. 

The same applied to the jars of beet derivatives, perfumed powders, lip creams (he knew of these vaguely from what Lust would bring down into her haunts to store, since she occasionally changed from the dark red automatic to her regeneration to blacks or purples or whatever else was going to make pawns stumble stupidly in a given decade), and other cosmetics. The most amusing part was that whatever, in essence, morphology humans in one location thought was most attractive would be laughed at in the past or future of that same region. The environmental circumstances determined what was most appealing and changed too often for natural selection to ever stop on one look for any creature of a species.

Presented among the other needlessly decorated hair management tools were larger handkerchiefs and ribbons that hardly could be passed off as clothes enough for the store to continue advertising themselves as a supplier to such. Neither could the scarves (near the belts and shoes), despite how large some were hung out to be. A mere two coats were offered. And the last hope of counting as clothes were undergarments that were far too lacey to be comfortable for anyone. Leave it to humans to complicate basic things needlessly. 

If this was how extensive a place selling essentially accessories could be in its variety, then he wasn’t eager to see how many styles and fashions of clothes they actually tried to sell elsewhere. This much he could give his surviving son: his wardrobe was nearly identical with each spare, rather than frivolously varied and overcomplicated. 

By the counter, Pride started up a dull conversation with one of the human shopkeepers.

“Do you know which soap is best for long hair? No, not for me. Scented? One moment. Do you have a preference for the scent? …Okay. Oh, that is a nice one! But what about that liquid soap I've heard of? No, I don't think I mean lotions. Should I be buying those though?”

The drivel stayed about that interesting. Little wonder it became a drone that began to tune itself out without his permission.

Soon enough, he really stopped paying attention, the weak form of participation that it was. It wasn't as if he did have any opinions about this nonsense and for all the time wasted being dragged around with patronizing explanations and questions every new step, Pride clearly quickly forgot about his involvement. 

The trays held bland, simplistic items, and colorfully labeled and bottled alternatives alike. There were strategies at play behind each design. Efforts by humans to best be memorable and appealing to other humans, not by the merit of the product itself, but through how it was presented. The preferred aesthetics of cultures may change by location and over time, yet the process behind marketing ran on similar rules no matter what.

And wasn't that just the case of anything in the universe. 

They might be hidden, unknown, unrecognizable in their given appearance. They could fool humans into thinking they did not know what they saw. 

Nothing was actually new. 

(How dare he be judged for creativity, when it was the universe which set the limitations he was to create by.)

The fads they'd use for their rubrics shifted every so often. Given time, and he could likely decipher what this county in Amestris was currently favoring: that which looked ‘rich’ or that which struck them as reminiscent of military effectiveness. Pride mentioned reforms, but a country so deeply interwoven with its militaristic idols would not be shaken in a short two decades. Yet shining things worked to draw any creatures’ attention. Patriotism and the desire to feel equal to the soldiers so publicly admired by using the same rough, gritty presented products might not be enough to outweigh glimmers and vibrancy.

Even without the association to a worshiped military, burlap and twine suggested to some humans a better quality for cheaper prices. The fancier and more delicate a presentation, the more fragile and frivolous it was. That was for the rich, and the rich didn't need things to be efficient. The products made instead for the poor were the ones to actually get and then flaunt in households for visitors to see and praise such a clever choice for. The reasonings ultimately came down to how other humans would perceive them. They were predictable creatures in that way.

Had this been Xerxes, and he would bet that the more elegant bottles and boxes would be the current successful fad. Van Hohenheim couldn't afford those desired options until the last few years, and even then, he couldn't spend as much as other alchemists and wasteful idiots of the court. 

In Xerxes, physical appearances- rather than social signaling- held great value. 

He wore the king's clothes better.

The markings for prices seemed to have higher costs on the shinier options, though whatever human did the handwriting for these slates was awful at it. A desire to be counter to the majority and assume compensation of flair over effectiveness would eventually lead to the popular choice being the cheaper one, which would have stores reverse the prices, and the sequence would repeat again.

It was strange to consider he might have to worry about money. Pride’s money, at the least, contributed back to his status so long as he was staying put at that quiet house. The last time that such a thing really had to be factored in for a market visit was back before he even had any stake in the shopping to start with. Xerxes, again. His new body after Xerxes did not require food or drink, he never found it new clothes, and in those early years before Amestris solidified, when he did need to retrieve supplies rather than sending someone else to do it, he would simply transmute gold for the task. It wasn’t as if there was a society of alchemists that had three laws that included a ban on that, at the time. He hadn’t made that culture yet. Its rules wouldn’t have applied to him anyway. They were there to limit the amount of interference rogue entities caused on his gameboard. 

In Xerxes, when he was carried around by his blood kin on his trips out, it was the human who had to worry about using his owner’s money and planning ahead to bring enough for everything on the lists he was sent to retrieve. Because, somehow, it wouldn’t be that lazy, absent master’s fault despite the list belonging to him, mattering to him, and carrying no relevance to the human property known as a slave that would be responsible for its contents ever being delivered back. 

Van Hohenheim’s safety was paramount so long as his safety directly depended on the man. 

And Hohenheim took him along out of a belief that he would prefer to see the world from his hands rather than sitting on a stand in the dust- which was very much not enough but he’d thought of the situation with more leniency four hundred years ago and had seen it as the rather dumb human’s tendency to view the Homunculus as a peer. That put the debt back on him, and he would never repay it if the human paid in flesh for a lack of money. 

It wasn’t just strange to have to think about having currency or not. It was strange to be thinking so much about a dead land and long past time. Xerxes? Really?

It just really was the only memorable example he had as a frame of reference for the shops of Eqtied here. 

(Van wasn't even supposed to bring him when he went out, half the time. No. More than half. Van wasn't supposed to take him out of that fool alchemist’s single room to see the thrilling sight of a different room most of the time, let alone leave the building.)

Pride dragged his attention up from sloppy labels with a hand tugging his arm. He flaunted a bag with a bright grin, like it mattered. “That’s one stop done! There’s more clothes options across the street. Mr. Rasari recommended…”

Another boutique, as opposed to options next door or even the few scattered shelves here, and so on. Whatever the human manager here said really didn’t mean anything right now. Pride used to prefer silence unless speaking was absolutely necessary. His cover of a child talked often, of course, in that senseless way enough human adults thought was endearing to make it advantageous to utilize. Once again, he thought it better to act like the latter out here rather than the former. For now, his father would leave it up to him. He was currently out of his element and Pride had more experience going unnoticed by the creatures in their herds around them. He would acquiesce to his creation’s lead.

It didn’t mean he paid any attention to the rambling.

This next stop was indeed only a minute’s walk across the mostly empty street. It consisted of one room as well, in yet another cramped, long structure. But this store felt larger since its walls were not as easy to see. Too many shelves and hanging racks cluttered at eye level. Signs in Amestrian were planted higher so that customers could see that one section was declared for one gender and another for another. Despite how little that sort of thing applied to him (he went with what he did because he was brought into consciousness by Van’s blood and he took Van’s body and there was no reason not to take Van’s gender, then), really, Pride brought him over to the “men's” side of the shop without delay. He didn’t even ramble about whether he should, or what he expected his creator to want. Being in Amestris in a human disguise for so long must have left him assuming the same easy jumps that they did: based on previous experience with his father’s appearance, gender was clear. Fashions, however, would swap up what sex was allowed to wear which types of robes, and so it was foolish that Pride so mindlessly went along with limiting what choices he would be given. 

Much of what was offered looked like more of what his first creation would wear. Starchy, scratchy, uncomfortable things. Really. Who made these? At least Xerxes prioritized being lightweight and loose enough that air could get in. 

Seeming to remember how successful he’d been with the likes of slacks before, Pride dragged him to any alternative being sold. 

“Greed and Lust are the only ones who really know how to dress like a human,” the homunculus told him, unprompted, while he dug through lumps of thick looking fabric stacked upon one display table. “Not that they still don’t draw attention, granted. Lust always would. Greed does because he wants to. He was a bit less conspicuous after you remade him but he’s still collecting sunglasses and running around with weird vests. He’s going to draw even more attention in Xing like that- that’s probably what he wants, though.”

Really, since when did Pride care about Greed? Why was he the one that he had the most information about?

“We won’t find anything like that here,” he went on. “They’re not popular up here the way they were in the south a few decades ago.”

He caught the lump when his son threw it over. Its texture was scratchy on his palms, though not in that almost silky, artificial way that the slacks were. 

“Here, tell me what you think about that,” Pride said. He stood, waiting. 

