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anthropwashere · 4 years

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deadfic: To Build His House

Further deadfic for @goodintentionswipfest, have the abandoned 6k of a giftfic for @phantomrose96 I wrote in 2017 as thanks for

a) for getting me back into FMA b) breaking my heart with all that damn good fic of hers

This was to be a continuation of her fic Giving Tree, which is so completely my jam it isn’t even funny. It will definitely help if you go (re)read that before reading mine.

“Can you give me a house?" ‘"I have no house," said the tree. "The forest is my house, but you may cut off my branches and build a house. Then you will be happy." And so the boy cut off her branches and carried them away to build his house. And the tree was happy.’ - The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein

White. That’s all he sees at first. A white canvas, stretching on in every direction, as pure and unmarred as a freshly fallen snow. His eyes sting. He squints, disoriented and off-kilter; his mind’s a haze he can’t think clearly through. He can’t remember what he’d been doing before—

Wait.

His eyes sting.

“Oh no,” he breathes, and he’s breathing, exhaling out his dismay. His lungs deflate, his vocal chords hum, his throat rasps and his mouth’s as dry as sand. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, swollen and pinched between his teeth. His chapped lips part reluctantly, catching on his teeth, peeling apart like a wound.

He’s in his body again, and it’s all he can do to keep breathing.

[[Welcome back.]]

He hears many voices speaking as one, a crowd perfectly in sync; young and old, masculine and feminine and a childlike singsong spun through. He can hear his brother’s voice loudest of all, speaking confidently, speaking with that ear-to-ear grin he reserves for fights he knows he’s already won. It seems to come from nowhere, or perhaps it’s only that he’s still struggling to see with his own eyes. He can see Edward’s Gate, of course; it’d be hard to miss the towering stone slab suspended on nothing, an intricate design upon the doors that seems both ancient and freshly carved. There are words, he knows, but he— his body, his body, his body— is sitting too far away to make any of them out.

And sitting opposite him is God.

Before East City, before his armor fractured and his blood seal splintered, before he woke up in this white void between two stone slabs face to face with this same thing, he never understood what Edward had meant when he’d mention any of this. It was an accident usually, a slip of the tongue that made Edward go still and look up at him out of the corner of his eye, as if he expected him to remember. He never did, but he’d pressed Edward to explain, once or twice. Edward’s voice always hushed a little, as respectful as he was fearful, as scared of the thing he called Truth as he was angry at it for taking so much from them. Edward always broke off before he ever said much, brushed it aside like it didn’t give him nightmares that he had to be gently shaken out of more nights than not.

After East City, he understands now why Edward calls it Truth instead of God. He doesn’t feel the same need to make a distinction between what’s sitting here and what people think is waiting for them when they die. It doesn’t scare him, like it scares Edward, and it isn’t bravery that makes him think this way. He thinks of God like a gemstone; faceted, blinding and plain in turns. The God sitting opposite him isn’t the one that took his body— or, it is, but it’s only one part of the greater whole. It is all and it is one, and it’s also so much more than that.

God has three of Edward’s limbs now.

“What happened?” He asks. It doesn’t hurt to talk, but his body is out of practice.

[[Don’t you remember? Think carefully.]]

It smiles at him fondly, a suggestion of teeth in an otherwise absent face. It had smiled the first time he’d passed through the Gate too, on that terrible night. He remembers it so clearly now; reaching into the light for the shape of his mother, only to be grabbed by his own hand. God had unraveled him that night, grinned with his stolen face before casting his soul into the twisted, broken thing they’d made. He shudders, the sensation of hot blood pooling in his throat as fresh as when it had happened. He licks his teeth, looking down at his pale, too-thin hands. His long hair tickles his spine and falls into his eyes, obscuring God briefly. His fingernails are too long too, but not as long he’d think they’d be, considering he hasn’t clipped them in years. They look torn, ragged. What does God do with his body when he isn’t in it?

He shakes his head. No, that isn’t what he needs to be thinking about right now. Where had he been before this? What had he been doing?

Resembol. They’d been in Resembol. Brother was recovering from his surgery, only just beginning his rehabilitation. The bandages had only come off last week, and his left shoulder still looked more like raw meat than scar tissue. It would be another month before Granny and Winry could put the protective plating on. His third automail limb, a steel port cupping his scapula, support struts clamped to his ribs, his remaining nerves threaded into a half dozen sockets for the control wiring to connect to.

God tilts Its head, watching him intently. It doesn’t have eyes that he can see, but he can feel Its gaze like a physical weight, cold and alien, like a bird watching a worm wriggling across the dirt. It sits loosely, in a comfortable sprawl. Edward’s arms are in Its lap, and Edward’s leg is curled neatly under It. His face twists, the guilt natural but the feel of muscle and skin reacting to his emotions almost as alien as the thing watching him. Brother should hate him. His weakness the night they tried to bring Mom back cost Edward his right arm, and the left now as well. Brother should want nothing to do with him, should want to leave him in this place to wither.

But Edward, impossibly, doesn’t seem to resent him at all. Edward just smiles at him, even through the pain, trying to reassure him. Sorry about the setback, Al. We’ll get back on track as soon as possible, okay? Like it was Ed’s fault he’d lost— traded— his arm. He hasn’t heard Ed complain once, not once, since they’ve been in Resembol, even with the winter cold and the spring thaw snapping at his old stumps, even with through the worst of the outfitting process, even with—

The spring thaw.

[[Ah, is it coming back to you now?]]

“Yes,” he says automatically. The spring thaw. He remembers now, and how could he have forgotten? That had been the closest Brother has come to being angry with him since they’d returned to Resembol, shouting himself flushed and sweating, demanding that he not go out there. But the thaws and the spring storms are always difficult this high up in the mountain. The river flooded every year, a [unfinished]

Winry doesn’t know what to do.

“It’ll be fine,” Ed says. “I can handle it.”

“Leave it to the search team,” Granny chastises. “They’ll bring him home just fine without any help from you.”

“Al fell in the river. He’s too big to fish out without alchemy, and I can’t do alchemy one-handed.”

Granny’s face hardens. “You’re in no condition to go traipsing around in a storm, Ed.”

“I’m the only one who can save him. There’s no other options—”

“There are plenty of good folk out there happy to help you boys if you’d just give them half a chance, and none of them are recovering from surgery.”

Winry watches Ed’s right hand briefly touch the empty port making up his left shoulder. The soft click of steel against steel is an admission all on its own. He’s only wearing a faded tank top so the new scarring is on full display, raw and pink, licking up his neck and across his collarbone. He’s standing in the doorway to the kitchen, boots on and a frightening calm draped across his shoulders. She keeps expecting him to shout, to crack the wall with his one fist, to tell them both to go to hell as he charges out into the storm and damn the consequences. Ed has always been short-tempered, volatile and furious when the world doesn’t follow his expectations. She’s never been afraid of him before, and there’s no reason to start now… is there?

He’s nodding agreeably to every sharp word Granny snaps at him, and he still insists that he has to go. “You don’t understand,” he says patiently. “If he fell in the river his blood seal in all likelihood has washed away. There’ll just be a suit of armor down in the riverbed.”

“So let the search team find Alphonse’s armor,” Granny says. If anyone’s angry it’s her, glaring up at Ed over her glasses, a screwdriver tightly clenched in one hand. The half-assembled arm on the kitchen table lays forgotten, curls of wire spilled across the pitted wood. Ed’s new left arm. “You’ll only earn yourself a fever if you go out there.”

“I can get over a fever,” he says.

“It’s much too early to put so much strain on your body.”

“You and I both know I can handle it.”

Granny scoffs, throwing down her screwdriver. A few bolts scatter across the floor, but no one makes any move to pick them up. Ed just smiles.

“I’m not asking for a whole arm, Granny. Just enough of one I can clap with.”

Her pipe clicks against her teeth as she purses her mouth, looking like she’s sorely tempted to toss Ed out with nothing but the clothes on his back. Damn the consequences. “Oh? Is that all you’ll be doing? And what about when you do find him? If his seal has washed away, do you intend on cutting off your leg next to bring him back again?”

He shrugs, sheepish. He’s only got the one shoulder, the left port empty and stiff. Funny. Winry can’t find the beauty in the easy motion of his automail. It’s been four months since he came back home with the wrong arm missing, and the absence on his left side still makes her breath catch. “What’s a limb to a life?”

Granny all but snarls at him. “Idiot boy! You’ve only got the one left!” But then the fury spills out of her in a slow, weary sigh. She touches her hand to her temple, eyes falling shut. “How many more times do you intend to do this?”

“I’ll handle it. Granny, please—”

She smacks her hand on the table, rattling metal plating. Winry jumps despite herself, but Ed doesn’t react at all. “Don’t beg,” Granny spits. “It doesn’t suit you.”

Winry is sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, Ed’s new fingers so many unconnected joints scattered between her hands. They’ve been taking his new arm slow, no need to rush order it because his port still needs time to heal. Slow jobs like this they like to share over cups of coffee, Den napping quietly at their feet. Ed’s been antsy, pushing himself too far too soon with his rehabilitation, but none of them had been surprised. He’d done the same thing with the first two limbs, and he’d been out the door and on his way to Central in a year. Still, even Ed’s not crazy enough to start slinging around a new arm on a new port after four months.

