FMA Fanfic: Unconditional – Seven
Unconditional – Seven.
by arcanewinter. NC17 4141 Roy*Hughes. Fullmetal Alchemist. AT, pan-series spoilers.
Deceit is a vice Greed can’t endure.
These characters do not belong to me. I do not profit from this.
The heavy metal doors of the factory burst open under their force, clanging rudely in the otherwise silent night. Envy skidded out first, followed by an irritably-rushed Greed, flipping up the collar of his new black jacket.
A few paces ahead, Envy straightened as he turned back, more familiar features replacing the disguise. “Would you hurry up? I’d rather not have to plan this all over again.”
Greed shrugged, the yells still echoing from deep inside the factory. “They’re not going to catch us, I don’t know why you’re so–”
But the gunshot punctuated his drawl prematurely, not to mention the center of his hand.
“You little–” he growled, stomping back towards the factory entrance before Envy grabbed him rudely by the wrist above the wound and pulled him down the street, soon hauling him up onto the roof tops.
Greed twisted his wrist free and rubbed grumpily at the palm of his hand as he followed. The wound had healed quickly, but it wasn’t often he was pierced at all. “They’re just lucky they missed the clothes,” he muttered, and even above the wind in his ears Greed could hear Envy call him a priss.
* * * * *
Down at the old docks, their only company was the stench of water made shallow by silt and refuse and the dull clatter of rotting boats against the pier. Even still, Greed stood watch from inside the old storehouse, scanning the blocked road for some kind of alchemist assassin, or maybe even the sharp-eyed homunculus himself, if he wasn’t already too busy choking the independence from his political neighbors.
“He could come from the water, you know,” Envy mused cynically from the makeshift table.
“Covered in garbage and slime? Not Pride.” Greed snorted lightly, but it was a feigned confidence. “When he comes he’ll be struttin’ pretty.”
But they could really only guess. It had been nearly five years and they hadn’t seen him outside of a newspaper, but they could feel that Eye on them almost always, especially when they had stones. And so they travelled more than they settled, striking their targets randomly across Amestris and sometimes outside of it, though fewer and fewer regions of late remained outside of its borders.
And they never spared the stones for very long, sometimes consuming them on the spot, or on the way. It could have been mere paranoia, but those glittering prisms were like thousands of tiny beacons in their pockets, flaunting their continued survival.
Envy dumped the stones on the small table, and Greed finally turned at the sound. There was a danger in bringing them back to their current residence, but now that they’d hit the factory–and at the perfect time, too–there was no reason to stay. They had the journal, Greed had a nice-fitting jacket, and they’d be off again in a matter of hours.
Greed tugged the stool closer and sat down, watching Envy roughly divide the pile, each jagged morsel gleaming even in the dim and grimy light. He finally pushed Greed’s portion toward him, grunting furtively to seek Greed’s approval.
But they’d been at this a while, and Greed barely compared the portions before grunting his acceptance. He ran his palm over his share for a moment, even as Envy began pulling his to his mouth, just appreciating the sheer number of them as a king might relish his jewels.
But he was no king, and his appreciation turned quickly to ravage. For that short, unrefined feast they both resembled another Sin entirely, but it was unavoidable, and afterwards they felt stronger, safer, and almost sated.
Table clear of stones, they both sat and gazed at it, eyes lazily searching its warped surface for a forgotten glitter, lazy only because they knew there was none.
“Few hours more, then?”
Greed looked up at Envy’s disinterested question, then nodded. He reached for the journal lying on the crate at his side and dropped it in front of his companion. “Your turn to pick.”
“And where are you going?”
Greed primped at the lapels of his jacket as he stood, grinning with conceit. “Figured I’d say goodbye to the ladies. However many I have time for, anyway.”
“Oh, I’m sure it won’t take you too long,” Envy teased, but when Greed glanced at him, he was looking a little meaner than he expected.
Greed stood up a little straighter, glaring his indignation, though he hadn’t lost his smile. “I may just take all night on one.”
“Have fun without me, then,” Envy muttered. He folded his arms and looked away dismissively, and Greed turned on his boot to walk out. His response to Envy’s jab could have been a little smarter, but he had better things to do than argue with him.
* * *
Though Greed hadn’t planned it that way, the location at the dock had been convenient for these visits. Sailors and whores seemed to have gone hand-in-hand while the ships were still coming in, and though the sailors had long since left the brothel’s beds, the seedy establishment had taken root.
Greed was far from sentimental, but he couldn’t help feeling regretful that they’d be leaving. He liked that they knew his face there, that he had his pick, give or take, for less than the going rate. Ironically, it appeared that Greed’s preferred method of taking and owning what he wanted was, by their standards, downright gentle. It wasn’t exactly the reputation he was going for, but he preferred making women come to making women cry.
Much as he wanted to savor this last walk, though, most of his attention flitted from broken window to rotting roof along his path. There were so many places Pride could be watching from, and once or twice he thought he caught a glimpse of movement.