It was a shirt, not pants, although it was hardly easy to determine that until it was unfolded from itself and he realized he was holding a sleeve and part of the trunk. The material was thick enough that it nearly felt squishy under his grip. When he rotated it, the shirt hung down in all its very limited glory. There was nothing to it aside from the seams where threads were tighter. Otherwise, the color was one base dark blue, no metal adornments were pointlessly embedded in it, and its sleeves almost appeared baggy enough to be airy. 

With the fabric as thick as it was, that last thought was doubtful. Still, better that than the shirts Pride had offered him before. 

He didn’t care much more than that. It was no robe, it was far darker than the ‘clothes’ he’d always worn before, and it was too dense. 

Pride waited for something he didn’t receive, before he covered for his expectant disappointment. “Sweats are what Gluttony prefers so far. He’s never really had to deal with real clothes before, so they’ve been an easy place to start.”

These were ‘sweats’, then. He grunted. At the acknowledgment, Pride brightened again. 

“What do you think? Here, you don’t have to decide yet. There’s more to look for. Just hold onto that- or I can? There’s a few other ideas I had.”

And off he was led to some new, far-from-thrilling shelf. 

“These are for running and exercise,” Pride showed more colorful lumps off without response. “Some of them are tight, and then some go over those, to stay warm. I got sweats for everyone except Lust and Greed, and I got some of these, because I figured Gluttony and Sloth would be most used to something like this. Sloth only uses these. So he might prefer them, but he also doesn’t change unless he’s told to, so that might just be him being too lazy to bother trying the rest of the wardrobe I bought him.” 

It was a little amusing that this was the second time Pride had talked about Sloth, and the second time he’d done it to complain. Normally, he would tell his homunculi to stop getting into spats together. It didn’t serve him for them to fight. It was all so very pointlessly human of them and that made him disappointed in them all. 

As Sloth’s main handler, it came as no surprise that Pride couldn’t stand him. The latter thought himself, effortlessly, their father’s best weapon, and thought Sloth to be the worst of them all because he wouldn’t do anything without being told to. Mutual distaste though there may be between Pride and Envy, the former acknowledged how eager to please their father the shapeshifter was. 

He was brought out from that thought when something new was dumped on top of the shirt he already had sprawled over one arm. Pride leaned down to retrieve something else and add it to what his father was carrying. “They would be pretty different from robes, but here, try this too.”

By ‘try’, it became evident that the other homunculus expected him to take everything the two of them carried into a small, cold stall to change repeatedly in front of yet another vanity device. The mirrors- one on the door, another on the wall- were large enough to show a whole body at once. Humans. Tsk. It took a needless amount of contorting to avoid seeing the glass.

Despite all the time Pride had them waste by going to many of the clothing categories in the mens section, the only purchases were multiple sets of the same sweats (the pants were far better than Pride’s, and while the shirts were suffocating, they weren’t tight and the lack of air meant better warmth), a ‘bathrobe’ (the most reasonable and comfortable of all the clothes here and yet one Pride said couldn’t be worn in public), some pair of boots that were at least a little more loose and less solid than the shoes were, some proper sandals (he was told the weather wouldn't agree with them, information noted, already known, and promptly ignored), and a variety of undergarments and socks that he had no input in getting, and left up to Pride. 

Despite having retrieved all they came for, supposedly, the trip in the human town did not end there. Pride decided to run more ‘errands’. He left their bags with him to hold. He set them on the sidewalk that he was told to wait on after a minute. While this body came lithe enough from the start, he was used to a philosopher’s stone’s power. Just as his feet and legs were facing a fair deal of discomfort by now, so too would his arms if he kept holding them. Besides, he’d made sure that they were balanced so nothing spilled out to get dirtier. 

The third errand wasn’t even a real one. When Pride returned, it was with another bag with the pointed edges of boxes threatening to tear through. 

“I’ve got us lunch,” the other homunculus explained, holding his fragile prize up. The only smile came from him. Really, he shouldn’t be expecting more than that. 

Keeping a flat expression didn’t appear to shake Pride at all, though. Maybe he didn’t even pay attention to it. 

So long as Pride was happy, self-centered brat.

“It shouldn’t get too cold on our way back. There’s some tables we could use too that are a little more private, nearer to the parking space. I was thinking we’d go to the house first, though.”

There was a short pause, like he was waiting to see if his father was ‘thinking’ anything else. 

“I'd rather we not be in public for long,” Pride justified, before throwing on his exaggerated false cheer. “But we're already here, and this way I don't have to make anything!”

And it was fake. The immaturity, the activity, this play at being some bright eyed young human. 

It was to maintain security while in a settlement like this. It was just a matter of habit when in private, now, after a few years alone amidst no one but humans while at the weakest the eldest of the seven ever was. 

He thought of alkahestry and claims made through distraction. 

Pride, hating death or seeing harm- hah! It should've been laughable for how worthless a sentiment was when coming from such a bloodstained creature.

Chapter Text

Broken Thoughts

Baths, he found, were nearly preferable to showers except for the matter of washing out this hair. The dirt fouled up the pooled water and he did not understand how the point of this was to clean up if it inevitably involved laying in the same grime stripped off the constantly-decaying human body.

They involved less stuttering from the plumbing, and the roar of the pipes only occurred during the pre-bathing stage. A relief from the noise made them both less of an effective distraction and also less of a headache. Being submerged was a change of pace from the air and different fabrics. When the water was actually warm, it felt downright pleasant rather than the burning of a shower. So there were advantages to weigh and still he couldn’t say they did successfully beat the alternative as preferable. 

But the escape from noise a bath provided meant that he heard the bang from up here. With a human shell and its human ears, this actually meant it surprised him. Had the shower been running and he may have missed it, but, granted, he was unsure of even that. It had been a loud noise.

Had it sounded like a product of alchemy? It was so brief and human brains couldn’t contain perfect memory recall, frustratingly enough. He couldn’t confidently remember the timbre and type of what he heard. If he had to guess- and apparently he did these days-, he did not think it was an attack of any common form of alchemy. It wasn’t an explosion set off and why would any human be downstairs sending weapon-shaped stones through the air that collided with a solid impact instead of crushing through and shattering against the target? 

He thought about options while he lay, uncomfortably tall and bent about to fit in the elongated bowl, in grimy skin-water with his head kept over the lip so his hair was laying out along the dry (or drier) edge of the tub.

The hair was rinsed enough. He could brush it while it was damp, later. What felt more interesting was slipping the robe on while still wet (uncomfortable and unfortunate, but ultimately unimportant) and going to see what was being so noisy. 

It wasn’t on the first floor of the structure. But its doors were open, and there was a trail of markings on the ground across the room from them to the often-shut bedroom Pride stayed locked away in. 

It required walking off the porch and around the house towards where the road was closest before he could reach the rumbling automobile spitting steam and exhaust into the brisk morning air. 

A travel case sat in the dirt. Pride had another up by his shoulders, as if he needed to leverage and pinch it against the car itself just to move it into the trunk. 

The sound was the vehicle’s engine starting. He recalled how bad of a fit it made a few weeks prior when he was brought to the nearby human village. 

No alchemy, then. He could have stayed in the bath where the world was at least warm.

He hung around to watch.

Pride’s container should have had deceptive strength. The damage done on the day of his ascension his death his despair must have been very critical. The shell itself showed no outward suggestion of compromised integrity. It was the stone that mattered, though. It was the stone that could mostly be considered Pride himself, with or without some human skin sitting over it. 

He ought to face no struggle lifting something of that size, unless he was intentionally restraining himself. Of that, there were two possible reasons: putting on an act for watching humans, or actively suppressing the natural bolstering his shadows provided to ensure they were stored safely for another purpose. Normally, even the usual patience and restraint of his eldest wouldn’t have needed the latter, because he could restore himself easily. Having shadows cut off didn’t equate to an animal having a limb cut off, losing blood from the spot and losing the ability to use it. Pride’s natural appearance was nebulous. That was ‘normally’. Had he not replenished his stone at all yet?

He’d mentioned being monitored very closely by the new government composed of their enemies. It was possible that for most of those years, he had no chance at all to try to help his stone along. Yet he had enough time away from those ‘agents’ to enact what he could only guess (until the brat showed him the work) was a close parallel to human transmutation (to create human bodies, yet pull on the beings of entities which were not human souls). It was very likely there had been chances to replenish his stone, even with those easier-to-create incomplete formulations.

Instead, he was fine struggling under the weight of something his shadows could move effortlessly. 

(There was a part of him that wanted to have Pride sit while he investigated this unplanned change to the container he’d designed; even if not through alchemy, he was the homunculus’s designer, creator, and would find much with just a critical eye and a little prodding.) 

An ugly clump of smoke spewed out of the car with another shake. It returned to its more peaceful rumbling deceptively, as if it would not repeat itself soon. It stank. 

What a graceless thing.

“Why do you need this?” He pointed lazily at the automobile even though the gesture was not being stared at. 