Except he is. He’ll always be that crazy, when Alphonse is in danger.

“Is—” She hesitates when both of them look at her, bites her lip until she can bring herself to ask, “Is Alphonse... dead?”

Ed shakes his head, no harsh snap of denial, no insults, no shouts. Just a calm, frightening certainty. “If his seal has been damaged, then his soul will have returned to his body.”

“But— but that’s good, isn’t it?”

For the first time since Mr. Caddeo knocked on the door and told them Alphonse had fallen into the swollen river, Edward’s face betrays some real emotion beyond this eerie, placid confidence. His mouth parts, his shoulder hunches, his eyes scrunch up. For one brief moment he almost looks like he’s about to cry. But it passes, like ripples in a pond, and that gentle smile returns.

“No, it’s not. The place his body’s at—” He chuckles, softly. His right hand is a fist at his side, gears humming protest. “I don’t think you can call it a real place. To be trapped there, I think…. I think you’d have to go crazy just to cope.”

Winry can’t say anything to that. She looks down at the spilled finger joints, the empty casings, the miniscule screws that will hold his fingers together once she’s put them together. Sheets of rain beat against the house. A hard wind rattles the windows. It’s mid-afternoon and the sky outside is black as coal dust, and Ed wants to charge headlong into the storm.

Ed says, “I can’t leave him there. Not for one second more than I have to.”

Granny’s voice is flinty, unwavering. “I can’t condone this.”

“I’m not asking you to. But I’m going to look for him, with or without your help. You can give me an arm, or I’ll go out there with a shovel.”

She sighs again, shaking her head. Winry watches the slump of her narrow shoulders, the weariness weighing down her small body. Granny’s never looked so old as this. “You’re gonna kill yourself if you keep this up, you know.”

“He’s my brother,” Ed says. “He’s all I’ve got left.”

The dummy arm barely qualifies as automail, only just complex enough to still hurt when the nerves are connected. Ed grinds his teeth and goes rigid, but doesn’t make a sound. It’s a skeletal thing, cobbled together out of old parts with no external plating to speak of, clusters of wiring carefully pinned away from the joints. It’s only real use is to help Ed adjust to the feel of using a prosthetic, a stepping stone to the arm she hasn’t finished building yet. It doesn’t have much in the way of fine motor control, and lacks pressure plating in the fingertips or palm. Weights can be attached to it to accustom the port to the eventual feel of the real thing. It’s controls are rudimentary at best; the elbow bends fine, but the wrist and shoulders don’t have much range of motion and the fingers tend to react as one.

It’s not meant to be a stand-in for real automail, just simple exercises. But Ed needs an arm; the dummy will have to do.

Winry walks him through the basic exercises mechanically, feeling like an outsider watching herself talk. “Don’t do anything crazy, okay? The dummy’s not built for your usual stunts. When you find him, you have to let the others do the heavy lifting, okay?”

“I know. Thanks.” He stands up, adjusting to the weight. Even stripped down to bare essentials, it is still heavy. He’s worked up to having it on a few hours at a time each day, but that still left his stump aching, even if he never said it out loud. He rolls the shoulder carefully, the leather support harness across his bare chest creaking.

Granny watches him as he struggles into his tank top again, eyes slitted. “Two hours, Ed. Not a minute more.”

“Right,” he says, walking over to where his red coat is hung up by the front door. He regards it for a few seconds, then gingerly raises both hands to clap. There’s a flash of blue light, and when Winry can see again the coat is hanging differently than before. He takes it down with his right hand and tuts.

“Sloppy,” he mutters, but starts to put it on anyway. Winry quickly steps toward him to help, expecting him to snap at her to quit hovering, almost disappointed when he doesn’t. Once the coat’s on she can see what he did to it. The left sleeve is gone, the fabric added to the rest of the coat so that it hangs more like a half-cape to protect the dummy arm. He lets her do up the top three buttons and smiles at her wordlessly.

This is a bad idea. No stopping it now, though.

“Winry,” Granny says, “Go with him, will you? Try and keep him from doing something stupid.”

“Right.”

It’s a long walk into town proper. By the time they get there Ed’s white-faced and breathing shallowly, and only nods when Winry offers to run into the general store. Someone should be there who will know where along the river Al fell in.

She finds Mr. Ragsdale just outside, a gangly middle-aged man who always smells like sheep no matter how much of Mrs. Karlson’s fancy soaps he uses. He sobers when she catches his attention, the other man he was talking to trotting off into the storm. He crouches slightly to speak without shouting over the hard rattle and patter of rain on the general store’s wooden porch.

“There’s some dozen or so folk out there trying to find a trace of him,” he tells her. “That armor of his must’ve fallen to pieces with how rough the current’s gotten. There’s no telling how far down he’s all gone.”

It’s Resembool’s worst-kept secret, what Ed and Al did. Only Winry and Granny know the full details— and Winry never saw whatever it was they made in their basement, only knows the ashen horror that painted new lines in Granny’s face that never left— but there was no way to hide the truth in such a close-knit village. Al stomping around in the armor, Ed missing two limbs— three now, it’s three now, and soon maybe another, oh Al, please be alive, please—

She takes a shaky breath, paws rain from her eyes, keeps pace with Mr. Ragsdale’s longer strides.

The only alchemists in Resembool are Ed and Al, and before that their dad, wherever he’d gone off to. No one has the knowledge to look at their crippled bodies and think taboo, but everyone’s heard horror stories about alchemy experiments gone bad. Rebounds, destroying buildings and shredding people to pieces. No one’s ever asked Winry what the boys tried to do; maybe no one wants to know.

As for Ed’s left arm, he’s stuck to the official story Mr. Mustang had spun about a car accident in East City. Everyone in town had shook their heads and tutted, said it was such a shame, what bad luck the Elric brothers have, to have been through so much so young.

Yeah. Bad luck.

Mr. Ragsdale hesitates when he sees Ed, leaning against an unlit house and shaking. He doesn’t look surprised to see Ed, just resigned. “Ho, Ed. Good to see you on your feet.”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Any sign of Al?”

Six months after signing off on Edward Elric’s convalescent leave, Colonel Mustang receives a phone call from Resembol.

“Fullmetal,” he says once the operator patches the call through, and watches the head of every other person in the office swivel in his direction. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“Yeah, well, I figured I owed you a status report.”

His voice is raspy, worn, perhaps lacking some of its usual ire, but he sounds healthy. He doesn’t sound like someone halfway through exhaustive and painful rehabilitation. Mustang huffs. The idiot owes him a whole lot more than a phone call for not court martialing him into a lifelong imprisonment. “Oh? Good news, I hope.”

Edward chuckles. “Afraid not. I ran into a minor complication with my rehabilitation. I don’t think it’s any big deal, but I’m not dumb enough to try and tell a couple of lifelong gearheads how to do their job.”

“What happened?”

“Ah, I couldn’t tell ya for sure. Automail surgery is complex stuff. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it. I mean, the first two ports went on more or less okay, so you think the third one would too, right? Show’s what I know, though.”

“It isn’t serious, is it?”

“Nah, I’ll be just fine. It might take me an extra month to report back though, two tops.”

“Take all the time you need. You’re in the middle of an extensive rehabilitation, after all.”

“Eh, it’s nothing I’m not used to.” His tone is dismissive, but there’s a slight tremor to his voice, a weakness Edward would never admit to. It’s not enough to comment on, but Mustang’s imagination fills in what Edward refuses to say. Torn muscle and broken ribs, infection and fever, leaking stitches and black-edged burns. Any number of things can go wrong with such dangerous surgery. “Still, at this rate I think I’m gonna miss my assessment. I’m not sure what to do about that.”

“It shouldn’t be any trouble, considering your condition.” His mouth twists, the unspoken lie like ash on his tongue. “I’ll submit a waiver on your behalf. You’ll have to worry about it once you’re back on active duty again, but for the time being you can focus on your recovery.”

“That’s suspiciously charitable of you,” Edward says, wary. “I kinda expected you to be hounding me for monthly status reports until I came back.”

Mustang sighs, hides his face in his free hand. The rough fabric of his ignition glove rasps against his eyelids. “...You lost an arm. It would be cruel of me to expect anything more from you.”

“...Right.”

Mustang sighs, dropping his hand. His team is still listening attentively, though they’re at least trying to be discrete about it. “Is there anything else?”

“I… yeah, actually. If you see Alphonse around, you mind letting me know?”

“Alphonse?” He echoes, surprised. “He left?”

Edward makes a noncommittal noise, a grumble that lacks teeth. “I pissed him off, and he decided to do some research on his own. I don’t blame him, ‘cuz I’m wasting valuable time here recuperating, but I’m worried about him.”

