Sunday, March 26, 2006

Just a quick FMA fic...
I'm loosing my comp, so I"m posting this here till I can get my laptop back online. Sorry, it isn't finished.

The first sensation was that of fire. The searing, all consuming rage of his first breath. His body screamed, broke, twisted and reformed, until he no longer had the strength to feel it. He hadn’t had the strength to begin with.

Then the cold. The blessed, merciful bite that drew itself up to settle into his bones, eating away at the pain until only his shuddering heartbeat filled the silence. The stench of burnt flesh, acrid and vile, filled his nose and mouth until he choked, vomiting up a poisonous red bile that scarred his throat and left him once again gasping for the toxic air.

Nauseating warmth grasped him by the shoulders, rolling him onto his side. He felt his mouth held open, rough fingers clearing the bile from his throat, carefully, gently. The draining of the blood and puss from his malformed ears tickled hotly, and the pounding of his heart retreated into the darkness. Something cool and moist passed over his eyes, and they fell open, the pupils contracting painfully at the dim light of the world around him. Images, out of focus and fading rapidly with his first consciousness; a man, towering even as he leaned over him, spattered in blood that was no longer his…

But it was the first words, whispered in a quiet, dawning horror, that truly created him.


“…this is not my son…”


This is not my son.


Dante found it later, the harsh gurgle of its labored breathing luring her down the steps into her husband’s laboratory. The graph in the center of the floor was smeared where it had managed to drag itself out of the morning sunlight, the bloody trail leading into the shadows cast by a table.

“Hohenheim?” She knocked on the door lightly. It wasn’t like him to leave a live specimen, or any kind of project, out like this. Really, she frowned; it wasn’t like him to leave his laboratory at all.

“Hohenheim, have you seen Edward?” She called. She paused by the desk, smiling at the familiar scrawl of her husband’s research filling the margins of his books. He was infamous for rewriting other scientists work, making additions and corrections for his own private references.

Sighing, Dante turned the cover of the book and brushed the dust off the binding. They had come so far together… It was really just a matter of correcting the mineral ratios and they would be able to forge a true alchemic catalyst. A “philosopher’s” stone, people called it. The foolish ramblings of half mad, washed up alchemists trying to pass of their parlor tricks as “science”… A day dream worth nothing more than dismissal. But they were so close now. Their incomplete archetypes had been such a breakthrough-

Human Transmutation?

Dante’s stomach lurched. Disgusting. She flipped through the pages absently. No one in their right mind volunteered to have their body reduced to its base components, and even if someone was in their wrong mind- human genetics were too complicated to reassemble properly. Human Alchemy was forbidden for the very good reason that it was tantamount to murder.

The escaped chimera made a noise, and Dante resigned herself to the hell of cleaning it up and putting it away somewhere. She had taken to scrubbing the laboratory floors herself; gossip among the servants had taken a nasty turn since Hohenheim had started experimenting with chimeras, and now none of the maids would set foot near either of their studies.

“Come here you.” She cooed softly. Inwardly she cringed at the bloody trail she was following; it looked as though she might have to put the poor thing down. “It’s all right, I won’t hurt you.” Hohenheim maybe. Where was that man? Edward had been pulling her sleeves all yesterday to remind daddy that he’d promised to take him fishing and Dante was damned if Hohenheim was getting out of it.

“There you are.” She crouched down in her skirts and peered under the table, her eyes struggling to make out the shape huddled in the dark. She dug about in her pockets for one of the candies she’d been hoping to bribe Edward out of hiding with. It was stupidity to reach into a dark hole for a chimera one knew nothing about, and there were other candies in a tin in the pantry. “Are you hungry?”

A congested, rasping cry shocked her back onto her heels, and Dante muttered irritably. Stupidity be tossed she didn’t have time for this. She pulled her husband’s overcoat off the chair and tossed it over the squirming lump, dragging it out into the middle of the floor and scooping it awkwardly up into her arms as she stood.