Pride didn’t act surprised to hear him at all. His senses were still good, depleted stone or not. The eyes of his container didn’t need to land on him in order to tell he was approaching. 

(Pride, like his creator himself, had many eyes in many places.)

The other homunculus leaned back on the side of the rumbling death-trap as if he needed to catch his breath. He didn’t. 

“For driving, mostly,” he said a second later. 

How sarcastic. What an ugly behavior to display. It did not belong to his respectful character. 

He would have expected that his position as Pride’s Father would have been the baseline for receiving that loyalty and admiration, first and foremost, over the power he did or did not hold at a given moment. 

His homunculi really did fail to be useful or loyal. When it was he who was weakened under the light of a recently-returned sun, Greed refused to share the souls that belonged to him originally anyway. When it was he who was diminished in this state, Pride could look down on him, swear off the fact that he was his creator, show him little more than either patronization or else cold disgust that he never would have directed towards his father before, fail. Fail fail fail. They were designed to be loyal and they wasted his souls, died, or ceased to adore him the moment he wasn’t strong anymore. 

In the end, none of them were any better than the first creature he shared his acquired souls with. 

(They left once their debts were even. He died.

They preferred humanity over what he had to offer. 

What absolute idiots.)

Pride hadn’t eaten him, so to some degree, he really should perceive some level of higher treatment directed his way than the same homunculus offered those who were his siblings rather than father. 

His insolent eldest sighed and decided to provide a more genuine answer, too late. “I can't just travel around Amestris through tunnels that have been filled up,” he said (oblivious to how it was news to his creator- the circle, gone. 200 years of digging, gone. Worthless, worthless humans, Van Hohenheim for telling them, finding it, worthless!). “Besides, it's useful to have in case I need to go anywhere with people.”

In actuality, his question was far more simple than it was perceived. He wasn’t referring to the tunnels, despite the efficiency that they provided for Pride to travel. It was more a matter of how automobiles were on the more rare side of human property the last he’d checked. In almost two decades, how much did that change? Granted, Pride’s last human cover family was that of their country’s supposed leader and they were undoubtedly wealthy enough. Or they had been. If the tunnels were exposed enough for the humans to go around filling them, then perhaps their own government officials were exposed too as the selfish fools they were and their leader was known now to be a planted puppet.

“Amestris primarily used rails,” he pointed out. “Is that no longer the case?”

The defensive air faded. Pride settled from where he was leaning against the vehicle’s shuddering side, his container’s expression baldly thoughtful instead. 

“Hm. Most people ride the trains still, I would say. But there's quite a few more cars around. More people are able to afford the older ones as newer models come out.”

“Afford? Where were you able to secure the currency in your state?” he asked. When the government was actually just theirs, it was easy to pull money from whatever Amestrian bank was nearest for their purposes. He didn’t have a large hand in that. It was all rather below him. But his homunculi would freely move or remove money as needed to incite unrest or sway new fools into serving them. 

As the eldest and the one best fit for surveillance and shadow work, the homunculus standing before him was experienced in securing currency. Seeing as his container was mutated, its stone a messy mark behind his hair, the flaking damage last seen on it sealed, yet signs of his shadows within seemingly just as trapped and nonexistent…well, it was easier for nebulous darkness to slip in and out of small spots than an adult-sized human golem. 

“State Alchemists have a questionable salary system and I don't mind draining the military banks to give out checks.” Pride looked inordinately pleased at his comment for a second. The expression was a bit more in his character. So of course the new lie would come cover it up quickly afterwards. “But actually, I didn't buy this. It’s mother’s car, but she stopped driving years ago. She never liked to, even before the problems with her eyes started.”

‘Mother’- The human his Wrath took to better display himself as a man that the country admired, he assumed. He never paid her much mind. Her image did its job, and placement in the capital made it even easier to put Pride directly at the heart of things to watch Central. 

She wasn’t Pride’s mother. Pride didn’t have one. He wasn’t a human. He lacked human blood and human needs and the only human taint in him was their sin of arrogance. 

As a homunculus, Pride didn’t have a meaningless placement in such a foolish human family.  That wasn’t-

(why did you create

have them call

you

Could it be you actually wanted)

It wasn’t worth talking about right now. 

(Van thought himself so smart and was an idiot as always. That still stood.)

“I actually really love the railways,” Pride said. It wasn’t asked for. “If not for- Well, I need the car for this trip. They are more versatile.”

Not as versatile as just carrying the container through shadows underground. If the tunnels fit Sloth, they would fit the new height that container had with ease. 

“I’ve got to visit mother. So I’ll be gone a little while,” the other homunculus explained. 

‘Mother’, again, as if such a concept applied to someone who knew better-

“For how long?” he asked.

On the one hand, being alone in an isolated area might be too reminiscent of that crushing, stretching emptiness he’d escaped. 

Rejection wasn’t new. Receiving it from Pride was not even impressive. Let it sting his arrogance, but Pride did not amount to a fraction of what it was to be rejected by god itself. 

Another view to consider, however, was that he would be free to really explore his situation. He did nothing but go through motions under Pride’s eyes. Even if his eldest was acting loyal, there were still barriers to testing himself and risking displaying a newfound weakness to another who might then either leap upon it, teeth ready, or be disillusioned. The latter already occurred with Pride to some degree and he did not even get to find out what it was that caused this. Alone, there was no reason to maintain tight control over perceptions. 

And, frankly, he wanted his first creation gone. Between the patronizing, the infantilizing, and the rare, strange moments of hostility, Pride was not playing his part as a very reliable child. 

The homunculus in question acted respectful and answered quickly here, at the least.

“I’m not sure. I think a week.” Barely any time at all, then. “I've made sure there is enough in the pantry for two, if you eat the perishables first.”

Yes, of course, food, all that drivel. Pride was so incessant about meals and the like. 

He’d probably try to lead him into the kitchen to directly point out every single thing he’d bought for this occasion, like he’d thought his father needed a tour to understand what a bathroom was or how to use a bed. 

That would be annoying. He would rather redirect away from that unwanted and unnecessary touring.

He frowned. “And I will sit still doing nothing.”

Pride gave an apologetic grimace-smile and shrugged. It was very unlike him. If he'd needed to pass as an older child, then teenager, and now young adult, then perhaps he altered his body language best to match those ‘peers’. It was first a matter of survival and next a process of becoming as unnoticeable as a shadow, which gave him many advantages over the humans he was living amidst. 

That rationalized it, but it didn’t mean he appreciated seeing these changes. Irrelevant. He was not going to be caught up on something so minor.  

“Leave me your work on our transmutations,” he said instead. “A week is enough time for me to identify the mistakes that found me instead.”

It was a fine offer. Pride would want the error identified. He hated not knowing, as much as his father did. A trade of closure and knowledge in exchange for the secrecy and how well such a thing could fuel an ego, to be aware of a partial discovery no others were: it was equivalent enough. 

Or it would have been, if ego was not a primary function of his pride given form.

That arrogance shaped in flesh matched his frown. “...I'm sorry, but I would rather be here to look them over with you if you do.”

So that remained a useless battle.

Up to seven days alone without something of substance to start dissecting. It wasn't worth fighting the point, clearly, but of all the times for Pride to deny him this, it was just additionally annoying timing now.

It was…

Frustrating. Irritating. 

He’d nearly say that it made him angry, but he knew he’d stripped too many of the baser vices that caused anger. 

Pride stopped leaning on something uncomfortable and walked close enough to reach out and grab, if his father wished to. He glared, acting, again, as if his container was taller than the flesh flask he’d trapped his creator in.

(He called it an accident, unintentional, but he would give up nothing that might let the better of the two rectify the situation, and so the platitude fell short. It left instead the sense that Pride wanted him rotting helplessly inside this cage while he watched. Did feeling powerful make it worth it? Did joining the other traitors make up for how much he lowered himself by finding purpose in base, human views of superiority? Humans could not reach god, could not hope to understand those deeper truths which would break them just by perceiving, so they found power instead in making other creatures helpless tools or pets, to threaten and preen and loom over.)

(It was pathetic. It proved them to be weaker than ever.)

Though the other did not actually grab at him, there was something threatening in his proximity.

“It is enough to have to leave you here,” Pride said, voice low- calm, characteristic, no passion to inspire danger, only the promise such would arrive if it proved more logical to kill than stand back. Characteristic. Pride’s voice, for once, not whatever incarnation of ‘Selim’ the human child he was at a given moment in a given planted family. “I don’t think you understand yet.”

Understand what ? Ego or not, it was never in question that the creator was greater than the whole of his creations combined in the realm of knowledge. Nothing living on the planet compared to him in that regard. 