But he reached the brothel unscathed, and the warm filth of the place felt comfortable. He grinned at the matron as he sauntered in, and she nearly hit him on the arm for trying to frighten her, saying something about his teeth that made him cackle smugly.
“Sorry to say your favorite isn’t here, dovey,” she began, hardly by way of apology, and handed him a drink, which he guzzled. It made it easier to part with the money later on, or so he imagined it did. Little could diminish that pain for Greed. “Y’want to come again tomorrow?”
“Can’t,” Greed grumbled. If he was going to take one all night, though he wasn’t sure why he felt the obligation, he would have wanted it to be with that one. But before he could decide on a replacement, a familiar voice called him from the creaking staircase, finely seductive.
He turned and grinned a little wickedly to see her. She was leaning against the railing, one bare arm supporting her slight weight with a careless command. “I decided I needed the money after all,” she called lithely to the matron, and Greed dropped his payment into the woman’s hand before heading to the stairs.
They were barely halfway down the upstairs hallway before he caught her and pressed her against the wall, running his fingers and palms up her arms to her smooth shoulders. She regarded him evenly with her dignified, yet jaded smile, which Greed displaced with his knee nudging the inside of her thigh.
“You know, you paid for the bed, too,” she murmured, and for Greed this was reason enough to rein himself in and continue down the hall. He all but lead her into her own room, barely closing the door behind her before he pressed her to the mattress, the curls of her long, dark hair rolling over the pillow under her head.
“Why so eager tonight?” she purred, though she gasped a little when he tugged open her bodice, his hand soon cupping her warm breast beneath the pleasantly constricting frills.
“Why so nervous?” he murmured back, his voice still resembling a growl, albeit softened.
She chuckled at him, though her breath caught as he brushed over her nipple with his thumb, one last layer of thin material still obstructing the touch. “I can be whatever you want. You want nervous?”
“I want everything,” he muttered mechanically, distracted by the clasps of her brassier, which he could so easily tear with his claws. The restrictive contraption finally burst open with her next breath, and he drew back to look at her as he pushed these final obstacles to her sides.
She smiled up at him with a lazy confidence, the fingers of one hand slowly twirling a thick brown curl on the pillow . “Greed,” she murmured, drawing out his name with a sophisticated but almost primal intonation. She extended her hand to stroke the back of his neck, lifting herself up. “Do you want me?”
The scent of her was naturally intoxicating, and his mouth played at her waiting lips in the same manner that he had rolled the stones under his palm before devouring them.
“Say it,” she whispered, her harsh breath teasing between the points of his teeth.
“Yes,” he almost hissed at her, his breathing more forceful than he’d allow himself to be, though still he pushed her to the mattress again, just barely catching the flare in her dark eyes before he pressed his mouth along her jaw to her ear. He bit carefully at skin too soft for it before dragging his attention down her neck and along the fine line of her collar bone.
Every sound she made under his tongue was his. Her scent was his, wafting up in reaction to him; the trembling just under her skin belonged to him. The smallest aspects of her were in his possession if they were because of him, and it was for this reason that his attention was so quickly and so tightly drawn in, why nothing she did went undetected in his presence. He nudged the softness of her breast with his chin, running his tongue over the nipple to make her breathe faster, his hand playing at her ribs to make that breath irregular. He dragged his mouth over her stomach to her navel, teasing around it with his tongue, counting her pulse thumping beneath it, faster when he began to tug her skirts down.
His money may not have bought her for very long, but for now, she was his, and nothing would go unnoticed, unappreciated.
Especially not that tattoo staining the skin of her hip, large and elaborate, and new.
His lips marked a path to it as he shifted to the side, pushing her skirts down to her knees until her legs could slide free of them. “This what you needed the money for?” he murmured, his hand coming to rest high on the inside of her thigh while his tongue resumed a reconnaissance of the ink’s design.
She tensed beneath him, and he could feel the muscle tightening under his mouth before her hand slipped into his hair, tugging him up until she could kiss him.
“And what if it was a gift?” she purred against his lips. “What if I liked him?”
Greed’s mind clouded over for a moment, but he wasn’t one for wasting time in situations like this. He couldn’t keep her and he knew it; Pride stopped him from having anything he wanted.
“We’ll just have to make this count, then,” he answered gruffly, forcing a toothy grin at her.
She scowled prettily. She had hoped for another answer, he imagined, but Greed had more pressing things on his mind, one of which he finally reached down to release from his human-made pants. He shifted to position himself, grasping her hip almost roughly to haul her closer.
He was about to move his grip to press her legs further apart when his attention snagged again on the design next to his hand. Anything that could distract him now could not be taken lightly, but at first he saw nothing that would explain it.
There was just something within its shape that struck some affinity with the insignia stamped on the back of his hand.
“Don’t tease me,” she murmured persuasively, rolling her hip away from his grasp. “Keep going.”
