For Wiccy: Reckoning

[herongale]

To: wiccat
From: Santa
Request: Hoho and Envy or Greed and Envy.
Rating: PG-13
Title: Reckoning

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

--Rumi

He was placing the finishing traces on the array when he heard his guest behind him.

This was an old place; there had been a house here, once, but it was long gone now. Dust and weeds remained. Dust, weeds, dry air and little mice in the fields. The sky was blue-grey and had about it that kind of gritty, miserable look that a few wisps of clouds and some unshed rain might lend to the air. The sun would set in a few minutes.

A wind lifted the back of Hohenheim’s long coat.

Memories. Dried, dead memories, like grains for the harvest and dust floating off to the heavens. Memories turned to ash and blown away by the years. No matter what grew here, no matter the creatures that thrived in the tall grass, this was a dead land.

“I knew you would come,” he said.

It did not answer.

It was always behind him. It had been behind him for years, following him for years, always one step behind its creator. It was his shadow, or perhaps his conscience.

Yet it had no conscience. No soul.

It was the ticking of the clock. It was the wind blowing against the door at night. It was the footsteps Hohenheim heard when he had just awoken from a nightmare in the wee hours of the morning. He could hear it, then, crouching outside his door. Were he to have risen from his bed and walked outside of his room, he might have tripped over it, might have found himself garroted. It was there, night after night, lurking in the moonlight, in the darkness. He could smell it. He could hear its heartbeats, its breaths. Sometimes it breathed shallowly. Sometimes it panted.

Once, he thought he heard it crying, but he knew that had only been the wind howling in the night.

It could not cry. No creation could accomplish what its master had long ago ceased to do.

They were back at the place where it had all begun.

Beginning to end. The celestial circle. Serpent swallowing its tail. Hohenheim had come here because he was ready to end this. Perhaps it was ready, too.

He looked up from his handiwork, tilting his face upwards so that his glasses fell back up the bridge of his long nose. He reached up and adjusted them, inhaling deeply and regarding the sky as if he expected rain. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and turned.

He was not certain what he had expected to see.

It was just standing there before him, fists clenched, with hell in its eyes.
He had almost thought he would not see an actual creature. Though it had a face it preferred and many other faces besides, he had somehow expected it to be a thing of spirit, a ghost, a trick of the light, a whisper of motion, but there it was: physical, composed of a chemical equation he knew by heart (by heart, by soul), looking rather like a boy with long hair, but nothing like the boy from long before.

“This is the end,” he said.

For a moment, Hohenheim thought it had no reply.

He half-expected it to make a blade of its body and come at him, but it did not.

“Yes,” it agreed, after a moment. “it is.”

It grinned.

“The end for you, old man,” it went on. There was tenseness to the side of its mouth, a strained quality in its high voice. It had not moved, but it did not look altogether composed. Its fists were balled at its sides, its arms trembling, lip pulled back in a feral sneer, brows slanting severely. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve followed you? Do you know how many years it’s been that I’ve been on your trail, going where you’ve gone, sitting, watching, waiting-just waiting-for the right moment to gut you, the perfect way to take you apart?”

“I have some idea,” he told it. This was true.

It glowered. Its eyebrow twitched.

And then it laughed. Such a cruel laugh.

“There were others. So many others! I betcha didn’t know that part, though, right? You don’t know everything. Hell, old man! You don’t know much of anything! I took them apart with these hands-“ It lifted them, as if demonstrating, and its voice took on a low growl. “-human after human, opened up. Shattered. You can put ‘em together, but I can break ‘em down, see what makes them tick. And I did. I did, and I always-“ Laugh. “-always pretended it was you. But it was the never the same. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t get what I wanted. I didn’t get-“

“-satisfaction?” he finished for it. Its expression became ambivalent. He continued. “Killing gave you no joy. Were you hoping that by exacting the screams of others, you might feel something, anything? Were you hoping if you hurt them enough, you might find some conscience in yourself, some lingering humanity? Were you looking for me? Or were you looking for yourself?”

Envy stomped its (his?) foot and took a step forward. “I have no ‘joy’!” It opened its hands, then squeezed its fingers against its palms. Its expression was wild, and the wind tugged at its long dark hair. “You really don’t understand, do you, old man?” Another laugh. “Well. Since I’m about to drench this world in your blood, I suppose it really doesn’t matter if I tell you.”