“I think a capable alchemist in an eight-foot tall suit of armor can handle a little research—”

“You KNOW what I mean, Colonel!” Edward snarls, and the anger in his voice is—not a surprise, no. Anger is Edward’s knee jerk reaction, or at least an emotion he has the easiest time showing. Mustang had expected a retort, but not one with so much venom. Edward’s breath catches, a sharp inhale hissed through his teeth.

“Fullmetal?”

“...I’m fine.” He almost sounds it too, but that tremor in his voice is stronger than he can stifle. “It’s just…. Al can be as reckless as me when he gets an idea in his head. He’s not invulnerable. I’m his big brother. It’s my job, to make sure he’s okay.”

A job that’s taken both of his arms from him, and Edward made it explicitly clear before he left for Resembol how much more he’s willing to give to keep Alphonse tethered to that armor.

Not for the first time, Mustang’s imagination gets the better of him. He pictures a boy more automail than flesh before his eighteenth birthday, blind and deaf, perhaps mute as well. Stolidly painting the blood seal anew with an unfeeling finger, forced to rely on past experience rather than sight or touch to know he’s done it right. Willing to trade every spare part of himself to bring his brother’s soul back again and again, loss calculated down to the number of ribs he can afford to replace with steel struts. Organs, too. Who even needs two kidneys? Two lungs? Halve the liver, two or three meters of the small intestine. The skin is an organ too, and he’d have plenty to spare on his torso. Fractioning himself away, leaving Alphonse to do the legwork when his piecemeal body can no longer support the metal that’s left of him.

Fullmetal. What a cruel sense of humor the Fuhrer had.

Mustang shudders, hunched behind his broad desk stacked with paperwork that seems so meaningless compared to Edward’s dedication, compared to Edward’s sacrifice. Lieutenant Hawkeye and the others have given up any pretense of busywork, watching him with furrowed brows and grim mouths.

This isn’t sustainable. This isn’t sane.

...But it isn’t his place to say as much. He’s Fullmetal’s superior officer, not his guardian. So long as Fullmetal is physically fit for duty, there’s nothing for it. Suggesting a psychological evaluation, suggesting that something beyond bad luck and an overactive willingness to throw himself into danger to protect others might be behind Fullmetal’s two— and soon to be three— prosthetics, would condemn them both.

“Colonel?”

He’s gone too long without answering. “I understand,” he says, mustering as even a tone as he can. “I’ll keep an eye out for him. In the meantime don’t overdo it, and I expect a status report on your recovery next month.”

“Augh, seriously?”

“It was your idea.”

“Me and my big mouth. Fine, fine, you’ll get your report. Just make sure you let me know first thing if you hear from Alphonse, okay?”

“Of course.”

“All right, thanks. I—” A muffled voice on his end interrupts him, too indistinct to make any words out. “Ah, okay, Granny. Look Colonel, I gotta go.” The line clicks dead before Mustang can reply.

When he hangs up the receiver, the silence in the office is like a physical weight pressed to his chest and bowing his shoulders. All of his subordinates are sat stiffly at their desks, waiting.

Lieutenant Breda is the first to speak.

“How’s the Boss doin’?” He asks, hesitant. Mustang knits his fingers together, rests his hands on desk to steady himself. He’s careful not to rub the fabric too roughly, leery of making any sparks. With his focus a scattered mess now, it would be all too easy to accidentally start a fire.

“More or less as well as can be expected,” he replies. “He called to inform me of a delay to his estimated return date. It seems he’s run into a minor setback with his outfitting.”

Sergeant Fuery leans forward, alarm in his expression. “Did he say what went wrong?”

Mustang can’t help but smile wryly at that. “Does he ever?”

“How long does he expect to be delayed?” Lieutenant Hawkeye asks.

“A month, two at the most.”

Warrant Officer Falman shakes his head, disbelieving. “I can’t believe how tenacious Edward is.”

“You’ve met him, right?” Lieutenant Havoc asks, laughing.

“No, I know. I just meant how incredible it is how quickly he intends to return to active duty after being outfitted with a new automail arm.”

“What d’you mean?” Breda asks.

Falman shifts nervously when he realizes the whole office has their eyes on him. “Ah, well. When I first heard about his automail I was curious, so I did some reading on the topic.” Mustang stifles a smile at that; Falman’s curiosity paired with his near-perfect photographic memory are both excellent qualities in a soldier. He’s saved untold hours of work. “There’s a good reason it’s still pretty rare to see automail in the military, and even then it’s usually people who were outfitted before they joined. The average rehabilitation time for a full arm replacement is two years, and that's for an adult. He's going to be [unfinished]”

Havoc stubs out the butt of his cigarette and draws a new one out of the crumpled packet on his desk. “If he says he can do it in a year, he’ll do it in a year. He’d know best, right? Since he’s already been through this before.”

“And that was an arm and a leg,” Fuery adds. “Not just an arm like it is now.”

“Almost surprised he’s not tryin’ to come back in half the time,” Breda says. “The Boss doesn’t know how to sit down and take it easy though. Guess he must be having a harder time of it than he’d ever let on, huh?”

Mustang hums, picking up his pen again. That’s certainly Fullmetal’s way, to play things close to his chest, to shoulder his burdens so no one else can be bothered by them. It’s a surprising display of maturity, for a boy only 14 years old.

Only 14 years old, and he’s lost— traded away— three of his limbs.

“Colonel?” Hawkeye’s tone is all calm, professional interest. “You’re certain Edward is all right?”

Of course. She was there, when Fullmetal committed the taboo in the hospital parking lot. She saw his arm peel away in a burst of alchemical light, saw the blood and heard his screams firsthand. In six months she’s never yet said as much to him, but Mustang doesn’t doubt that she blames herself, for not realizing what Fullmetal intended to do to bring Alphonse back again.

“He’ll be causing trouble again in no time,” Mustang replies. That, at least, is a certainty.

Two days later Alphonse arrives at Eastern HQ. Without Fullmetal he isn't allowed access to the base, so the gate guards call Colonel Mustang’s office and Sergeant Fuery offers to sign him in. When they both enter the office there’s a chorus of greetings; despite his intimidating appearance Alphonse has endeared himself to the soldiers with his soft-spoken insight and razor intelligence. Those long debriefings Fullmetal had with the brass gave the younger Elric plenty of opportunities to rub elbows with enlisted and commissioned alike.

Alphonse shuffles by the doorway, embarrassed enough to duck his helmet sheepishly. “Ah, thank you, everyone. It's good to see you all again.”

“It’s been too quiet around here without you and your brother raising hell every couple of weeks!” Havoc says, and he and Breda laugh loudly.

“Oh, yeah. I guess it’s been awhile, hasn’t it?” Alphonse clasps his hands at his waist, looking across the office to meet Mustang’s eyes.

“What brings you to HQ?” Falman asks.

“I’m not staying long. I know it isn’t really right for me to be here without Ed—” His voice catches, his hands wringing. Mustang frowns. Something isn’t right.

“You’ll always be welcome here,” Hawkeye says, reaching out to pat his arm.

“I— thank you, but—” He pulls away, his backplate bumping against the closed door. “—I just wanted to make sure you all knew about Brother, before I left.”

“He called,” Mustang says from his desk, and doesn’t miss the way Alphonse’s pauldrons jerk in surprise. “Just the other day.”

“He did? Really?�� At his nod Alphonse hesitates, helmet spanning the room again. “...I see. Then I owe you all another apology.”

“An apology?” Fuery echoes. “What for?”

His helmet ducks again, his spiked pauldrons hunching as his leather hands fall to his sides. “It’s my fault,” Alphonse whispers, his child’s voice cracking. “It was all my fault. I was stupid, I was careless, if I’d just paid better attention it wouldn’t have happened and Brother wouldn’t— he wouldn’t—”

“Alphonse,” Mustang calls out sharply, and the boy flinches, falling silent. He gets to his feet and closes the distance between them, his subordinates parting uncertainly to let him through. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

The pale lights in Alphonse’s helmet flicker. “...What did he tell you?”

A chill runs through Mustang, a cold dread ghosted down his skin. No. Let him be wrong. Let him be wrong. “Fullmetal said there had been some complication with his port,” he replies slowly. “He informed me that his estimated return date would need to be pushed back two months.”

“Two—!” Alphonse breaks off, his gloves tightly fisted. “Of course he didn’t tell you. That idiot!”

Mustang’s throat is dry, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, his lips reluctant to part. Let him be wrong. “What happened.”

Alphonse’s anger bleeds away as quickly as it had come. His voice is barely more than a whisper; dull, without inflection. “There… there was a flood. The spring thaws are always bad, but this year was worse. Half the village might have gotten washed away if I hadn’t gone to help. It shouldn’t have been any trouble, but I— I lost my footing. It’s hard, sometimes, to tell where I am. To be sure of my footing. I fell into the river, and got pulled under. The last thing I remember is being dragged across the river bottom, before my blood seal…”

He shudders, his overlapping plates clanking. “It was almost two weeks before they found my armor. Brother, he— he didn’t hesitate. He pulled me back again.”

Again.