“We lost. The next solar eclipse is not until long after your body will be dead.” Pride shook his head meaninglessly, stepping away. “But I still can't shake the thought that you would use alchemy for the exact same plans.”

That was his holdout?

And- what would be so wrong with wanting that again? With wanting to be free? Unshackled, unrestrained by god, who bound him in that place with an unflinching smile? Who was always so high out of reach when his soul cried out, who called him insufficient for the crime of not believing in himself enough- ksh. No. 

If becoming god did not work despite how well his plans suggested it would, then he would change those formulations. Then again, it only failed because of the reversals set in place by that damn ungrateful slave he should never have helped in the first place.

Pride had no right to question him in any case. It wasn't his place. He was created to be a piece of a greater picture, glorious for its whole and not a singular component. 

The eclipse was here and gone. 

Priorities, for now, were discovering how he had been found amidst the congested universe, tied to a human container, and what was necessary to surpass such a state. Pride was being foolish to worry about an eclipse. Those wouldn't matter until his creator was safely an immortal again.

Pride, at last, was gone.

And he wasted no time in becoming productive.

On that first day, he inspected the house. The kitchen was a drab place hiding no secrets. It was stocked enough to have some materials for transmutations, though hardly everything a foolish alchemist would try human transmutation with. Outside of those bags, many of its drawers were empty and the room as a whole appeared no more promising than it did every day he was dragged into it. It held little aesthetic value. He didn’t care for aesthetics at all (a lair was a lair) so that was a given, really.

He supposed he could be glad that the green was not an arsenite. It lacked the coloration and someone with as much experience and knowledge as he could tease apart a composition for the analysis stage of alchemy with relative ease. Even humans could, after all, with their short lifespans and arrogance. 

The downstairs bedroom held far more promise. Unfortunately, Pride was true to his rather traitorous sentiment expressed outside. He took anything related to alchemy or his alkahestry variation with him, it appeared. That was the simplest explanation. Hiding such boxes or pages out in the dirt somewhere was too much work for too little certainty. If Pride didn’t want his hands on them, then they were near Pride’s side, not left unobserved. 

It was disappointing. Little was left in the room and none of it was particularly thrilling. Some clothes remained. The bed was made tightly and all of its covers and pillows were present, so they’d not been taken to make that automobile slightly more comfortable to sit in for however many hours of driving the homunculus planned to sit through. Since Pride remained in his actual, proper container, it likely didn’t bother him. He wasn’t trapped inside true flesh, blood and bone that bruised from so simple an action as sitting. 

Why his blood kin of a time long gone was so upset to no longer be stuck in a body that pathetic, he would never know. 

(And as a being of knowledge, he hardly said that lightly.)

The cellar’s door was locked, originally, likely just because Pride kept it so for weeks and forgot about it. But he had options there. If alchemy itself failed to give him an entrance, the variety of trinkets bought in Eqtied could be put to use. Hair pins may be enough, should the lock be simple. 

The open space of the lounge, or whatever humans wanted to call it in a given decade, held a few bookshelves and drawers that were mostly as empty as much of the house. Mostly. He gathered from them inkwells, pens, papers, and trivial items that could act as the base to transmutations without being noticed as a loss should the results need to be tossed. As pedantic as Pride was, he still wasn't likely to have an inventory of every little thing in an unimportant building. His focus tended towards grander goals.

The only room upstairs had no mysteries for him. So he put off retrieving the pins until he'd finished scouring this space for anything useful.

He couldn’t find chalk. Either it was cleared out by previous tenants when they left, or those former occupants weren’t alchemists. If blocks were left behind, it would have certainly been more convenient for him. Instead, he had to open the woodstove to see if the prior owners cleared it too before abandoning the dwelling. 

It certainly wasn't piled high with coals and ash. In some spots, he could see scrape marks on the metal floor itself. But it wasn't empty and it was scraped to the bone only in ‘some spots’. He was able to brush through the dust and pick out lumps of charcoal left behind. 

The gray stained his fingers after. Ash powder puffed up with each brush and had already risen up from the air moved by the stove door opening to start with. In culmination, it led the body he occupied to a few peculiar sensations that turned into very annoying fits of sneezing. 

The actions weren't conscious. He was unable to prohibit them. They swept him along, ignoring his efforts and mind; he was helpless to the natural reactions of the human container and it-

(was a little too much like the thump

thump

pull and push and pull of alchemy ripping through the planet’s landscape, its life force beating, millions of souls contradicting the tempo

the Eye of Truth in the sky, vast, massive, unreachable until his hand-

-pulling skin open, aside, form of choice too small to contain 

thump )

That was enough. It was already frustrating to ride as a passenger, powerless, to simple bodily functions. He would not be powerless to filter his own mind and prevent certain memories from lambasting him at their own whims. Yes , the former reminded him of the contents of the latter and so crescendoed in a harmony of helplessness together. But he would not think of that memory (not the confusion, not the pain, not the rage of being denied what he and he alone finally achieved just because the likes of Van Hohenheim wanted to show off creativity in unexpected counters, not the drool and exhaustion those rebellious eyes watched leak from him, damn them all ). No, he thought not.

He imagined that to lack complete and total control over every aspect of himself, full autonomy, perfection in one hand and freedom in another, was nearly the worst state he could be seen in. It was a narrow margin. Being seen pulled back there would have been worse, if not for the crude observers, then the simple fact he would be back in that state.

While it was not his work of choice- far from it, when he’d set up his circle to operate so well-, the sitting room was the most spacious option to spread out these overly simple, base materials.

It was still a step up from being a Homunculus in a jar who just had to tell others what to do and then watch them fumble easy instructions. At least he didn’t have to deal with the illiteracy of humans while he identified the new limitations of his unexpected impotency. 

It was about time Pride was gone for longer than unexplained night absences. Finally, he could uncover if this was a matter of lacking a stone, lacking a body which had gone through a Gate, or, and he had to consider this worst possibility, lacking a Gate at all. Every bit of his original existence was unprecedented as it was, but his current life was grounded in luck and luck alone. The previous Gate of Truth was his to access, his to use, through the blood that gave him consciousness. Surely, retaining that consciousness was what mattered. Then again, he must consider that said Gate swallowed him whole. Something else was done to rip him out again and how far removed he was, now, he didn’t know.

He didn’t know far more than he was pleased to admit. 

At least he did not suspect that the latter possibility was the most likely. A circle transmutation would confirm it. Once confirmed, the concern could move towards limitations without a stone. 

A simple, easy process.

Hours passed instead of minutes, as he ate those words.

Wasted papers lay on the floor. The sun was setting outside and it was getting difficult for these human eyes to see proper details. Yet another deficiency. Like its hands. Like its single housed soul. He should have quit and moved on to another one of his searches long ago, he knew. He couldn't blame the perfectionist need to stay until it was finished on the new human body. 

Alchemy was both complex and rather simple. It operated on very basic principles. While the accomplishments he’d achieved through alchemy were unseen before in history and intricate, any creature that attempted any act with alchemy would be bound by its laws. He’d taught as much, once, when teaching was something he had to bother with instead of doing. Alchemy remained the same. Whether it was in teaching a slave that could barely write how to analyze carefully and fear rebounds or it was in telling pompous fools how to construct an array they did not even understand but would do because they knew they couldn’t compare to the knowledge of their oracle . The importance of those basic principles was in one’s own safety, so they did not die a stupid death early just because they’d not drawn their array well enough.

And therein lay a problem.

He couldn't draw a perfect circle.

It barely looked like a passable circle, really. It wobbled and slipped and he couldn't seem to make that stop because his hands themselves were jittering. Their muscles held no capacity for grace, still. Dexterity was as much of an issue now as when he’d first tested this body. The more he attempted to put only delicate pressure on what he held, the worse they shook and ruined everything instead.

The first grueling chore taught to prospective students was just drawing a circle. Human children learned it. 

By the point when he was forced to rise just to find a lamp he could bring over, he was aware that he had accomplished nothing. There were cramps in both his hands, despite having traded between them to stave off so human an effect. 

He shouldn’t need a lamp. He shouldn’t need ink and scraps and drawn arrays. He was more than this-

Calm. Patience was something he was well practiced in. 

He had a week or more to spare.

The cellar would have far more space on its cold floor to try with the charcoal, and it would be easier to remove compared to the mess left behind in the sitting room. By morning, he’d given his hands a break and went to work on the lock. 

Since he’d yet to manage an acceptable circle anyway, there was little reason to start with the cellar yet, but at least he was able to see to it that a task was completed acceptably. 

Rather than throwing away the pins he’d ruined the tension of, he put them in the small pile of materials a child could transmute. 