“I can’t feel joy. I can’t feel anything,” it said. “You put me into this hell, this grey and black and white place. I can see emotions on their faces when I kill them. I can hear their screams, their cries.” Sneer. “Their laughter. Ya know, I hate that laughter. And when you’re awake, you think a lot. You plan a lot. I hate. That’s all I can do. That’s all I can think. Hate. Do you know how it feels, you bastard? Do you know how it feels to look around and see nothing but hate, to watch all those unimportant, trivial humans and know that they feel something else, and to hate them for that, to resent them for seeing something you don’t see?”

“No,” Hohenheim said, “I don’t feel hatred any longer. I don’t feel resentment, either. Grief and remorse burned those away long ago.”

A drop of rain fell.

The wind tossed Envy’s hair around its face.

“My blood-“ There were no tears in Hohenheim’s voice. The well had dried years ago. There was only pain. “-my heart, my soul, my family, the world I came from. My life, such as I knew it. These things I have sacrificed.”

He pressed his lips together, then added,
“What does it to mean to be human, really, if all that a man has loved has fled him? A life without meaning is no life at all. So if it is that you wish the death of this man who does not live, then take as you like.”

“No.”

No?

“No,” Envy repeated. “No. You stupid old man. That’s not enough. That was never enough.”

Envy stepped forward. There was perspiration in the air; a drizzle had begun. It was sunset, a dead sunset, and the sky was smeared with rust. A sliver of silver crescent moon hung like a scythe above. This had been a place of beauty, once-before the fires had come, before the wars, before the plagues that had made the boils burst on the children’s skin. Before the fear, the darkness, the paranoia; before the burnings and before the climate had changed. This was a new world. The land they stood in was haunted by the ghosts of before. It was a alive with death; skeletal trees, a moon like bone, dust and weeds and mice.

Envy crouched and pressed its thumb to the array, tilting its head and regarding it as a child might.

“With an array like this, you brought me into this lousy world, didn’t you? Well, well, well. Guess what? We’re back at the start! Isn’t that just delicious irony?” Its eyes narrowed. It licked its lips. “Getting back to what we were discussing a moment ago-it’s not enough. Peeling your skin from your bones wouldn’t be enough. Cutting your fingers off one by one wouldn’t be enough. Slaughtering that bitch and your fucking brats in front of dear old Daddy’s eyes...just wouldn’t be good enough. So sorry.”
It sighed dramatically. “But then, I suppose my master got to the bitch first.” Its half-lidded eyes regarded Hohenheim. “When she became one of us, she really was beautiful.” It tapped a finger to its lips. “What if I told you I fucked her? Huh?”

He swallowed. Anger. Cool anger. He had to keep that in check. It wanted him to get angry. “Then I would say you were lying,” he replied, smoothly. “Your kind take no pleasure from sex, and you in particular were repulsed by it.”

Envy snarled and slammed its fist into the ground. “What the fuck do you know about me? You left before I was even fully formed. You don’t know shit! I would stick anything hard enough to make it bleed. I like hurting people-especially people you don’t want hurt.”

Why was it just sitting there, talking? Hohenheim had not really anticipated this. He had been prepared for a struggle between alchemist and alchemically created being, but now that it was before him, he was left with the distinct impression that it wanted something from him. He did not know what. Perhaps it wanted him to react. Perhaps it wanted him to sob, to lash out, to throw the first punch so that it might counter. Perhaps it felt he was too guarded as he stood there now.

He didn’t know what it was thinking, but he did know that in as much as it could feel nothing but hate, he could feel little more than the dulled echo of age old weariness. They were two halves of the same whole; the passion and the dispassion, the one who would never grow up versus the one who had grown beyond humanity and was tired of it all. Hohenheim had been a whole person once, before Envy’s creation had taken most of his soul-the part of his soul that hated. The part of his soul that envied. The part of his soul that had gone into its personality.

And he did pity it, having to live with such a burden, but he could do no more than pity it. He could not feel true sympathy for something that was nothing but the embodiment of his own youthful spite. It was a mirror; his hate coming to hate him, while his intellect looked on in dismay.

For a time, Trisha had rekindled that fire of life that had once burned within Hohenheim, but then she had died, and he had died with her, just as he had once died with his son centuries ago, leaving monsters in their wake.
Monsters in the red and the dark, beneath the falling rain.

Envy looked up.

“Why?”

The question.

Three letters, one word; a sentence, a question mark, quotations, and Hohenheim found his breath taken.

“Many answers. None you would like.”

”Why?”

Its face had twisted into a look of harrowing agony.

Rain silvered its cheeks.