There is a long, awful silence. The gravity of Alphonse’s hushed account sinking in, horror growing on everyone’s faces. Breda, Havoc, Fuery, Falman, and Hawkeye have all known the Elrics for years. They’ve known the truth behind Fullmetal’s automail and Alphonse’s armor. They’ve all grown to care for the boys, in their own ways. Every one of them had been stricken six months ago, when they’d seen what Fullmetal had done to himself to save Alphonse. And here they’re gathered, hearing it all over again.

“What….” Hawkeye swallows, looking away. “What was taken from him?”

The lights in Alphonse’s helmet have all but gone out. “...His leg. It took his leg.”

13 months after he’d walked out of Mustang’s office with a bandaged stump where his left arm had been, Fullmetal returns.

The worst part is, at first glance Mustang can’t tell anything’s different.

Fullmetal strides in like he owns the place, hands in his pockets, a bored expression like he’s already itching to stride right out again. He’s grown, a little taller and a little filled out. There’s a maturity to his face, a strength to his jaw and a new focus to his eyes. When he turns to shut the office door Mustang catches a glimpse of his braid stretching halfway down his back. Red coat, black jacket and pants, white gloves. It’s almost like nothing’s changed at all.

“Miss me?” Fullmetal asks, grinning [unfinished]

“He's trying to protect you from your own fanaticism!”

(Phone rings, Mustang makes to answer it, Edward smashes it. On his way out pauses to put shoes on [uh…. I think I was going to have Mustang demand Ed to show his feet when he tried to lie about the leg? I honestly don’t remember.]

“Fullmetal! Fix my phone!”

Derisive, “Are you an alchemist or not? Fix it yourself.”)

[super roughed here. Was going to have Ed bail East City pretty quick, try poking around Central for any sign of Al before resigning himself to Izumi’s fury in the hopes he’d find Al there. Imagine his surprise when she knows what the automail means, whoops.]

When Izumi kicks his ass across the yard she notes something is off at once. Edward's too heavy for his size, the thud of his limbs against the dirt too pronounced. She flips him again for good measure, feels how unyielding his arm is in her hands. Assumes two limbs are prosthetic, furious he was foolish enough to be hurt so badly since the last time she saw him. Transmutes a spear and demands he defends himself. Short one-sided fight as Edward doesn't want to spar against her, ends up blocking a slice with one arm, she sweeps his feet out from under him and puts the blade to his neck.

“How shameful! And where's your brother? Is he in as sorry a state as you?”

“I don't know! He ran off six months ago! I was hoping he'd be here.”

“I haven't seen him.”

“Damn it!”

Claps his hands, transmutes a blade and cuts her spear. Of course she knows what that means. “Idiot boy! Do you have even one limb left to call your own!”

On his knees he flinches. “No!”

“...That thing took so much from you?”

He realizes she's done it too. Bows his head, unable to meet her eyes. “No. The first time, it only took one of my legs.”

#fma #fmab #fullmetal alchemist #my writing #deadfic

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whumpiary · 4 years

Text

whumptober 2020 | day 1: let’s hang out sometime

[content warning: discussed past self harm, referenced past abuse, mild dissociation/depersonalisation, intimate whumper]

There's something harrowing — gut-wrenching — about seeing a grown man cry. It's almost painful. Just watching someone with utter poise and dignity let it slide and crash because they don't care anymore who sees them crumble.

It's enough to make the one watching crumble a little, too. Just a little. It doesn't even matter what it is that they're crying over. A loved one in a hospital bed. A job that came to an end too quickly. A lost pet. Some spilled milk.

A boy strung up in the middle of their parlour, hands high above his head, barely standing where he's chained.

Christopher sobs silently, one hand clamped over his mouth as the other grips the edge of the desk he’s leaning against like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. He had started tearing up as soon as he’d started taking away Cass’ clothing: a soft little gasp as he caught sight of the first scar, and then growing grief as more skin was exposed.

The first sob took the man over as the last scrap of clothing fell away and he’s been braced against the desk since. Shoulders softly shaking, eyes squeezed shut. As though he can barely stand to look at the boy in front of him without being overcome.

Cassius is cold. He registers it dimly. Distantly. This body, right now, isn’t his own. His senses seem to know that, relaying everything from a distance. Like hearing the radio from someone else’s car. Like watching the TV in the reflection of a window.

The cuffs around his wrists cut in and his calves are starting to burn and his lungs ache from breathing against stretched out ribs and he also doesn’t care about any of it. He’s back here again. A whole new cycle that he always knew, not so far below the surface. And every scar across his body is a road map of a world that Cass already feels like he never escaped to to begin with.

Christopher brings his hand to Cassius’ cheek and as though on muscle memory, Cass leans into it.

“My darling boy,” the older man whispers. His eyes are tear-filled still, searching Cass’ own desperately, as though for some sort of answer. Cass has none. “My darling, darling boy. What have they done to you?”

Cass holds Christopher’s gaze and for a moment wants to share with the man the entire history of the last few years. Every secret. Every truth. Give them up. Give them over. Undo. But he feels muzzled. Gagged. Like his lips are sewn shut.

There’s nothing to say. There’s everything to tell.

“I’m so sorry, Cassius,” Christopher says. His hand skirts over the scar near his shoulder, the one down his arm, the one at his ribs. Like a fucked up dot to dot. “I’m so sorry. If I had known… My god, darling boy, if I had known…”

Cass nearly laughs at that. He would have what? Bought the company just to win his contract back? Stolen him away? Killed Tucker with his bare hands? Or would he have shaken the man’s hand and given him a bonus? Asked to sit in for the next blood letting?

Christopher starts with the obvious.

“This one,” he says, pads of his fingers tracing the gnarled, raised scar along Cassius’ ribs. “Tell me about this one.”

“Got stabbed,” Cass mumbles. His mouth feels full of cotton wool. “Job went wrong. About a year in. Maybe later. Can't remember. Had to have surgery.”

Christopher sucks in a breath, deep and shuddering, covering his mouth on the exhale as another silent tear slides down his cheek. He brushes his cheek dry again with his knuckles and takes another breath to calm himself, lowering his head. For a moment, his hand sits heavy on Cassius’ hip, as though he needed it to steady himself. Cass rocks back on the balls of his feet just barely and the man’s grip seems to tighten in kind, keeping him still and close.

They stay just like that for a moment until Christopher manages to collect himself, fingers pressing to the bridge of his nose, drying his eyes with a sniff. He drops his hand from his face to trace the scar again, breath stuttering. Cass feels seasick with the the touch. A dragging back of forth over scar-tissue he can’t quite feel properly.

“The scarring is terrible,” Christopher says.

Cass closes his eyes for a moment. If he imagines enough, the cool, dry hands are warm and steady instead. They’re firm and sure instead of claiming and caressing. They’re pulling him back together, stitch by stitch. The memory is such a sacred indulgence, he has to shake his head a little to clear it again.

“Yeah, they... fucked the stitches,” he says, voice croaked. “Had to get it redone.”

Another shaking breath. Another sniff. Cass keeps his eyes lowered. He doesn’t need to see the grief.

“Well that surgeon deserves to be fired.”

They go on like that. Christopher touching each scar, having him name and catalogue them, one after the other.

The thin one over his bottom lip. “Bar fight.”

The short thick one at his collarbone. “Lab test.”

The nick up by his brow. “Beat down.”

The curving long one down his arm. “Don’t remember.”

There are a few like that. More than he’d have expected. The burn on his arm. The glossy skin on his knuckles. The twisted one at his knee. Don’t remember. Don’t remember. Don’t remember.

And Christopher in between, mourning each one. Touching them, pressing his hand to them as though he could will the scars healed with his grief. Christopher has to keeping taking breaks for more tears and sobs. Like over, and over again he’s realising what he’s lost. Of what he once had. What he’ll never have back.

“My God, what have they done to you, darling boy?” He whispers it over and over again and over again. “You were so beautiful. So perfect. What have they done to you? What have they done?”

It takes them a while to retrace every new mark on him since Christopher has seen him last. The man is methodical and thorough. Scrupulous. Cass is almost startled by how many he finds. More than Cass would’ve discovered on his own, he’s sure. By the time they get to the last few, Cass can’t feel his hands.

“I’m so sorry, my love, I know you’re tired,” Christopher says with a kiss to the cheek, a hand cupping his jaw. His eyes are filled with sympathy and apology. As though he isn’t the one who’s doing this. As though this is some necessary procedure instead of his own predilection. “We’re nearly done. Last ones.”

Christopher holds Cassius’ gaze as his hand drifts low, skirting a decent gathering of little scars at his hip, over his thigh. They’re smaller, these ones. Harder to see. Only a shade or so lighter than his skin these days but piece by piece, bit by bit, they stack up, start to look noticeable. Little fine nicks and cross hatches, some raised, some flat, all faded.

“These ones here. The lab again?”

Cass drops his eyes. He stares at them for a beat, stares at what he can see beneath the man’s hand anyway, before looking back to Christopher.

“No,” he says. He feels a thrill to say it. “Me.”

A sharp intake of breath. “Excuse me?”

“I did those ones myself.”

A beat. “I thought we broke you of that little habit.”