It rained, for the first time here. The thick clouds cast a filter of darkness over daytime. As if the night hadn’t been a reminder enough, now the day itself forced him to acknowledge how inadequate these human eyes were. He had to keep a lamp nearby despite the time. This one wasn’t even from the sitting room itself. He’d found it in the kitchen instead. The fuel in the first was out too quickly to be convenient should the rain remain an issue, as it was unlikely the second would miraculously surpass the former’s half-day running by triple or more. This would limit his time at night, at least, to one of the desks with an electrical lamp, and those were too cramped to be practicing large arrays at. 

If the clouds turned into a true storm and knocked that electricity out, he’d have basically nothing to do in the nights at all. Except sleep, of course, but there were advancements to make during those hours that felt more important than existing as an unconscious body with no control over how it might flop and drool and even speak nonsense. He’d lived hundreds of years already and had sleep been a necessity for them, it would have instead been cut down to such a degree that he would have missed the eclipse. It simply wasn’t efficient to have a biological need over what ought to be a choice, if that. 

To meet other unwanted inconvenient biological new needs, he also had to visit the kitchen to put a stop to the physical pain, and he begrudgingly paused in tedious failures to trudge upstairs and sleep in the late afternoon of that rainy second day.

Body, body. It was once quite the obsession of his to attain one. Being stripped down into nothing again did force into perspective that any autonomy was better than none. For all of this, he switched between the essence of his matter spread out or held in the replicated Xerxian container and back without sentiment or preference for one state over another. It was all him. So what did it matter? Making himself a body like Van’s was a delightful step towards freedom, once. He missed it now just because it was less annoying to maintain, not because of some human attachment. 

They began to smell. They had aches and grew sore and required time to wait for that to leave because will alone wasn’t enough. They felt cold and registered it as a type of pain that he was left to weigh against other priorities- he was in the most comfortable, most acceptable, of the clothes, and he thought the avoidance of seams or the inside texture of those thick sweats rubbing constantly on skin was more important than avoiding the minor discomfort of being ‘cold’. If these were his limits all along, he’d have died under Central even without the interference of enemies! 

And without practice, they could not move their limbs as willed. But this was practice. And if that damn human slave wouldn’t have known what he deserved, wouldn’t have a name or realized he should want one without him managed to become a more than adequate (for a human) alchemist (only as good as the teacher behind them), it was no surprise he would improve.

By the third night, the circles were still not passable. He considered putting the wooden cutting board back into the kitchen and throwing out the leftover pins. Failure was novel, and it was unacceptable personally. 

There was time, later. Constant lack of results was read as a sign to switch tactics instead of brute forcing that which couldn’t be forced. To do so was human. 

As he was better than that, he settled over the short coffee table and began to map out- in terrible, unreadable handwriting but what mattered was just marking factors so he could keep track of them- every possibility behind his own conscious existence. Pride might be capable of slowing this investigation down. But he underestimated his better. The original of the two could analyze the scene where it occurred, the body Pride made for him- presumably a model to assume the rest matched, the pattern of the five others he claimed to have succeeded in reaching from the void, and come across enough to eventually deconstruct and reconstruct this mess into something better. The arrogant, would-be alchemist who was so many centuries behind in experience could thank him begrudgingly. 

Soon, he'd take these thoughts and inspect the cellar more thoroughly to see if he could find anything left behind: the ghostly traces of arrays on the stone, half cleaned away, souls embedded into the ground, anything. 

An ache throughout this form slowed his thoughts but he thought he could still finish within the next few hours and move to that physical inspection. If only he wasn't being slowed down. The ache was heavy in the skull itself. It ruined what otherwise was stimulating, yet this remained the most purpose he worked with. Acceptable, finally. How fortunate.

It was the last bit of optimism he got to have in the whole waste of a week.

He’d fallen asleep downstairs this time. It shouldn’t have made a difference what surface it happened on. Before, it wouldn't have.

Human bodies were so weak.

Unfortunately so. The new, unprompted problems he’d awoken to showcased that.

There was more than the pain of restored blood flow and bruises deep on the bone from laying too long in one position. His head was dizzy without movement to cause such. It squeezed and squeezed. Pressure behind his eyes disturbed any sense of balance and direction before he’d even stood up, which should have been an impossible sentiment and yet here he was, ears and eyes incapable of telling him that he wasn’t spinning about when he knew for a fact he was just on the sofa still. Ears, too. They were muffled. They were itching. He was nauseous when their fluid chambers splashed about upon him trying to sit up.

Worst of all was the chill that seemed to engulf him. It was not preceded by any change in the environment. No gust of air, no loss of a blanket. He became aware of it in one abrupt swoop. 

There'd never been a reason for him to feel underdressed before. There was, obviously, a first time for many things and he could check this minute human experience off the list. 

The clothes he was in felt thin and light and useless because he was freezing. 

There was some warmth in the sofa, originating from his own and resonating back to provide a bit of relief to his icy form. With his head to its upholstery, each exhale served the same purpose. It wasn’t enough. Not nearly. 

Now that he was awake to tell how cold he was, he also got to watch his autonomy stolen away further by shudders that wracked through this body and made it shake against the couch. It was almost as if he could hear it rattling too. He thought better than to trust these ears, especially now. They were at fault for unmoving vertigo and they hurt, sharply, like something was stabbing into each canal. Sharp glass shredded its way from the center between his eyes, crunching against soft orbs as they traveled and lodged behind them both, making them pinch without his control, and up, diverging to join the drilling pain. It wasn’t constant, but the breaths that it occurred in were unpredictable. 

The world spun, his bones shook of their own accord, and pressure converged upon him.

The facts were easy to put together. These were symptoms of common ailments. Whether viral or bacterial in origin, they would wreak havoc on the respiratory system and strain the immune system until it was giving out unpleasant symptoms of its own. Actually, he'd likely reached that point already. It was very cold. The temperature was surreal. It seemed sourced from inside him and inescapable in nature. If this switched into a sweat, then he could confirm a fever. 

This was ludicrous. 

Part of his anger was self directed, because it was so very easy to avoid getting sick with the right behaviors and he'd long judged the humans that grew ill and cried as if they couldn't have prevented it by not sticking filthy hands in their mouths or bothering to wash in general. The rest was at the former sentiment, because why should he have been alert to something that never once was relevant before? He'd never been sick. The ‘leather bag’ (as Van Hohenheim called his own shining mirror image) was incapable of it. There was no reason to use a part of his mental capacity focusing on something irrelevant, especially not when that mental capacity was abruptly limited by Pride’s botched alchemical mess. Yes, he was in a human body. Yes , Pride nagged him about things like feeding it or changing out clothes and sheets (which he'd not even used! …a problem in and of itself when he considered the nights he slept on the bed in an open robe alone in a cold room, hardly helpful for easing strain on the body so that it could devote its efforts into staying acceptably healthy) or bathing, all as reminders that he was in this new container. It still all seemed inconsequential when four hundred and some years were spent without an immune system to be bothered with. 

Pressure against and behind his eyes fought to make even this basic level of thinking dissipate. Damn it!

Oh, but it was so easy to determine where the issue likely began. There was the chance that Pride brought something in when he would come and go. For all his recent inadequacies, he was carefully hygienic. It wouldn't even matter to him- but he did hide among humans often and had done so full time since his creator's death, so to keep up a role of a perfect, precocious child, of course he would go around remembering to wash hands or brush teeth for a fake parent’s adoring approval. Such habits were likely second nature when he was playing human. No, the original homunculus thought, it was far more likely that this came from the town. 

It was simple in hindsight.

This human body was new to existence. He'd not been given any hints about the alchemy and ‘alkahestry’ involved and wanted them now more than ever, if just to see whether or not such forms came hardened and exposed as most human adult equivalents or if it was instead going to start at the immature immune level of some newborn. Strength grew from exposure and Eqtied’s cluttered shops and dirty counters were, for this body, his first exposure to count. How fantastic . Thanks to Pride’s little outing, he'd picked up who knew how many germs and now Pride didn't even have to be here to deal with the annoying consequences.

If Pride had been here, granted, then the last set of days would have involved dull mealtimes, pestering, heavy handed hinting comments about being in the same clothes as the day before, commands to shower, washed laundry rotations, and a variety of other rather mundane tasks a human had to do daily if they were going to be one of the smart ones.

Father wasn't one of the smart ones.

It was almost funny. Except for the rational thoughts that served as a reminder over that drifting consciousness that he wasn't human. It did not matter if he wore a prison of flesh at the moment. He was still himself. 

Outside these thoughts, he tried to push up onto his arms. Doing so instantly stole the warmth that had, thus far, protected his face ever so slightly. Unlike the cushion itself, the air offered no mercy. It hurt. It hurt and he lowered over those arms once again immediately.

This was stupid.