Rain ran down its throat, moving when its Adam’s apple bobbed.

“Why not? Why should I have stayed?”

Bared teeth. Pulsing vein. “I didn’t take kindly to being abandoned. I hated it. I-“

“You need hatred. You cannot live without it. Giving you something to hate was its own kind of benevolence.”

“Don’t. Don’t act like you did this for me.”

It shook.

Its whole body shook, and blackness cut through the moonlight as it lowered its head, such that its eyes were hidden, and its hair was a wild mess, a tangle of thorns.

Nine words, two sentences, a plea, a demand, an order, two periods and quotes, and it was trembling with hate and hell. It leaned over heavily, bristling.

Bristling, pure and primeval. There was nothing but rage in those sinews.
Language had failed the world wherein they stood.

There were no words to match Envy’s fury.

It stood up, and Hohenheim knew the time was near.

So it was that he said the final words.

“I am sorry for your suffering. Even so, I would do the same again, without half a thought.”

And those were all the words it took.

For one second, he saw Envy’s face, the reaction as its temper crashed--
And then there was only the wind and the moon and the hair and the dark and the rain.

And the rush, the body in motion; silver of blade-tipped fingers amid the rain, and Hohenheim grimaced and stepped backward and clapped and caught that wrist, that white wrist; cold, wet. He had never touched it before.

(the face and the teeth and the light and the dark and the rain and the blades of the teeth and the blades of the fingers and the spikes of the hair and the moon and the rain and the face)

Envy’s hand plunged into the rotten flesh of Hohenheim’s side.

It would have caught his abdomen right on, had he not turned.

“I thought it would come to this,” Hohenheim said. “Your temper.”

Blood ran down his abdomen.

Blood ran down Envy’s hand.

“You-“ Envy said, only.

Wide eyes. Stricken expression.

It spasmed. Like its temper, it crashed to the ground, taking with it five fingers polished by blood.

Hohenheim winced and doubled over, then caught himself, literally, and felt his own blood on his hand. He regarded it, though he had little interest in the blood, and even less interest in the pain. Physical pain was a worthless notion these days; he couldn’t be bothered with it.

No. His focus had already gone elsewhere. His vision had lowered to regard the creature on the ground before him. Envy. Envy, it had been named, and she must have named it that, truly, Hohenheim thought, for he had never called it anything before he had departed, and yet he had come to know the name by which it was known now because he was perceptive--because he had heard of the homunculi in whispers in distant lands, because he knew what news floated upon the air if one listened, and because he knew the whims of their master.

Here it lay before him: on the ground, in the heart of the array, twitching as its body was caught in a paralytic paroxysm.

Hohenheim pressed his lips together tensely and felt the brush of whiskers.
No, not it. Him. The thing which remained in the stead of the son who had died.

Looking down upon him now, Hohenheim realized that from the moment he had first laid eyes upon Envy’s form, he had been seeking something. An answer. An epiphany. A trace-in hair or teeth or lips or feet-of the child he had lost, the sullen teenager who had withered away on the cusp of adulthood, lost to mercury poisoning from some foolish, experimental error. Once that child had ceased being a child that Hohenheim might dandle upon his lap, his parents had scarcely had the time for him, being as preoccupied as they were with wars and fires and plagues and alchemy and dark things done in dark rooms underground, with the eyes of candles for silent witnesses.

If distancing himself from that child had been what Envy had desired, he had done well. There was nothing of the boy in him.

And yet, the form itself was conspicuously boyish. Odd.

Hohenheim did not know what to say next, but as Envy’s body shook, his eyes begged for an answer. From demanding to begging-though there was still wrath in those eyes. Wrath, confusion. Hurt.

“Long ago,” he began, “I had a son. His name was not Alphonse, nor Edward. He was born with blonde curls, and he looked like the cherubs you see on old paintings.”

Now, bewilderment in purple irises.

Hohenheim patted down his injured body and reached within his coat.
He did not have long.

“At the age of four, when his cheeks still tinged pink and flushed often, and when he still buried his soft head against my chest to cry, that child lost a tooth. He held it curiously in his outstretched palm. He tilted his head and regarded it inquisitively. At the end of the day, not knowing what else to do with his loss, he toddled over to my desk and set it before me. I said thank you to my son.”

Pain, then, but he continued.

“I told him his contribution would prove very useful in my alchemy, and he gave me a gappy grin for his answer.”

He pulled the tiny encasement from his coat and held it up. Envy’s slender pupils thinned further.