And they had. For a while. – You’ll be hurt on my terms or not at all. – But Christopher should’ve known it would be one of the first things to resurface once he was out of reach. Why shouldn’t it be?

Cass smiles at the older man, eyes dead. “If it helps, I thought of you every fucking time.”

Which isn’t true entirely but shit does it feel good to say it.

The slap that flies hard and brutal across his cheek feels good too.

“Don’t you do that to me,” Christopher says, after a moment. His voice is soft and quiet and sad. Shaking with what was maybe a little anger. Funny. It was rare to see Christopher show that card. “I’m hurting badly enough today, I don’t need your cruelty on top of it.”

Cass keeps his head turned, staring at the arm of the leather rancher’s sofa beside him. His cheek burns, hot and tingling with the blood rush, as Christopher’s hand trails up and to his shoulder. As the man steps behind him, both palms pressing at his shoulder blades. At his back.

“And these?” he says. Cass’ eyes shutter closed, breath all at once catching high in his chest. Christopher’s been saving these, he knows. The crosses and lines on his back. One after the other after the other after the other.

Cass can’t answer to these. He can’t say. Can’t bear to. And, by some virtue of generosity, by some kind of twisted, fucked up grace, Christopher doesn’t make him. “He gave these to you?”

It takes him another minute. A long, hard minute of trying to breathe. Christopher allows him the mercy of the hesitation. And then, shakily, he nods his head.

Christopher sucks in a shaky breath as his palm presses to the scarring and Cass can tell he’s crying all over again. The sob shakes down Christopher’s arm, into his hand and hits like a jolt of electricity through Cass’ spine. It feels like it shakes his

“My God. This is cruelty. This is… this is cruelty.”

And Cass could laugh at that. He really could. After everything, everything this man has done. After everything he’s put his head through and his heart through and his body. This is cruelty, is it? Finally, this is cruelty.

Nah, it’s not cruelty. He wants to say. Penance.

He’s glad the words don’t actually make it past his lips.

Christopher’s hand runs across them over and over, again and again, and the feeling is so strange, so tender, so violating that Cass finds himself pressing his face against his arm and screwing his eyes shut, as though to hide. Skin then scar then skin then scar. Numbed then felt. Hot then cold.

Every trace of the crosses feel like he’s being stripped bare. As though with every caress, Christopher is peeling away a layer of numbness, a layer of armour, an exoskeleton. The world is like a burning thing without it all.

Cass hangs his head, arms still stretched up and aching, and he sobs, voice pulling out of him in a broken whisper. “Please stop.”

The plea seems to bring Christopher to the surface of whatever grief laden fascination he’s lost in and the man circles in front of him, hand cupping his cheek, thumb catching the tear that slides down it. Christopher’s tears mirror Cassius’ own as the man presses their foreheads together and Cass is sure they look a lovely picture of grief.

Shared martyrdom. Saint and saviour.

Maybe the man should have crucified him instead.

“I’m so sorry, Cassius,” Christopher whispers again, and Cass cringes and cries and keeps his eyes shut. “If I had known… I promise you, if I had known…”

It’s a mercy beyond measure that the man never finishes the sentence.

#whumptober2020 #no.1 #let's hang out sometime #oc #fic #self harm tw #dissociation tw #referenced abuse tw #cassius #christopher #return to whumper #possessive whumper #intimate whumper #nell does whumptober

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idlecreature · 4 years

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*sidles up to you* hey man, want a Magnus Archives rarepair? I’ve got one right here you can have for free. It’s Mordechai Lukas/Hezekiah Wakely. Here’s my sales pitch:

Mordechai Lukas is only forty years old, but he’s in very poor health. Granted, he’s been on death’s door for several decades, having never fully recovered from the excision of a thyroid tumour - a surgery that scarred his throat significantly, making it hurt to speak. But this isn’t his usual moaning about feeling cold and depressed all the time. This is the doctor listening to the slow gurgle of his heart and telling him “you shouldn’t be alive. your days are numbered”.

(cut for length)

And Mordechai’s honestly fine with dying. A little.... too enthusiastic, even. On his trip to Italy he forwent normal accommodation to break into and sleep in mausoleums, and he might have returned from the continent a little... haunted. He’s designed and redesigned the family mausoleum a dozen times, and he’s had his own funeral planned for years much to the chagrin of his friends. “What flowers should adorn my funerary wreath?” he writes to Jonah Magnus. “Can we please change the subject?” Jonah replies. “And I swear to the one above if you send me a memento mori I am throwing it in the fireplace.”

Mordechai’s fulfilled his life’s requirements -- he’s married into the wealthy mercantile class, fathered children, and spends most of his time either in a graveyard or wandering like a ghost through Moorland house. His wife, Charlotte, really only wanted a man’s name on her letterheads and spends most of her time on a ship somewhere between London and India. She’s only interested in her possessions, her wealth, in ensuring the books are balancing. Her family made their money in opium prospecting and she’s pressuring Mordechai to open the lands surrounding Moorland for coal mining after a few test bores unearthed rich black seams. Mordechai’s essentially like, “over my dead body,” and Charlotte’s like, “so any day now! :))))” and Mordechai’s sole reason for stubbornly clinging to life is to protect his family’s ancestral lands.

Mordechai has to occasionally rub shoulders with Charlotte’s friends in the East India Shipping Company. Among them are the Beale brothers, Daniel and Thomas. They have a younger brother, rich but temperamentally unsuited for their family’s line of work. His name is Nathaniel Beale, and, oh boy, he is a treat. He’s awfully similar to Barnabas Bennett, shy and closeted and yearning. Nathaniel tells Mordechai all about his good friend Hezekiah, who he’s so, so worried about, who makes poor Nathaniel ache with hunger and longing and shame all the same. Finally, some delicious fucking food thinks Mordechai Lukas.

But if this man really is like Barnabas, Mordechai wants to enjoy his demise. So he obtains Hezekiah’s address with a mind to murdering Hezekiah and relishing Nathaniel’s grief and loneliness. It might be Mordechai’s last communion with his god.

And that’s how Mordechai ends up in a quiet countryside graveyard, staring at the man in a dead sleep at the bottom of an open grave.

And hot damn Hezekiah Wakely is a sleeping beauty. Muscular, square, with hands big enough to circle both of Mordechai’s wrists if he were to pin Mordechai down. (And Mordechai would very much like someone to pin him down.) He almost feels sympathy for poor, repressed Nathaniel but nonetheless summons the fog of The Lonely and it swallows Hezekiah whole.

But the crawling fog parts around the sleeping man. There is a certain solidness about him, the weight of someone touched by another power. Mordechai sighs in annoyance but keeps watching Hezekiah. Slipping away once the man blinks awake, stretches his long, tanned limbs.

Mordechai keeps close company with the Beales after that. Nathaniel passes away in January of 1839. Mordechai finds his grave in yet another lonely graveyard and is absolutely delighted that many of Nathaniel’s sparse acquaintances have forgotten him already.

Hezekiah is curled up on the freshly turned earth. “I should hang for it,” Hezekiah says.

“How about a new job?” Mordechai says.

“I’m a murderer,” Hezekiah says.

“Hold my beer,” Mordechai says.

Mordechai convinces Hezekiah to work as Moorland house’s groundskeeper. By the time the pair of them make it back to Kent, Hezekiah knows about The Buried, The Lonely, the whole wretched Lot.

“You have a lovely mausoleum, sir,” Hezekiah says.

“Shame no-one’s christened it yet,” Mordechai replies. (He plans to be the first.)

Time passes.

And Thomas Beale passes away in 1841.

The Magnus Institute opens its London branch in 1841.

Daniel Beale passes away in 1842.

By 1843, the world has forgotten Nathaniel even existed. Except, of course, for Mordechai, who keeps Nathaniel and Hezekiah’s correspondence.

Mordechai’s now spending 90% of his time watching Hezekiah. When one of Mordechai’s many faceless relatives dies, he sits on the steps of the family chapel as Hezekiah digs. He lets Hezekiah sleep in the grave before the burial. He likes how peaceful the man looks, even when the grave dirt falls in his eyes. He even thinks about burying Hezekiah himself, how that would be another kind of embrace.

Hezekiah more often than not sleeps outside, on the moor, and when the weather drives him inside he sleeps fitfully in his room in the cellar.

(Hezekiah sings when it rains, bitten-off, wordless, self-soothing melodies that sound like oncoming earthquakes through the thick walls of Moorland House.)

(Mordechai listens to him sing and tries to harmonize, and, although the knot of scar tissue in his throat makes his voice sound like grinding metal, isn’t that something?)

The next time Mordechai catches Hezekiah dourly shuffling to the basement for a restless night he snags the larger man’s wrist.

“You might sleep better in my bed,” Mordechai says.

“???” Hezekiah says.

“Come to bed with me,” Mordechai repeats.

“!!!!!” Hezekiah says.

And, well, Hezekiah likes the pressure of Mordechai lying on top of him. Hezekiah is warm, and soft, like peat, and if Hezekiah’s hands snake up to circle Mordechai while he sleeps, then what about it? In Mordechai’s world, they can’t be together in any way that matters. It’s just another thing that isolates him from polite society.