As a being of knowledge, he knew the causes of illnesses from the mundane to the rarest diseases, just as he knew techniques animals could use to try to ward off falling prey to these ailments (and knew he had failed to uphold very many of them personally). Likewise, he could name what cures could exist for a good deal of that long list, what treatments helped them pass faster, and what actions would at the least make their symptoms less noticeable while a sickness lasted. He should…probably get on that. He was absolutely freezing, though. The idea of moving to the kitchen felt unappealing when he'd rather bring all the heat to himself where he was. It would only be worse if he got up from where the cushions of the couch had some of his warmth absorbed enough to return. And considering he hadn't been bothering to eat often, the lightheadedness (as contradicting as that was with the heavy, lolling weight on a fragile neck, the squeezing, dizzying thickness of a headache he simultaneously was experiencing) was only being augmented. If he got up, he would run the risk of tripping around or even falling. The floor would be cold. He couldn't stand this damn cold.

Like an obsession, the temperature was all that he could process well. And he could even tell himself it likely wasn’t even real! The air here was probably close to the consistency it was hours before, or yesterday, and the last few days onward. So his thoughts were trapped by an illusion, not even a real cause for pain.

It did not eliminate this ice. 

The quickest solution was- the room, he thought at first, then reconsidered how vague that was. There was the one upstairs and there was Pride’s empty room down here, closer to reach. Still not close enough. The moment he stood up to move, he'd lose the collected warmth he had gathered in this painful spot. It made it seem like it'd be better to stay right where he was, miserable, to avoid becoming more miserable. 

That was all overdramatic and inaccurate to reality. He knew how fevers could operate. The temperature they told a biological being they were was a lie that was subject to swing from extremes of the pendulum. 

There weren't blankets draped on the furniture in here. The rug wasn't meant to get tugged up like that. It'd need the sofa and chairs moved off it. That wasn't worth it. So there was little choice in the matter. To get a blanket, he had to go to a bedroom.

He was stuck shivering uncontrollably the whole time he made his way up the stairs. There was a very animal urgency, very human, that screamed into being in his skull when he was digging through the lumps of clothes he stuffed into a single drawer. Only when he was actually touching them and thus simple seconds away from the goal itself did these fears decide to act as if it was all too late, the shaking tripled and difficult to hold anything, or he must rush within a split second to grab something warm. Without alchemy, without being himself, he could not rip that useless human facet out. 

Even while shrugging on the new bathrobe to use as an extra coat, the arms doing the work wouldn’t stop shaking. And of course relief didn’t come instantly, that wasn’t how temperature functioned. This needless urgency wailed that it’d come too late, or that waiting a few more minutes to heat up the added clothing was too much to bear. It was ridiculous. 

He tore the spare sheet from the drawer, folded it over, and then draped himself under its added weight like it was a blanket. It threatened to trip him when he walked. He’d rather not feel a need to have it at all. 

The stairs were annoying when his balance was so ruined by the state of his ears, and his head disoriented from congestion. 

What was he supposed to do, though? Nothing at all?

First, damage control. It was too little, too late. Still, he got a cup of water from the kitchen and drank as if he could die- that urgency that came from the body more than mind back, again, to only start reacting once he was doing the damn thing it decided to panic about needing to do. He felt what he only had a frame of reference for as the souls of Amestris wrenching out of his throat and the gate of the heavens itself bloating and fighting to break that short-lived body apart from the inside like a revoltingly huge parasite, and the far more simple pain of hunger the body Pride trapped him in would experience. A stomach ache seemed like an underwhelming word for it. Saying he ‘felt sick’ was even more general and vague. 

It got worse rather than better after he forced bread down. Even buried in a doubled sheet, robe, and clothes below that, crouched on the floor of a corner in the kitchen, the discomfort raged. It wasn’t the best food for a human body that was in a state of infection, but to make anything else, he would have needed to have his arms out from the suffocation of the sheet for too long. It was still cold. 

There. He’d eaten. He was asleep recently enough, so even if it was a reasonable strategy to help limit stress on the body to go sleep some more, he did not require it yet. Hygiene…it would be too much work to get undressed in order to get a new set of clothes on, and the same went for the idea of bathing, even if that water itself could be boiling. A shower required standing balanced and was out of the question. Once the heat was gone, all the water and damp that remained on his body’s surface would turn cruel in the air and he couldn’t dry off and dress fast enough to avoid that fact. 

Any human tonic that would help was hardly out in the open where he knew to find it. This left him to drift back to the sitting room where he’d left a mess. 

The precise point when he fell asleep again on that couch was inaccessible to memory. There was light pouring in (faint and gray from the overcast sky though it might be) from the windows of the house. While he didn’t feel like he was freezing anymore, the rest of the identifiable symptoms only felt worse than before. The flesh of his throat pretended it had dried like clay and now was cracking apart with every breath. The first layer of clothing he was in had stuck to him entirely from sweat, though at the moment, he did not feel hot. It was disgusting. 

All of it was disgusting and inconvenient and mildly unnerving, if he let himself consider that last emotion. With the house as empty as it was and the land outside as difficult to cross in a convenient amount of time without his usual stone or even that car, it was obvious that- should this condition get worse- he would be alone in fighting it off. If it started to kill him-

It wouldn’t. He wasn’t about to die to a simple human ailment. It was not even a disease. 

Besides, being alone was better than being patronized by one of his lessers, witnessed like this, or being subsumed into Pride’s stone while weakened as Gluttony had been. 

But it felt as empty as the white before the Gate. As vast. As oppressive. 

All around, that ominous verdict, that impending dread (the very same he knew awaited boastful human alchemists, yet he was better - he wasn’t boasting, arrogant, not when he’d separated that arrogance from himself entirely). The judgment of that god who rejected him, refused to join with him, yet called him a part of it that it could thus do anything to.

It was too real. 

For all the fog and heavy layer to his thoughts before, they came with total clarity. 

Total, unbearable clarity. 

In a bid to concentrate on anything else, he pulled the tripping hazards along and crossed the floor in this bundle until he reached the cellar door. 

There was a good deal of clear space. Too much so. What was to be an advantage for alchemy practice was now not a canvas to draw an array at all anymore. 

From the doorway, he looked down the short steps to the ground. From that doorway, he looked straight ahead, then up, while the phantom of that Gate inside him tried to force itself out.

He wasn't standing vertically. Concrete floor was just empty stone, a large rectangular construct of empty stone, and it was cracking down the middle, cracking perfectly straight in a line that grew darker as it grew wider, was looming over him. Those blank doors were so dizzyingly large. 

He decided to leave the basement alone.

There was an oddity to the fever. 

Humans- per the usual- told inaccurate stories. They made things sound far more immersive than was truly likely. Some perhaps did see things while they existed in that dazed state. Some might even hear those specters that visited their empty hours. Such dramatic levels of illusions were not easily created by a brain that was just dealing with simple infections. 

All of this mattered very little in the moment. He just still could quarter it off in his mind, analyze it despite the disorientation. 

It was not that he hallucinated sights. He heard nothing. This brain was not sending out false signals about the ears of the body. Any words making their presence obnoxiously known were self contained, internal, and easy to pinpoint as memories. For as limited as the biological container made his being, he'd really have rather the memories that made it be more important than these ones he would choose to discard. 

None of the stereotypical tales of visiting black dogs or monster faces that human consciousness spread around matched this experience. It wasn’t that delusional sightings were talking to him so much as it was the volume of words he remembered hearing before. 

(Words, voices, spoken, like that which didn’t need to move its teeth apart to sound things out and could continue to smile with rows of those identical blocks while dismissing anything he said. Or those that came from human mouths, either very long ago, or disrespectfully recent by an interfering little fool of a man-)

Homunculus, it seemed, was still better than a human even when trapped in the nervous system of one. Their weaknesses of sensation and the mind weren’t shared.

Yet he wasn't normal. Or- as ‘normal’ as this state of existence was. There was a presence to his thoughts. They came and caught on things and were experienced as more vivid than before. Vivid was a good term, though imperfect. Intense. Fascinatingly clear in a way that made it feel like all other thoughts before were false, half-lived, shielded by a grimy wall. These too were imperfect descriptors. It was strange.

He couldn't call it pleasant.

In fact, it very much was not. 

And it was bad enough that he had all the physical failings to deal with. Being drenched in sweat and still feeling ice cold was disgusting. He did not need to add atop that presence of memories so vivid it seemed like he could hear them right behind his skull, mocking. 

The real Van Hohenheim must be feeling insufferably arrogant ever since ruining everything. Rather than paying the price for all he boasted about himself and his humanity, the divine preferred to play with other prey. 

So those very boasts got to repeat, and repeat, and repeat, as loud as they were completely silent, and as unwanted as they were a promise the world hadn’t all disappeared outside the window while he existed alone in limbo forevermore. 