“I only said that to make him smile, you see, because what value would a little boy’s tooth have to me? With a simple circle, I could construct a house from dust. Then, the boy died, and I saw something new in all those things which I had always deemed worthless.”

He smiled sadly.

“The irony is that my proclamation eventually came true. The gift my son gave me will indeed prove useful in my alchemy, as it has already by immobilizing you when you struck me.”

Hohenheim opened the case and flicked the baby tooth into the array. It was lost to the windy, rainy night, and it struck the ground soundlessly. He had been right before: this was the end.

Trapped in the array, Envy’s body was a squirming rictus; rain sluiced over his skin. Colourless skin; sharp, shiny teeth, long, long dark hair, streaming wet now, thick, matted, and that pale body was shaking, shaking, shaking with indignation and hate and horror; teeth gnashing, cutting tongue. Blood running down his cheek, jaw, sliding away. Hate. Emotions so intense they were almost incomprehensible. Emotions contorting that entire form as the homunculus arched and screamed and scrabbled with his little claw-like fingernails, digging, digging, digging. Black cloth stretched tight over supple muscles. Boyish, but nothing like before. Nothing from before.

His son.

His stupid, rebellious, evil son, made with his own hands from that sad-eyed boy whom he’d realized he’d loved far too late, and for whom no apology would suffice, and now, there was no apology to give. Like tears, words dried up, faded away over the centuries; they were the ink of the past, and blood was the signature of the future, and this array, now being rained on (but sturdy enough to withstand that) was the here, the now. This was the time to say farewell.

He knelt down.

Arms around the body, around the exposed skin that didn’t prickle with gooseflesh beneath the assault of the elements; arms around that alchemically created limbs, that youthful appearance still in every part of the soaked creature. Hands threading through hair, green and black hair, tangled; more tangles had they gotten themselves into than either of them could sort out in any number of lifetimes, and Hohenheim thought he heard himself laugh, without humour, at the thought.

Wasted time. Wasted lives. Wasted words. Their existences had been long and chilling and impossible, so complex that the average human mind would reject them out of hand as monsters and miracles-for what man might conceive of a rotting soul that had lived on for centuries, until his emotions had shifted and his mind had exceeded reason, or a soulless demon who personified evil itself and who could become a beast or a bird or a beloved friend, identifiable only by its uncaring eyes?

And yet they, the gods and demons, were dying.

In the end, they were nothing more than humans. In the end, they were nothing more than a family who allowed words to go unsaid, who had made mistakes-as all families do-and whose unfathomable might had but allowed them to indulge in their own flaws and evade the truth for longer than any other family since the dawn of civilization.

Behind power, there was avoidance. Behind intellect, there was fear.
Even when a human could challenge the sun and hold it in his hand, as those foolish alchemists did, the light cast the shadow of mortal folly and failing.

The greater one became, the more inventive manners he might dream up for disguising his mistakes.

All that genius gone to finding ways to escape his past. He had been intelligent, but never wise.

Impossibly, Envy smiled.

Sneered, more to the point.

“You’re going down with me, old man,” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “Straight down to hell.”

Not that they, either of them, believed in a hell apart from their own lives.
This was benevolence.

In a certain light, this was liberation.

And somehow, even more impossibly still, Envy managed to wrestle his way upwards, to claw and scratch and bury his hand in the open wound, as though he thought he might be able to seek out the beating heart to wrap his fingers around it. There was a yell, a mad cry of triumph (but it was pained, so pitifully pained, so miserably insane), and laughter, raw laughter scraping Hohenheim’s ears like a knife on a nerve. And under the moonlight, under the slanting rain and wind and in the absence of salvation and redemption and words, Hohenheim held that thing that was and wasn’t his child, his creation, his legacy; Envy’s skin was icy, and at the embrace, he startled and stared and glared and stiffened, grunting and twisting and hissing, rejecting as he had been rejected. And that was fitting. Envy needed a chance to reject. It was the one thing he was owed. It was the single power he deserved to have.

Felled by something tiny, this titan.

The array had specifically been draw incomplete, fashioned such that it would take the raw materials from the one who gave it power. Hohenheim had given a part of his soul to bring the creature into this world, where it had never belonged. He would give his rotting body to send his child out.

Goodbye, he thought of saying, then, but that was trite.

Thunder.

He took a breath, swallowed, and smiled down through foggy glasses at surprised eyes.

Finality was the greatest tonic for disappointment.

He clapped.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I should have named you before I left. I would’ve given you a better one.”

Envy, after all, was the greatest insult to the self.