"The groundskeeper? The man who smells like a bog?” Charlotte says, but she’s relieved it’s not a mistress who might want to live more ambitiously, that they might have to keep a London townhouse for because Charlotte’s the one who’d be saddled with the fiscal responsibility. She’s already writing monthly cheques to buy the discretion of a certain J. Magnus.

And Charlotte has an idea. “Dear husband :)” she says. “If you don’t let me open a colliery I might expose your little affair and you’ll get thrown in jail and I don’t think you’d last very long, dear, with your poor heart :) and when you die I’ll do it anyway :) so how about it?”

Charlotte never makes empty threats. But at the same time, Mordechai is connected to the lands around Moorland house in a very real way.

He doesn’t really have a choice.

Charlotte opens a mine on Lukas land.

They have their first grandchild, a boy, and Mordechai names him Nathaniel. Hezekiah just smiles at the baby, warmly. (His smiles are so warm.) (Mordechai is spending more and more time at his bedroom window, watching his groundskeeper. Surrounded by bottles of medicine that never make him feel any better.)

“Are you going to die?” Hezekiah says.

“It’s likely,” Mordechai says. For no reason he can name, the prospect of his funeral no longer delights him.

Hezekiah is silent. “I hope the Lord forgives me,” he says, eventually, and a tremor runs through the entire house, and Mordechai hears, far-off in the distance, the desperate peal of a ringing bell.

An accident in the colliery, they call it. A mineshaft cave-in, trapping 26 men and boys 150 feet under the earth, running out of breathable air, scraping at the cold, unforgiving rock until their fingers and lungs bleed. Crushed and choking and feared enough to paint the walls with it. There’s a thin plume of black smoke. (Mordechai can hear them crying and begging.)

The mine closes. There’s a lengthy investigation. It will cost a considerable amount of money to sink another pit. Echoing, cloying silence wraps around the abandoned worksite. Mordechai can leave his bedroom for the first time in months.

He sits on the chapel steps and watches the muscles of Hezekiah’s back work under his sweat-slick blouse. “Do you think...” Mordechai starts.

There’s something in Mordechai’s voice that makes Hezekiah straighten up.

“Do you think, when I die, you might cut a hole in the side of my coffin?” Mordechai says. “So, when you die, if there’s a hole in your coffin, our coffins could. Lie together. And. We might be able to hold hands under the earth.”

It’s the most he’s said at once in decades, and his throat is raw for it.

“I could do that,” Hezekiah says. “When are you going to die?”

Mordechai sighs. “You’ve bought me a little time. Soon.”

“I’ll make you a Coffin,” Hezekiah says, his voice oddly constricted, as if he’s speaking through silt. He drops his shovel and walks off, towards Moorland house.

Later, from his windowsill, Mordechai watches Hezekiah cut down a whitebeam, feels the heft of it in his large hands. He’s too far away to gauge his expression accurately, but he seems to appraise the wood and finds it passable. He hauls it inside.

The mere act of watching has left Mordechai feeling bone-tired, and he sleeps.

And sleeps.

(In between the sleeping, Mordechai finds himself cradled in long arms, sunburned by the late summer sun. The press of a spoon to his lips as he’s fed a soup that tastes like dirt and tannins.)

And sleeps.

(When he chokes a little on fluid-filled lungs, he feels warm hands rubbing his back and the choking eases.)

Moorland house is awfully quiet.

A hand scraping softly on his collarbone shifts Mordechai blearily into consciousness. “It’s done,” Hezekiah says. “Would you like to see it?”

Mordechai nods. His limbs are oddly discombobulated, his heart feels heavy and dragging, and he looks up at Hezekiah. The man scoops him up like he weighs nothing and carries him, bridal-style, down the cold, empty hallway.

The gate to the mausoleum opens on well-oiled hinges. It’s no longer empty; a single coffin now sits in the marbled room. It’s simple - rough, even - the whitebeam a pale, unvarnished yellow. But there’s undeniably a presence to it, an undercurrent that draws you towards it. Hezekiah approaches close enough that Mordechai can run his hand down its flank.

“I’m not an artist,” Hezekiah says. “It’s even a bit simple-looking, in this grand place.”

“It’s perfect,” Mordechai says. “Would it be too morbid for me to give it a christening? Try it on for size?”

“Pot and kettle,” Hezekiah says.

“True,” Mordechai says.

“Mordechai...” Hezekiah shuffles on his feet. “I would like to embrace you. Under the earth. It has to be deep enough that nothing can live there, where it is quiet and cold and the dirt clings like damp to your skin and dark enough that our touch can hide in secret, that’s the place we can be together. I think if I stayed here when you were buried the pressure of the world would be so much more than the pressure of the dirt and I don’t think I could bear it. I would like to hold you, under there, and you would have space from the choke and I would not be alone. I think I would like to do that forever, or, at least, until our bodies are less human than they are water and earth.”

“I would like that too,” Mordechai says. “It’s like a marriage.”

“It’s more than a marriage,” Hezekiah replies.

“Yes,” Mordechai says, and lets his head sink down against Hezekiah’s chest, measures Hezekiah’s strong heartbeat against his own, thready and uneven. It’s so much more than he deserves.

Hezekiah opens the coffin. It makes a comically sharp scraping noise like it’s the door to a vampire’s crypt in an opera, like thousands of paper bats will fly out of it and fill the room.

It is silent, and cold, instead.

Mordechai never gets his funeral.

Most of Mordechai’s papers get passed along to the Magnus Institute.

And two hundred years later, Jonathan Sims reads some letters.

#the magnus archives #mordechai lukas #hezekiah wakely #jonah magnus #m....monsters in love #this was supposed to be a bullet point list and it turned into improv fanfic halfway through #how the Coffin dovetails the Lonely and the Buried.... very interesting #tw terminal illness #tw death #ask to tag #tma blogging

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theasteriae-a · 3 years

Note

scars: how many scars does my muse have? where are they located on my muse’s body? how did they get them? what do they look like? / bash.

all about health / @residualed

Bash has lots of little, and he thinks insignificant, scars, including one that cuts through his right eyebrow (a result of falling out of a tree when he was seven or eight, trying to pick some fruit off the higher branches).

He does, however, have two very noticeable ones on his back.

At the bottom of his spine, there’s a mass of raised tissue, smooth, white, and numb to the touch, which is about the size of his hand (fingers spread). On his third tour of duty, he was heading out into the desert when the vehicle he was travelling in hit an IED. A piece of shrapnel from the truck got lodged in his spine and damaged the nerves in his spinal cord, leaving him temporarily paralysed.

The second scar is much neater. It’s a thin white line that runs from the top of his spine to the bottom, a relic of the surgeries he underwent to repair the damage from the blast. You can see the tip of it poking up above the collars of his t-shirts when his hair’s cut short. The suture marks around the edges have faded by now, but when the scar was fresh, they were visible too.

It's worth noting that Bash is not self-conscious about these scars at all. He's more than happy for people to see and ask him questions about them, and he loves it when his partners kiss him up and down his spine. Ironically, he’s a lot more reluctant to tell people the stories behind the smaller scars, like the one on his eyebrow. Those memories feel like secrets, somehow—maybe because a lot of them come from his childhood, when things were different for him.

#injury / tw #scars / tw #ask to tag #idk #this might be a little squicky but i don't know what tws to use #residualed #( i. message )#( ii. sebastian | hc )

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despairforme · 3 years

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He had almost forgotten which date it was today. That’s how preoccupied he was with OTHER matters in his life. It was a good thing then, that he had set an alarm on his phone to be SURE he didn’t forget. He was startled when it rang, and before he looked at the screen, he really had no idea why it was sounding. The display on his phone said ‘ doc ‘, and then he remembered. Yeah, he was supposed to head to the hospital today for his check-up. Nnoitra went to these check-ups a couple of times each year. He HAD gotten shot in the head after all. Going to the hospital wasn’t something he enjoyed, and he... Had half a mind to ask Grimmjow to come with him, but that would probably be lame, right? He was a grown man and could go by himself. So he did.

The waiting room wasn’t that crowded. An elderly couple was sitting a few seats away, and a bored-looking younger man had just gotten up and followed a nurse. Nnoitra was playing on his phone, invading planets with his leveled up powers. It was calming, because this game was very easy - even HE could play it without losing and getting pissed off. The pictures on the walls were the same as when he was last here. Not-so-great paintings of landscapes. Forests, mostly. Nnoitra hadn’t spent much time in this part of the hospital. Most of his time in hospital had been spent waiting for ( and trying to get to see ) Grimmjow after all. He HAD spent a good few weeks here after he got shot, but it had been in a different department. It was a large hospital, but Nnoitra had remembered which floor to go to since he had been here only six months ago. When he was last here, his doctor ( who had been his primary physician with regards to his gunshot wound ever since it happened ), had told him that he had published an article about his case in a medical journal. Apparently, Nnoitra’s survival of his injury was a big deal. Almost like some sort of miracle.

