FMA Fanfic: The Naming I
The Naming I
Title: The Naming I [all parts] [originally posted to <lj comm>hughesathon]
Author: 
loreamara
Recipient: lacidiana
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Ep25
Wordcount: 2051
Thanks to momoiro_usagi for looking it over at the ungodly hour of 7am.
Prompt: Hughesmunculus watches Roy from afar and wonders why it hurts.
Summary: A man can be killed for many reasons. Jealousy, hatred, anger, fear: all ugliness and cruelty, petty reasons with brief lives and consequences that stretch far beyond them. A man can be killed for another’s gain, for one’s success amid the failure of others. A man can be killed for what he represents, for who loves him and whom he loves.
A man can be brought back for the same reasons.
-
The light rain clung only reluctantly to the edges of his clothing before letting go, trading black fabric for a black rooftop. He stood quietly, his attention fixed with unearthly fortitude on the open window of a house hundreds of yards from him. His eyes, long devoid of their original color, were focused with uncanny perception on the man who lay slumped over his desk, a bottle of whiskey half-empty beyond his fingertips. He could read the label if he wanted despite the distance and the dark. He could not read the man.
His vision was one of the abilities they used him for, quite opposite of his other ability, the one they often neglected. They would sooner beat information out of humans than withdraw it painlessly through touch. He never really liked it, anyway. It made him feel too much. It seemed everything made him feel too much, from the lives he destroyed under their command to the words he exchanged with them, a showcase of apathy and cruelty. This was his legacy, and in his subservient position it was his only means of recognition.
He hadn’t even been given a name.
The Seven had been named long ago, even the one who now denounced them, as he sometimes wished were possible for him. She had even cajoled him with the possibility of gaining that name when her patience ran out with that other. It was ironic. Maybe it was the name that did it, the name that inspired one to leave.
But his purpose was different from theirs, he had been told. He had no name because he didn’t need one. He’d merely been shown a photograph of a man he didn’t know, and he’d been told that when the time came, his mere presence would be enough to distract the man from the trouble he was certain to make. The photograph was torn just down the shoulder of another figure to the man’s right.
He wished he had the photograph now, though he couldn’t have said why. He’d watched the same man all night, watched him slowly drink himself down. He’d had time to notice differences. Compared to the photograph, the man was older, his hair longer, his eyes more severe. But the severity was only an assumption. In the private of his room the man’s eyes had been kinder, because only the kind suffered like that.
This was the one he would take down, when the time came.
But the time wasn’t now, and still he had come, as he had come last week and the week before. There was an uncomfortable sensation in his chest whenever he was near enough to see him. It was different from the discomfort of nurturing the warfare she needed. He ran from that. He ran to this.
He released a sigh, for once giving up the theatrics that usually accompanied such human reactions. He leaned against a chimney that climbed out of the roof, its bricks cold and red and wet. They smelled like earth, though fire had transformed them into something much harder.
Absently his fingertips traced the insignia emblazoned on the inside of his left forearm.
They would come for him, soon enough. He was not supposed to be where he had not been sent, but they were often too busy to enforce that rule. Depending on who it was who retrieved him this time, his punishment could be severe–severe because there was no limit to it. His heart could rupture a thousand times and still it would beat again. And yet somehow, this was worth it. Somehow this pain meant something more than that. Something more than he was, more than they were.
His fingers shifted from his arm to his pocket. Taught well by her, he was ashamed of his own sentimentality. Yet through the irrelevance, he withdrew the only possession he really had. He smiled wanly. In truth they weren’t even his: they belonged to the one before him, the one he’d been made to resemble. She hadn’t known that man. Even the one who had killed him didn’t know him, and so she had required something from the man’s grave to guide the creation. She thought they had been lost in the transmutation, but they’d only been hidden in a hand clenched with the intensity of forced existence. He considered them as much his as the hair on his head and the teeth in his mouth.
One of the lenses had fractured, but he could still put them on if he wanted to.
But there wasn’t time now for such a game, and in truth there was something more waiting for him. He knew when he had set out tonight that he was going to make an incredible mistake, but it was a mistake he could no longer avoid. In silence he moved from the roof under his feet to the next, the rain causing him no trouble. Time and again he had seen the man in his uniform and he’d known that he had once worn the same. He had heard the man’s voice on a telephone and wanted to answer him, had watched him stand at his grave and wanted to cheer him. He lamented that the man’s rank was not higher and that he had not found a wife.
He knew who had been in that photograph before the halves were torn apart.
Rounding the house, he paused, listening, but the man still made no sound. In the distance, figures were traversing the skyline. There was time enough.
