Title: Sunlight
Author:
Dreaming of Everything dreams-of-allSeries: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairings: Lust, Jean Havoc, Solaris, Havoc/Solaris(Lust)
Rating/Warnings: Nothing worse than a mentioned kiss.
Summary: Lust took on the persona of Solaris and fell in love with Jean Havoc, who fell in love with the one side of her he knew.
Lust will never tell anybody, but she loves Jean Havoc.
She didn’t lust after him as she has lusted after countless others, didn’t (and didn’t want to) fuck him senseless and then take what she could, nails scrabbling to gain a purchase in whatever the act brought close, the deed itself an exploitation. She was always hungry and never satisfied, all primal need and desperate ache.
He was not like the others. She knew what every other guy, and the occasional girl, wanted from her, and knew that he doubtlessly wanted it too, but he wanted more than that, and pushed that desire aside. That sin.
Because he wasn’t interested in Lust, in sweat and sex and writhing skin and flesh, she became Solaris.
She hadn’t been graced with the ability to change her shape; that was Envy’s domain, and he carried the mental scars to prove it. It was why he hadn’t been assigned the job-the world’s greatest mimic had an abrasive, glass-and-sandpaper personality covering hate, not one of the homunculi but the greatest sin of all, hate of himself, and the world because of that. He could never maintain the façade they needed to coax information out of Jean Havoc.
And so Lust had changed her inner workings, the ones she could control, into Solaris. Demure, shy, gentle, pretty, completely in love. Chaste, virginal, even; everything Lust was not.
She couldn’t change her appearance, but her attitude softened that aspect of her as well. She was called beautiful and sexy and dangerous, and that changed to pretty and attractive and harmless.
So, because Jean Havoc would never have anything to do with Lust, Lust became her own polar opposite.
And when she bumped into Havoc, her own eyes widening in flawless mock surprise and worry, and he played the perfect gentleman, because of course he would, she was just another human, an innocent, and it was easy to draw him into a conversation and things went from there. After all, he was single and desperate for a girlfriend.
He had fallen for Solaris quickly. That was natural; Solaris was a creation designed to be perfect for him. He thought of her as his dream-girl come to life, and that’s what she was.
And after a while, Lust’s contempt of Jean started to fade and her revulsion of Solaris started to change and slowly she began to enjoy the person she became around him.
There was never the promise of sex when they talked, and since Lust’s entire existence revolved around sex, it set her back to square one. And since Solaris was a combination of traits and half-formed ideas, Lusts’ personality began to show through.
And Jean loved it when that happened, and that was worst of all. He would laugh at her mild sarcasm, smile at the occasional slip in her cover, and when they kissed and she let a spark of passion run through it, unsure of what else to do, having never kissed before when it wasn’t an invitation or a preclude to sex, when they kissed and her pretense slipped because this was so startlingly, suddenly different from what she had experienced before, he smiled into the kiss. But he always held back, didn’t deepen it, didn’t try to take it further, didn’t press his advantage, even when she had started it, and it was that that let her keep doing it, and some part of her craved those kisses like she had nothing else.
So Solaris slowly came to be not a disguise but a facet of Lust’s personality, a part of her that was slowly coming to light after being hidden, something she had never had the chance to be before and finally was. And Solaris (Lust) loved Jean Havoc, who loved Solaris (and not Lust, except the little he saw of her,) back.
Lust was in love but felt no remorse about feeding information she got from him to other places, most especially ones that would benefit her and the other sins. It was what she was supposed to be doing, and fucking someone on the side (not that she had ever gone beyond polite kissing with Jean) had never stopped her from doing her job before. And it was what was keeping him alive, which was something she wanted very much, even when she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to be happy, because that would involve her leaving, not because he was unhappy now but because she was not the person he needed. She was not a person at all.
When things were hardest she could tell herself that he only loved an image of a person they had created for that reason, a not-personality with no real soul, and that he deserved it, for being that way, for being so shallow that he was content with someone with no personality and no meaning to her, and it helped sometimes, but sometimes it just made it worse, because she was Solaris and because he loved the glimpses of Lust Solaris let show and because she loved him. Lust hated Jean Havoc most at those moments.
It was a train wreck for both of them, and only she knew it. She knew it would all end in tears, and if not that then in death, at least for Jean. It would take a lot to kill Lust herself. She had known the eventual outcome and she had fallen in love anyways and there’s no going back from that and now there was nothing to do but sit back and enjoy the view until it all ended in flames.
And it did, of course, and Jean didn’t die, but he might as well have.
Lust never saw him again. It would take a long time to recover, if ever. Solaris (Lust) didn’t like to think about what that would do to him. Was doing to him.
Some part of her was glad that it had ended with him thinking she had never loved him and betrayed him than the truth, that she had loved him and still betrayed him. It was easier that way, for both of them.
She knew it would be a long time, if ever, before Solaris was used again.
--End--