The reason why Nnoitra disliked hospitals wasn’t because of the times when he had had to stay here. It wasn’t like he was traumatized from getting shot... Not even the amnesia that had followed had been all that bad, in comparison to WAITING FOR GRIMMJOW. That was the sole reason why he didn’t like hospitals. It always reminded him of how he had come here every day, hoping he would get to see his boyfriend, but he had been denied access to him. No wonder, Nnoitra thought to himself. He tapped a finger against the screen to exit the game. He didn’t feel like playing anymore. It wasn’t enough to distract him from his bad memories. Would he have felt better about it if the chair next to him wasn’t empty? If Grimmjow was sitting here with him? He didn’t get time to answer the question, because his name was called next. The nurse pronounced it wrongly - that happened from time to time. Didn’t matter. He got up from the uncomfortable chair and headed to the doctor’s office. It was a white door with a tiny metal plate on it. The plate had printed black letters, spelling out the name of his doctor. Nnoitra didn’t stop to read it, and just entered.

The doctor was not that old. He always seemed enthusiastic, but not in an unprofessional manner. His hair was thinning slightly at the top of his head, making him look older than what his youthful face said. He smiled at Nnoitra when he entered, and soon after they were shaking hands.

❝ Good to see you, Nnoitra! ❞ He said, and it sounded like he meant it. ❝ How are you? ❞ Nnoitra guessed that that article he had written wouldn’t be that amazing if he suddenly dropped dead from the wound that should’ve killed him.

❝ ‘M alright. ❞ Was his answer, his shoulders rolling in an indifferent shrug. Of course the answer was not that he was ‘ alright ‘. His life was FUCKED UP at the moment, but that wasn’t something he could tell his doctor about. He was here for his physical health, not his mental state. In any case, Nnoitra kinda liked how friendly the doctor was with him, and he’d rather not change that by making the man think he was some kind of criminal. His answer drew an understanding smile from the doctor. Nnoitra thought that was the sort of look you give people when you pretend you understand them. At least the doctor understood that Nnoitra didn’t want to talk about it. WELL HE DID WANT TO FUCKING TALK ABOUT IT! Just --- not with a doctor.

❝ And how is your head? I remember last time we talked about the fact that you had been having some headaches? Do you still get them, or? ❞ Nnoitra thought about it, trying to remember the last time his head hurt. He thought it had been a couple of months since the last time... Which was definitely an improvement. The doctor didn’t rush him. He just patiently waited for a reply. Nnoitra shrugged again.

❝ Mah, ‘s been a few months, I think. Don’t think I’ve had a bad one since ‘round Christmas. I get small headaches, but I ain’t no pussy so I don’t even remember ‘em. ❞ He couldn’t say how many of those minor headaches he had had. It would just be a dull pain against his temple, and since he was NOT afraid of pain, he didn’t let it bother him too much. The headaches his doctor was referring to were MUCH worse. It was the kind of headache that you’d imagine you’d get after getting shot in the head.

The doctor asked him some more about his headaches, and Nnoitra answered as best he could. No, he couldn’t say how often he got them. And no, they didn’t impact his daily activities. No, he didn’t think there was any specific trigger for them.

After a few more questions, they got to Nnoitra’s least favorite part, where he was asked to remove his eyepatch so that the doctor could take a look. He asked him kindly, as if Nnoitra was self cautious about it. He was, but not in front of this man. It didn’t matter for shit if this guy thought his face looked like a fucking horror movie or not. It was different with Grimmjow. He didn’t want his boyfriend to be disgusted by his face. Nnoitra removed the eyepatch by opening the two little buttons at the back that kept it together. He pushed his hair away too, because his bangs were always falling on that side of his face. He was sitting down in a chair, and the doctor was standing over him, leaning only slightly ( he was not a very tall man ) to be at the right height to inspect the healed wound. Nnoitra knew perfectly well what it looked like. The eye socket had almost grown shut, leaving only a very roughly scarred dip where the eye would’ve been. The browbone had been crushed by the impact from the bullet, and some fragments had been impossible to reconstruct. So yes, this side of his face was FUCKED UP. That didn’t even count in the older scar beneath his eye, reaching almost down to his cheekbone, where the old infection from when he got stabbed had eaten away at his skin. The doctor was leaning in close, and Nnoitra kept his head at the best angle to let him see. It was pretty strange, having someone stare intensely at a place on his body he never showed to anyone. He didn’t feel awkward about it though. Apart from how UGLY it looked, this scar wasn’t a bad thing. It was just proof that he had survived something most people would not have.

❝ Is it okay if I touch it? ❞

❝ Yeah, ‘s fine. ❞

A fingertip was carefully pressed to the wound. Nnoitra could feel it. ALL these nerves were completely fucked up. Some parts of the scar, he had no feeling in at all, and others were very sensitive. The most sensitive part, surprisingly enough was the exit wound behind his ear. This spot would NEVER fail to give him shivers when he accidentally touched it when putting his hair up or when he showered.

❝ It has healed quite nicely. There is a thick layer of scar tissue here. ❞ ‘ Quite nicely ‘, huh? Mah, at least he didn’t have a HOLE there now. It wasn’t like it had looked all that great before he got shot. With his blind eye just randomly sliding back and forth, making him look all cross-eyed when he wasn’t wearing his eyepatch. Cute, Grimmjow had called it. Nnoitra didn’t say anything to the doctor’s remark, and soon enough, he seemed to be done examining it. Nnoitra kept his eyepatch off. It was incredibly rare that he would be in a room with someone and not wear it, and a doctor was probably the ONLY person who he KNEW it would not be dangerous to show his weak spot to. He imagined that if any of his opponents ever learned what he hid under that eyepatch... They would definitely try to punch him in the eye. He remembered that before he got shot, his bad eye had been incredibly sensitive. One punch there and he was in so much pain he had to throw up one time. Maybe that part had improved, after the gunshot? He wasn’t about to put it to the test though. ❝ I know we talked a little bit about possibly having some reconstructive surgery. Last time that was not something you were interested in. Are you still more comfortable with your eye the way it is, or have you had a change of heart? ❞ Ah, yeah, he remembered this. The doctor thought he should do some plastic-surgery shit to try and ‘ reconstruct ‘ the eye-socket and put a glass eye in there. Nnoitra could not imagine that it was possible for ANY surgeon, no matter how God-like skilled they were to fix this shit. It was bound to look wonky. He had seen some funny programs on TV about women who got their faces absolutely fucked up by plastic surgeons. No FUCKING THANKS. In any case, he had worn his eyepatch for about ten years now. It was a comfortable and he thought he would feel very odd without it.

❝ Nah, I’m good. Ya know I was already blind on that eye when I got shot, so I’ve been wearin’ this eyepatch ‘fer ages. It would feel weird as fuck ‘ta not wear it. ❞ Almost like going out without a shirt or something like that. Just...WEIRD. Nnoitra had the same thing with his bracelets. He had worn them for years ( and actually his bracelets he never, ever took off, unlike his eyepatch which he removed when he showered ). The thought of removing them was almost like removing a part of his body. It was a lame ass comfort thing for him. He really had no problems with his bad eye having to be hid under his eyepatch. The ONLY thing he wished was that he would find... Some sort of way to show Grimmjow his eye. He knew he COULD just show it to him, but he was worried he’d regret it. What if Grimmjow found the sight so disgusting that he would never be able to kiss him again without imagining kissing some sort of zombie? He didn’t want to put that sort of burden on his boyfriend.

They talked some more. There were some more questions for Nnoitra to answer, and then a few memory tests ( which he thought he completed pretty well ). Eventually the doctor checked the eyesight on his left eye, and told him that his vision was excellent. That kinda cheered him up. Wasn’t often anything about him was referred to as ‘ excellent ‘. Nnoitra hadn’t thought he’d feel BETTER after his appointment, simply because of how much he hated hospitals, but when he walked home about an hour after arriving... He WAS feeling better.

He also... Wondered if he should talk to Grimmjow about showing him his eye. OR if that was bad timing. There were other things he should talk to him about instead. Nnoitra didn’t know whether he would bring the subject up to Grimmjow, but at least he was considering it, and that was the first step. At least that’s what he liked to believe.

#[ i hardly have anything to write on here SO ]#[ i thought it was a good opportunity to treat myself to a drabble ]#[ been wanting to write about this for AGES ]#[ n finally did! ]#[ i love........ writing nnoitra........ ]#[ it's simply The Best tm ]#ᵈᵉˢᵖᵃᶤʳ ;; ic.#ᵇᵘʳᶰ 'ᵈᵃ ᶜᶤᵗʸ ;; verse.#ˢᵗᵒʳʸᵗᶤᵐᵉ ;; drabble.#eye horror //#hospital //#longpost //

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linkspooky · 5 years

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day two butterfly effect -

butterfly envy shigaraki ponders how different he could have been and longs to transform as lies on Ujiko’s surgical table / for @villainmonth / edit by @inumaqi / fic by @linkspooky

The border between life and death was as thin as paper. He knew better than anyone else. Life’s fragility, like those centimeters thick wings. Life was destroyed with a single touch.