The window opposite the desk was open, and he passed through it, dropping soundlessly to the rug. He straightened slowly as though on sacred ground, and for the first time in his unnatural life there was a sense of foreboding that dogged his steps and quickened his heart. Though for many hours and over many weeks he had watched this man, never had he come so close as to hear his breathing. He was real in a way he hadn’t been before.
He drew closer with feline poise. The man’s forehead creased, but went smooth again. If he completed this act, there was no telling the consequences. Given the position he was in, it was better not to know, better to let it go, better to accept that whatever he was now was all he had a right to be. It was better to have begun this way than to have become this way.
And yet still his hand reached of its own volition, fingers lifting the hair from the man’s forehead. Another inch and he’d make contact.
Shifting his weight, he stepped to the back of the man’s chair and bent down over him. One hand, he placed on the desk’s surface.
For a long moment he didn’t move. He simply listened to the man’s breathing, his own nearly falling away entirely. He was almost waiting for the man to wake, but he could tell from the strong scent of alcohol that it wasn’t likely to happen.
Footsteps, though hushed, sounded on the roof.
His eyes hardened with sudden loathing, and then he closed them just as his palm slid to the man’s forehead and his own body quaked with the touch.
The beat of silence that followed was gone in an instant, replaced by half a lifetime of sun and storm and more than a man’s fair share of night. Deserts and bedrooms, war and laughter, birthdays and funerals, faces of the loved and the lost.
He couldn’t have counted how many times those glasses showed up, on his face or off.
And so much more of his life was just beyond the edges, a woman and a little girl, dressed in black at the side of a coffin, but the vision just then was going out of focus.
There were two lives written in this man’s memory. He saw merely a fraction of them before something caught him cleanly in the forehead, but it was enough. The rest was already there.
* * * * *
He woke to the sound of metal clattering to the floor in front of his face. For once, he had trouble focusing on it when he opened his eyes, but he snorted quietly at the sight of it. The appropriateness of the throwing knife was not lost on him.
“You’re lucky,” crooned a voice some feet beyond him.
“I don’t feel too lucky,” he responded. In truth, he felt like hell. He lifted his head, but that was all for now.
She was sitting neatly in a chair, her hands folded in her lap. “You might have negated the need for your existence. You should be more grateful.”
“For getting back what you took from me in the first place?” He chuckled weakly. “Sure I am.”
“You could have had Greed’s name if you’d only behaved yourself.”
“Keep it.” His eyes had fallen closed, but he forced them open again, rolling to his elbow. “I’ve already got a name.” With immense effort, he pushed his torso off the ground, steadying himself on his hands. “And you can keep your damned red stones. I’ve got better things to do.”
No matter how difficult it was going to be to explain himself, he was going back. It could work out. He had people to look after. People who needed him.
The smile on her face was nearly audible in her speech. “You have nothing better to do than what I tell you.” He could hear the rustle of her skirts as she rose, and there was a soft clap that sounded harsh in the empty air. “I should never have let you out before you were needed.”
The glow that rose from the floor beneath him shouldn’t have startled him, but it was the worst moment of his life all over again. “Don’t do this,” he begged, his panic softened by weakness. “I need to see them. You can’t do this now.” He pushed at the rough stone floor as though to get away from it, but the inches meant nothing to the twenty-foot array.
She was speaking again, chastising him with saccharine venom, but he couldn’t hear it anymore. With the last of his consciousness his hand found his pocket, seeking to take out with him the same object that had brought him in.
But they were gone. The pocket was empty.
Curled on his side, all his senses slowly drained into the array. His hope was the last to go.
“Roy.”
His heart could rupture a thousand times, but still it would beat again.
* * * * *
The pale wash of sunrise woke him several hours too early.
He had a nasty stiffness in his neck from sleeping at the desk, but he’d never admit it had anything to do with his age. With a note of cynicism, he pushed the open whiskey bottle another few inches away from him. It might have put him to sleep, but it hadn’t made things very pleasant afterwards. Not only was his mouth a solid, dry mass of tongue, but he could have done without the dream. He drank to get him out of his thoughts, not to invite him in again.
Standing, he stretched his back with a grunt of both pain and pleasure and disappeared down the hallway. He’d have to look more presentable than this or they’d send him home again, colonel or not.
It wasn’t until he returned to take his jacket from the chair back that he noticed the glint of lenses on his desk.
In the long moment it took him even to pick them up, logic had given him a thousand reasons it couldn’t be and a thousand explanations that were more probable.
But none of them explained why his hand was shaking, and reason could only sustain a man so long.
“Maes.”
x-posted:
fma_yaoi [x]
hughesxroy [x]