He made it into the bed upstairs and from there did that stagnation encapsulate everything. Light and dark cycled by the window’s view but it was easy to feel as if it wasn’t. Time refused to pass. A day lasted on and on from bed. 

Blankets were bindings rather like all of the arms of the universe entering the air from where their door nestled in his core, wound about the rest of him, squeezed until Greed’s doing made mass irrelevant so long as that carbon could break and be condensed into one- final- 

In the next moment, the sheets were suffocating because they were incredibly hot and needed to be escaped from. In the one after, they might still register as bindings but in a way that hid away the vastness of oppressive eternity outside which wanted to swallow him again and only by crafting a prison for himself- again- was he safe from dissipation. 

(But life in a flask was no life at all- but life back there was no existence at all- )

Of course, blankets were just blankets. They were excessive when he was already wearing baggy, weighty clothes. That was the reason he didn’t bother with them in the nights before. If not for the added vividity of every perception and foolish thought, there would be nothing of note about the experience at all.

It would freeze.

He would cover every inch of this failing body because then the air would be trapped too, and warm, and if so much as a small fraction of the skin was outside instead then that outside air would cause the entire body to shake uncontrollably. 

It wouldn’t be warm enough.

The shuddering wouldn’t let his mind get the chance to think and relax, it was so disruptive.

Then it was comfortable for all of a moment.

No voices came, despite the human storytelling. No hands of hallucinated beings found skin to threaten. The fever caused him to feel like reality was no longer physical, but back to the universe outside of time, where its size and form could crush him into nothing. The world was a compressing thing around him instead of a vast stretching plane to explore. Body or not, he was trapped in one small, tight space. Because of the body, the stuffy air wasn't a mere annoyance, but a stressor, growing more hot and flat with every breath. And it did not matter, because the cold was painful and the way things swam and shadows teased the stupid, easily tricked signals firing in this meat brain only made the alternative worse.

So he thought until the heat was unbearable, urgently so, in a rapid switch of temperatures. The amount of fabrics he'd bound himself in was all too present suddenly. Tangled. Wrapped and tangled and hands fought to get them off, rather than it being a simple action. Off off off off get out get it off. Even though it was ice outside and blank stone doors and moving shadows. 

He took a haggard breath of freezing air when he surfaced and afterwards was able to take in the room. 

There were, of course, no moving shadows. Pride wasn't in this area of the country, after all. He was not there. Van Hohenheim was not there. God was not there because it did not want him, only his despair, it did not accept him, he was just an unimportant tiny speck of dust contributing to its being and why would it come down to earth to look for something so unimportant that ultimately was still a part of the universe and thus it no matter where he was located or if he was being boastful or desperate-? He most certainly did not want that vision here, especially while he was half trapped and couldn't fight or flee. It still left him feeling dull to remember that the fear of that overbearing presence and that terrible smile was unfounded completely. 

It was an empty room, an empty house, an empty world outside it, and he was going to flounder and fail to function alone because he couldn't prevent simple human ailments. 

It was empty-

-going to-

-alone-

It was an empty prison and he was going to die alone.

It didn't matter if this wouldn't be what killed him, or if it happened in a place full of noise and creatures and his own homunculi. No one was here now, nothing would be there then. 

He was going to die alone.

It was an equally half-incoherent, overly-urgent, rabidly deranged mantra to fade in and out of sleep ‘listening’ to, but thinking that apparently didn't make it stop.

On one of the times he dragged himself downstairs for food, he ignored the vertigo, the ice, the weight of a brain in its skull, for as long as it took to retrieve the alchemy tools left in ugly disarray on the floor. There was little care in putting the instruments back where they came from. Being meticulous was not high on the list of priorities when it seemed in every moment that the container one was inhabiting- and reliant on for existence- was going to ache and die abruptly. 

Floors rose, ceilings drifted, he didn’t even bother to look outside. It was already an empty enough location without the illness’s oddly emotional distortions. 

Phantom souls manhandled and brutishly shoved their way down veins. Really, if Van Hohenheim had been teaching them for years in preparation of an internal attack against him, he ought to have imparted some talent to that foolish task force. They really expected to defeat him? Destroy him? Eight souls and one fool, a count of nine altogether, against him on the threshold of the eclipse and of godhood?

It would be appreciated if he stopped thinking about all that. There was no philosopher's stone within him for invading souls to attempt to interfere with. He didn’t need to remember anything his formerly respectable bloodkin said in that arrogant moment that he allowed the fool to think he’d won before he decided to eat his outdated skins and show off how outmatched Hohenheim was in truth. 

(Truth- he hated the word-)

Predictably, it was miserably cold to wash and dress. As a result, the decision to bathe led to simply staying in the water as long as it stayed warm and, admittingly, repeating that process. If he was able to, he would reheat the water easily with a thought. Instead, Pride would be paying human prices for heating bills. In almost two decades, who knew what the mortals had moved to using for currency. They had such an immovable desire to put value to new representatives and only through his influence did Amestris even remember to keep gold as the foundation rather than their meaningless slips of paper. Without his hand, they could very well have established new frivolous comedies they called economies even in such a short amount of time. Humans were tenacious that way. Little wonder he'd never pursued trying to get true sleep. He didn't have the time to. The country needed micromanaging- from his homunculi and pawns, mostly- to stay in line with his vision.

Such folly.

It was far too hot in the water, but it was worse to be held hostage by unreal chills in the air, and besides that, hygiene was helpful to health. It never was important before and it might try to slip his mind again, but he knew all there was to know about humans and their medical concerns or simple efforts to stay healthy, and he had to start playing along with all of that slog in a schedule now. Until this situation was fixed, he must not die in a way a very underdeveloped child of a human wouldn't because it would follow its parents rules to do the cleaning it didn't want to. 

It was easier said than done. Once actually in the bath, he alternated between shivering- so movement outside a huddle was difficult- and being sticky hot- where movement should be done but reaching for soaps or draining and rinsing things felt like too much work when he could just continue to melt there. It broiled his face and that affected the mind, slowed it, everything stuffy and sluggish- another concern he'd never had in the past. 

So when the water was far too hot and he actually got to notice that instead of the lie a brain in a body was trying to tell him, he just kept as much of himself out as possible without getting up entirely. Some parts continued to boil. Others steamed as heat and moisture alike rose in a rush off the skin of arms and feet and head.

Which meant his arms lay on the lips of the tub, visible and bare.

Easy to confirm the sights of.

Easy to deny what the twisting insistence of sickness tried to claim was happening. Those were memories, nothing more. They existed as data stored in his self. Not as emotions, not as visions, and certainly not as replays nearly as physically felt as the real thing.

His face wanted to collapse from how much pressure and heat there was inside and out of the skull.

The threat of dying continued to feel too real, if he let his guard down. It arrived in a wave unpredictably and then for a few moments he was at the mercy of little rational thought and instead a worry he might go unconscious from the fog in his mind, then proceed to drown in the tub water. If it didn't come as urgently and hysterically as it did, the irrational picture might have been funny in how close to impossible it was. He could deny it with multiple arguments based on the size of the container, the position of its limbs, their length, the height of the water, the shape of the tub, and how if he passed out right now in this position, his face wouldn't even reach the liquid. 

It didn't do much to sway the misery of being certain he would be helpless to die because the body would fall unconscious from heat and he was helpless to stop that because he was too weak to get out now, and how much would drowning maybe feel like being compressed and suffocated and nullified by the universe-? he was going back there, he'd die, he'd be back, he'd die alone, so nothing would prevent that thing from shoving him right back into the Gate -

It almost made him wonder if the stereotypical hallucinations of human storytellers would be preferable. A few demon dogs and monstrous faces would be more entertaining than anything. Let that be what came.

Fire burned through his veins if he noticed them too prominently. Those mere eight souls whose names were equally seared in his memory should never have been capable of causing pain, yet the agony of that invasion was unlike anything else. So though he did not see those veins bulge and fill with red, throbbing red, because his vision was fine and his perceptions were hardly dreaming while awake, revulsion still set off far too many other bodily reactions at the thought he would. Vivid, again. He could feel that which he wasn't seeing. 

The arms steaming on the lips of the bathtub showed nothing more. No red. No attack. No violation shoving deep into his source of power and trying to turn blood itself against him. 

A thousand insects crawled under the skin. He did not hear Van saying those eight names in the bathroom now, but he remembered it. There was no philosopher's stone to feel psychosomatic memories of the attack from. He felt some semblance of it anyway.

Soon, there would be no chills, no fever, no delusions. He needed to do all the human things to weather it, and then it would be done. He wasn't going to die first. 