His hands were never meant to hold onto anything. That was why Shigaraki wondered again and again why someone like him was born with hands. Did his mother know when he was in the womb, what exactly she was giving birth to? When she expected to cradle a human baby in her arms, what did she feel when she saw him instead? Humans can only feel affection for other humans. Perhaps all the members of that household were aware of it before he was. That was why they silenced him, that was why they slowly pushed him away. His sister was the only natural born child of that family, and that was why she had died along with them, he was something else. The same way a cuckoo’s egg was laid in the nest of another bird. They are a parasitic brood, because the baby cuckoo is fed the bird’s other children are neglected, and slowly because of the presence of the cuckoo they starved.

His father realized he was raising the egg of another bird. He must have known, this boy was born to destroy his nest. His parents knew what he was, and they could not forgive him. They tried to stop him by suffocating him slowly. They denied that this child ever existed within this household. Even Tenko forgot about who he was and pretended to be a normal child for awhile. In the end you cannot change who you are. What you were born as is deeper than your skin. That was why he felt a terrible itching there. It was like the skin he was wearing was on the wrong body, like his insides and outsiders were mismatched. He was rejecting himself, the boy who wanted to become a hero and play pretend like he could become someone good like All Might.

That itch like fire ants crawling underneath his skin. Insects feeding from him on the insides, he could feel them sucking from his veins, and munching on the tissue of his organs. He rotted away on the inside, slowly. He must have been stillborn in some way. He was born as what he was, a glitch in this world. A person who did not belong anywhere. A person incompatible with everyone. The bug only existed as a flaw in the system, to bring the whole CPU to ruin. A repulsive bug, without any hands, not in the shape of a human, only able to crawl on his belly in the dirt. ‘ The only difference between a snake and a worm was one had venomous fangs, and the other was stepped on.

Shigaraki did not think it could be helped. Even if a hero tried to save him that day, just like his father, they would be destroyed. He could not change what he was born as. As long as they are alive, people have to live as themselves until the day they die. That was why he looked with envy of their wings.

A butterfly spread their wings in front of him. Several veins ran through the wings leaving black trails that led all the way to the edges, where only white spots remain. The shape of the wings itself were jagged, with holes torn in the frayed end, and yet they could still fly with such wings. The veins looked like blood from some old wound cascading outward, or maybe tears that fell in streams down your face.

He could destroy those wings in one touch. All of the colors contained in those wings, burning up all at once, would paint him the most beautiful portrait he could ever imagine.

Shigaraki hesitated. A butterfly started out as a worm too, but they were able to become something else. He stopped being a worm, but never became a butterfly. He was still trapped inside the silk he spun around himself. Yet no matter how much he grew he could never break free. Shigaraki could destroy everything around him, and yet he could not move enough to break the clear glass of the chrysalis in front of him. The whole world could be burning, and he still could not open his eyes as long as he slept in the sticky goo of a butterfly’s womb. Sometimes he wished he had been born with a different name. If his birth name was Shigaraki, if he was that man’s natural son, then maybe he would not have to hurt himself so much continually chopping is body into pieces and sewing himself back together in order to transform.

♚

Shigaraki observed his arms. There were cracks running down his skin, entire chunks of flesh missing. That confirmed what he always thought, he really was a glitch. The freak accident of the decay quirk manifesting in Shimura Tenko meant this body could not handle his quirk. The doctor says the same thing while Shigaraki only half pays attention, that quirks are getting more and more powerful while bodies lag behind them.

The software outpaces the hardware. His quirk, the glitch that would destroy both.

The origin of the word “computer bug” comes from a malfunction of an early electromechanical computer. The error was traced back to a moth trapped in a relay. Something as small and insignificant as a moth and the beat of its wings could bring down the entire system.

Something as insigificant as the beating of a butterfly’s wings could change everything. That was what he was, but the glitch destroyed his own body now too. He always knew, he knew that there was something repulsive inside of him. His body knew it before he did, and that was why it so violently rejected him. His itch, his own internal organs rejected him the same way a donor organ was eventually rejected by the body, instead of functioning they only made him sicker.

An eternal nausea.

The sickness of living. It was always underneath his skin and now it has spread like a rash to the surface. He stood there in silence, his body half naked under the harsh lights of the hospital. He looked at himself in the mirror. And saw nothing. He had yet to become someone. This body was not who he was. It could not handle who he was. He was… Who was he again? Skin, and muscle, and ribs that could each be individually seen and traced with a finger under the skin. A face covered in wrinkles as his skin shriveled up in self disgust for the person underneath it, and two scars that never healed on his eye, on his lip. Sunken in eyes with dark circles all around them, that were so empty it looked like they had been gouged out with a spoon. The shadows of empty eye sockets would probably look more human than the eyes staring back at him in the mirror right now. His chest pressed up against his skin, is collarbone, the divet of his breasts, both of them clear in their shape. He breathed, and he could hear his bones creak and rattle with the effort. Lifeless hair fell on top of him in a mop, hair without color that had died a long time ago, but stayed attached to his scalp. He was. Shigaraki Tomura. Shimura Tenko. He was… dying.

Dying to become a butterfly.

That was why he laid on that operating table, and told the doctor to cut open his chest, pull out his heart, and sever all of the veins one by one. This body was not suited for a creature like him that could only destroy, this body broke far too easily. He needed a new one.

♚

The caterpillar spins a cocoon of silk, and eventually molts into a translucent clear, chrysallis.

A worm transforms into something beautiful, but the transformation itself is ugly and wretched. The capterillar releases enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. It digests itself. Then it exists in a soup of its own digested organs. But not everything is digested, what remains is the parts of a butterfly.

The caterpillar was already born with all of the organs it needs to become a butterfly inside of them. They walk with rudimentary wings tucked inside their bodies without ever knowing. The limbs are cut apart. The flesh melts. The head is detached. The nerves are cut off one by one. The caterpillar writhes in agony in its cocoon. Its insides are churned and rearranged. A caterpillar spinning its own chrysallis was tantamount to suicide. They spun the silk rope they were going to hang themselves on. That is the pain of the surgery once Shigaraki wakes up, wrapped again entirely with bandages only his red eyes showing in gaps between the crisscrossing bandages that look like the white silk of a cocoon slowly falling apart around him.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, I hate this.” Shigaraki reacted to the pain eloquently. His wings are emerging, he could feel them all alone tucked beneath his spine, but to have wings the entire flesh of his back needs to be ripped out first. He can feel flesh rending and tearing.

“I hate the doctor and his shitty surgery. I hate Re-destro and his stupid nose. Fuck - I just hate everything.” He tried to stand up on his own again. Even though it was only a few minutes after he first woke up from the surgery. The doctor should have strapped him to the bed. The last time he could not stand up on his own, he was in an alleyway, crying for help. The last time he relied on master’s help, master disappeared in front of him before he could pay him back. He has to stand all alone, and the moment he managed to get himself off the bed Shigaraki’s entire body crumples. He hates this, four minutes in and he hates it. There was no love inside of him, and he could not love the world he was fundamentally incompatible with, so he just hated, and hated, and hated.

Shigaraki raised his hand in front of his own face, tempted to grab it with all five fingers until his brain rotted away completely instead of continuing to exist in a half rotten state. Perhaps what master saw in him was wrong, he was not someone who could become a king. The reason no one saved him was because he was a worthless child right from the start. Shigaraki lived this way the entire life. If he destroyed what was causing him pain, the pain would go away. But, it never went away, not really. Perhaps he was only ever treating the symptoms, like removing tumors. The reason people experienced remissions of cancer was that cells continued to divide until another glitch occured. It was the process of life itself that caused cancer. The pitiful worm in its chrysalis. He could crush the crystalline structure between his fingertips, shatter it like glass and watch all of its insides pour out and ooze from between the cracks. It would be the most satisfying thing to close all of his fingers around and break. He tried to do the same once in the past. If he cut off his hands he could live the same as everybody else. If he cut off those wretched hands they would not reach out to destroy anyone.

But master stopped him. He did not care for a future. Everyone could do whatever they wanted when it was all gone. If that was true then why… why did he hesitate to close his hand around his face. Several faces flashed through his mind at once. He thought he hated everything, but he found there were people in this world he could not hate no matter how hard he tried.

Shigaraki let his hand drop down to his side and lay there pathetically on the ground gazing at the white ceiling above him. When everything was destroyed, what would the sky look like? He finally understood why ugly creatures like caterpillars put themselves through that hell, boiling their insides alive so they could become something else. They looked up at the sky and desired freedom.

Freedom from everything. Four months from now when this was over would he be able to see that horizon? He reached his hand up again this time reaching up. At that time, he wanted them there. He wanted to show them the horizon he longed to see all of his life. As his fingers continued to curl to reach a few extra centimeters. A butterfly descended. It landed on the tip of his finger, but it was not destroyed.

#villainmonth #villainmonth2019 #zeldi drabbles tag #shigaraki tomura #shigaraki fic #shimura tenko #tw: self harm #tw: abuse mention

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