A flash of yellow caught her eye, and she froze. Fighting down the sudden rise of panic in her throat, Dante closed her eyes and forced herself to remember that they had a cat. A yellow tabby.

Edward would be upset of course, he’d been fond of the cat, but perhaps if Dante cleaned it up and patched it back together a bit it would survive. Because it was the cat. Because it had to be the cat. It was the only yellow animal they had around. Because it was an animal…

Because of course it wasn’t one of the servants, none of them were blonde, and of course it wasn’t Hohenheim, because one couldn’t very well perform alchemy on oneself… Though Dante had been almost ready of late to suggest Hohenheim try it…

And of course it was the cat because the only other blonde in the house was…was…

Not again. Oh god, not again. Dante kept her eyes closed and sank down onto the floor, holding the little monster almost still in her sudden vise of a grip. After Edward had been born, Dante had come down with the Mother’s Fear. And the visions had not deigned to keep to her nightmares like they were supposed to. Everything meant only harm to her child, everywhere she saw only her child hurt…dying…

It had taken her almost two years to climb her way out of that pit of a madness; she was not going to let the little matter of a yellow cat cast her back into it!

She opened her eyes, and flipped the bloody coat sleeve away from the writing pile of misshapen organs.

And she laughed.

Because, of course, what she held in her arms was far too big to be a cat.


For days she lay there next to it. Unmoving, unblinking, as still as the death which lay next to her. On the fourth day she wept.

As the night’s chill began to set in he found himself reaching out for that little warmth which was left in her. She didn’t respond, not at first, but when he nosed his way under her arm she brushed her fingers over what was left of his bloody, matted hair and began to speak. Quiet, kind sounding words that belied their very definition and confused him.

“That basterd.” She sing-songed. “He’s left… He’s…gone…” He felt her shift and whined as she sat forward listlessly, like a puppet dragged forward by its strings. She turned and looked down at him It was the first time she had done so since that moment she had known… She smiled at him tenderly, stroking his crushed jaw and murmuring sweetly. “Oh my son… My poor, beautiful Edward…”

But she wasn’t talking to him, he understood, even if she did not.

She wept over him, cursing her husband for leaving him alone in the dark and cradling his head in her hands, sobbing brokenly. She reached for a second fragment of chalk.

“Oh, Edward.” She breathed. “Don’t worry, don’t worry mother is here… Don’t cry, baby, mother will make it better…” The chalk broke in her fingers and she fumbled to find another piece.

He did not cry.


The pain only grew worse with each transmutation. The imperfect stones weren’t enough to complete him. Raped by the fire, left to rot in its sudden absence, until his flesh scabbed over and he had the breath to hiss at her for hurting him like this… And Dante would slip the stone into his mouth and retrace the graphs until her fingers bled.

And each time he would refuse to cry out…Each time he opened his eyes and did not beg her to stop this, he saw her dreams that this time he would be her son, die just a little more. They was she would look at him sometimes, so desperate, almost pleading, begging him to at least pretend; he began to enjoy her heartbreak.

He was learning to work his malformed jaw, and he cursed her, in rasping, garbled oaths; her stupidity, her persistence, her love for her son that blinded her to everything else. Because each time she would hold out another handful of little red pebbles for him to choke down to try and ease the pain anyway, he would take them.

Even though the pain never went away.

Because this time…maybe this time it would work. If only he could tell her to stop, if only he could be whole, if only he could open his eyes, and they would be green, and his body would be whole, and he would remember her, and she would love him….and she would stop…



“Oh my God.” Dante choked.

The creature looked over its body, staring in fascination at the perfectly fashioned hands pressed against the cold floor… It touched the hair falling over its shoulders, glowing in the afternoon sun, and toyed with a strand of the soft spun gold.

Dante crept forward, not daring to breathe, not daring to hope… The boy, her son, lying naked on the floor… He was perfect. Every line, every freckle, the part of his hair, the set of his mouth, the color of his eyes…

But when her son looked up at her… No.

Those were not Edward’s eyes…

“This is right?”

Dante collapsed to her knees as the creature wearing her son’s face rose to


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