He hated how little he could hear and how the steam seemed to block out awareness to even the bedroom outside let alone the house. It made it seem like dangers were there and he was helpless to detect them. The building could threaten to swallow him and he'd not know until it was happening. Until it split open and the truth was inescapable and (it wouldn't even answer his one question, he still did not know what he was supposed to do all along if not seek full freedom to obtain all knowledge)  

Enough, 

(but it was not currently up to him to say what was enough or not in his own thoughts)

Skin broiled boiled chilled hurt, veins throbbed, everything ached, the memories of Van Hohenheim’s arrogant speeches wouldn't shut up, and if he closed his eyes to relax for one second, the universe may remember that it wanted him trapped and swallow him once more. 

If it would all just

stop

The dramatics

(felt real, not amusingly foolishly made up no matter if that's all they were)

He was found on the downstairs sofa half-asleep, at an indeterminable time because time had stopped having meaning and only seemed to restart when the noise of another creature entered the world again. 

For as disorienting as it was to be alone and feel as if the world, despite its human appearances, was the suffocating ‘place’ beyond the Gate where he was before, and as much as this illusion broke the moment Pride was talking and moving around again, he almost regretted wanting the status quo broken. Every noise was sharp against his skull. His eldest had always been so good at being quiet and unobtrusive. Now, he didn’t respect his father enough to act like he used to. 

“I’m home!” Pride called. 

He dropped his arm off the back of the sofa so it could cover his head. It wasn’t fully an intentional insult on Pride’s part. He’d likely thought his creator was upstairs. That was typically where he stayed, doing nothing, achieving nothing, being nothing. 

“Oh.” Still audible, despite the arm. True human bodies continued to be worth little. “I didn’t see you there. Hello. How was your week?”

Terrible. Far longer than a week. An eternity. Nothing. Stretched on, on, on, with ghosts around him and in him and waiting for him, waiting for him to die and be dragged into the rest of the Truth again. 

“Mine was nice. Mother had me run some errands, but we were mostly able to spend time together. Excuse me, I’ve got to grab my last bag.”

A cold draft replaced the chatting. While the chills and fever seemed to have left (but left him fatigued beyond reason), that was still unwanted. 

Noise returned. Thudding, thumping nonsense, like Pride was dragging one of those trunks up every stair outside instead of carrying it. 

“Why haven’t you made a fire? It’s freezing in here.”

Probably not for the speaker. He wouldn’t be limited by the cold or heat. His container didn’t have the same senses and nerves. He could tell what the air was like, and apply it to known human comfort levels, but unlike the abomination he’d made of his father and family, he wasn’t powerless to shivering pain. 

“I’m sure you-” The voice was nearer, now. Probably by the side of the sofa or even in front of it. The original homunculus wasn’t checking to look yet. “Are you alright?”

Pride’s hands were on him. They pulled the blanket back from his face and pressed into skin against bone, forehead, then neck, then wrist. While he wasn’t cold, he wasn’t warm either and this investigation was (mostly) unwanted.

(It broke that illusion. Made it impossible to consider he was dying or dead. It was not alone-)

“You’re sick. I can try- I should have thought this might- Let’s get you to a bed. Have you been down here this whole time? I’ll build a fire in a moment and bring you water. Here. Come on, let me help you up. Hold on to me.”

How easy that made it sound. It wasn’t as if these arms were weak, pathetic things. 

And if he was going to make a fire, he might as well leave him downstairs where it was actually at. 

The words were groans instead of anything very coherent. 

(Words were something he was able to use quite capably from the moment he was made. Even when powerless to do anything else, he could speak, and it was a power of its own.

The feeling that he’d never failed to use them weakened when he remembered just what a poor state those human fools left him in after ripping all the souls of Amestris out of his new god state. What a disgusting mess they’d turned him into. What disgusting humans. Foolish alchemists. Short-sided, small-minded simpletons who wouldn’t even have been dead after he ascended.)

(And they dragged him low once again, by aiding Pride, by telling him what to do in order to twist and distort his nearly perfect siblings and indirectly, accidentally, himself.)

That reminded him of…

Something. He tried to say it. Pride spoke over the mumbling. 

Of course a person made of arrogance would. Only one voice mattered to such a creature. 

“Take the steps- be careful. Let me help. You must not have been eating much, you’re weak-”

Many thanks, child. 

Through that weakness, the creator became a creature like any others in Pride’s eyes: entertaining at best, and automatically a lower life form. The respect was gone. The deference was gone. He refused to call him Father anymore now that he was brought so far down from godhood.

The formerly mindful creation even forgot to shut the front door all the way, again, Homunculus noted while looking over Pride’s shoulders on the way up the stairs.

It was cracked to let freezing air in. Bags were left on the floor.

He took priority. That much had not changed, at least. Even if he couldn’t approve of the mess left behind. 

Pride wasn’t listening. He wouldn’t.

He just did as he thought best, and pulled covers back, lowered his father down to sit, tried to drag him into place. Those almost-cold hands were everywhere. They checked for a temperature despite the fever being gone, and learned information that was useless compared to what the one who was sick for a few days actually knew already. 

“I’ll have to warn my teachers, too,” Pride rambled. He was back to trying to push him down. But now that someone else was here, he really was in no rush to be trapped in constrictive fabrics to lay around for hours to days. “Of course, we knew you’d be able to catch something, but it is the season for colds even down south. The rest need to be told about that new risk. Not that some will listen, but I hate for them to be back for so little time in such confusing circumstances and have it all get worse with new symptoms- I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be insensitive.”

Shut- up -

And listen instead.

The bedroom where he’d spent the worst of the fever was a reminder. The ‘teachers’ Pride spoke of were another. The way he had been stripped of coherent speech before his death, by certain specific human alchemists: a reminder. 

He found one of Pride’s moving wrists and gripped it as well as these failures of hands could manage to.

“Van Hohenheim,” he forced out. Pride’s hands on him stalled; his face showed confusion. “Where-”

It was more work than it should have been. His throat was sore. His mind worked slowly, terribly slowly.

Gasping breaths made that first sentence attempt a failure. He tried again once he could breathe. “How did you- the brothers- hide this from-” 

Talking took a dramatic amount of effort. He found himself wheezing again instead of finishing.

His eldest had pulled back. His face was shadowed at this distance, and Father could not lift off the bed enough to stand and see it. Was there a faint glint of red in the reflective pupils of those shadowed eyes, or was he imagining what would be familiar? 

“What role- if his sons were involved-” It should have been easy to ask it all, if he did not have to keep breaking these questions up. The Elric brothers had been mentioned before. If they aided this unprecedented alchemy venture, did it mean their father did as well? He would know. He would find out, even if the boys did not. Pride thought he could hide his ‘accident’, but for all that his first creation was very impressive, he would not be a match for someone with as many souls as the ungrateful Van Hohenheim unfortunately had. 

He hated the things he’d thought about while in this room feeling fears amplified and made more vivid by nothing but a simple human illness. The slave played a role in those thoughts. 

Yet hadn’t been mentioned at all since he first came to gasping life in this body. 

It was important he know. He wasn’t fully certain why, yet, but if he was to get anywhere, do anything, taking the stone that should have just been his to start with - or proving the human sentiments and foolish pity wrong -

“He didn't have any involvement,” Pride said. “He’s long dead.”

Dead. An immortal. Dead. It made sense why his name hadn’t been brought up at all. 

If one immortal (and one with the power of a god, at that) died from that fight, there was nothing that improbable about another one who’d wasted who knew how many souls on that reverse transmutation circle running out too.

Yes, nothing improbable. Almost a logical prediction, yet he’d failed to make it.

He sat up with the help of one arm (the other failing to stay flexed), and tried to grab Pride’s wrist once more to pull him down again. 

“Where?” he asked.

“In Re-” Pride stopped, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with how he used that time to move out of reach. “In the Elric’s hometown,” he restarted. “It's not really important right now. You need to lay still.”

Not important? Really?

There were few humans who held any level of relevance to history, and the ungrateful Xerxian alchemist was one of them. Was indeed. So it'd happened, had it? Death of the undying. The final total rejection of an immortality a great majority of humans over all of time would have done anything to receive. 

He met his simple goals from old. Played into the idea of family, created impressive alchemist offspring, died off during their generation like a regular human parent. Congratulations to him, the fool. 

“I don't know very much. Mr. Elric doesn't like to talk about him. I’ve never had many questions for Alphonse.” Pride grimaced, an intentionally human expression to show pity. It was more patronizing than anything else so far. “I never ran into him again. I think he died pretty quickly after we, in essence, did. Here. I'll find out for you, if you follow what I say to recover.”

It didn’t matter how or when the human died. That information was not more strong than any other bribe.

Illness had him fatigued.

He lay back and went still, and did not care what Pride provided so long as it made the annoyances of congestion and exhaustion go away faster. 

He didn’t hear what was said after, either. It was mere, meaningless noise.