He nearly did. He wasn’t interested in complications, especially not now. He didn’t like wasting time with questions when he was so close. But some die-hard suspicion in the back of his mind made him glance behind him for the skirts he’d pulled from her.
They weren’t there.
Greed’s jaw tightened as he closed his eyes. He was silent for the moment, believing it but not. It was the ouroboros hidden in that tattoo, the ouroboros even his tricks couldn’t hide.
“Envy . . . ”
It spoke of his independence from Dante that although the hand so recently almost gentle had turned black and dangerous, he did nothing more than curl it into a fist. His eyes were vicious when they found the large, pretty gaze of Envy’s disguise, and his lust had given way to a wounded fury–though not completely.
Envy slowly pouted under his gaze, his lower lip protruding, still feminine and smooth. “It’s about time,” he intoned, but among the signs of smug disappointment, Greed could still detect a subtle fear.
“Where is she?” Greed seethed. He wanted what he came for, not some joke of Envy’s.
“Don’t worry, she won’t bother us.” Though not nearly as confident as usual, Envy’s sly smile remained.
Greed’s eyes widened slightly. Would Envy really have–”What did you do to her?”
It was now that Envy’s entire demeanor changed, his proud shoulders drooping into the mattress. “I didn’t do anything to her. She wasn’t here tonight.” He shifted under the press of Greed’s body as though uncomfortable, his gaze slipping to the side. “I didn’t plan this, you know.”
“Well, it wasn’t in my plans either,” Greed growled, frustrated. But it wasn’t easy to berate him while he looked like that. It wasn’t the disguise, but the expression on his half-hidden face that slowed Greed’s anger.
Still, he’d been robbed of something his body was still prepared and aching for.
And Envy hadn’t changed back, yet.
Greed glanced to the side for barely a moment as he considered it, then took Envy by the hip again, though it felt more like the first time. Keeping the momentum of surprise on his side, he flipped Envy to his stomach and dragged his backside up.
“You’re just gonna have to deal with this,” he muttered.
Envy had to pay somehow.
“What do you think you’re–”
But Envy’s anxious demand was interrupted by a grunt of discomfort, even pain, as Greed pressed into him. Coming from that throat, however, it sounded more like an acquiescent sigh, and that was what Greed chose to hear.
He could have taken his time, could have eased the entrance, made it better, but this was ultimately what he wanted, and he was far from brutal, especially by a homunculus’ standards.
And Envy wasn’t exactly fighting him.
Greed answered the sigh with a small groan of his own, letting his groin lead him, which it was more than happy to do, its clipped thrusts rocking Envy forward while Greed’s hands guided him back.
“Looks like you were thorough,” was all Greed could think to say between his breaths, which was really quite impressive.
And while he expected a smug, scornful reply from his partner, and could even have spoken it for him, Envy didn’t seem to have heard him. He was breathing hard, just as Greed was, and he rested on his elbows, forehead drooping to the bed. Hair cascading forward, his slender neck lay bare, and before Greed knew what he was doing he had bent over him to put his mouth to its base, inhaling what he imagined was a woman’s scent.
He told himself it was only in his nature that he would wrap his arms firmly around the slender waist, closing all gaps between them, his movements becoming faster, feverish and shallow. His hands slid up so that the sway of Envy’s breasts brushed teasingly over his palms, and for a long, ecstatic moment he forgot that Envy was not the whore he came to see tonight.
But the whore could never have knocked Greed back the way Envy suddenly did, separating them just long enough that Envy could turn to his back beneath him.
Greed’s weight brought him close again quickly, and though still positioned between Envy’s legs, he was stilled by the heat in Envy’s face and a strange intensity in his eyes that nearly turned them from brown to purple by its force alone.
Greed couldn’t fathom why Envy wasn’t denying him, or why his only real retort was an accusation that Greed couldn’t face him while he did it.
Greed clenched his jaw with the comment, muttering with the remainder of his breath as he returned to the wet heat between Envy’s legs, “It’s not your face anyway.”
Envy chuckled lightly, the breathy sound of it almost a hiss. “You want it to be?”
Greed ignored him. In fact, he couldn’t even be sure he’d heard him right over his own heartbeat in his ears, even while Envy’s lips were so close to his ear that he could feel his breath there.
Envy’s groan, though, he did hear, though it was a much smaller sound, as though he’d tried to stifle it.
It propelled Greed almost to the brink, surprising him so that he answered it with nearly the same sound, though his retained the heaviness of his gender. For only a second, he paused, gathering his control before one hand, now clawed in his need, pressed under Envy’s hip to clutch the ample flesh there, forcing Envy to take him to the end, deep and hard and desperate.
His supporting arm pressed under the homunculus’ shoulders as Greed tucked his head down. Envy’s body, however he had managed to do such a thing, was beginning to react, he could feel it, ready to clutch him, ready to convulse beneath him. Never mind that he was about to make Envy come. It was just a body, one he’d been tricked by, but god damn did it feel good, and it was only going to last another two seconds.
In the cacophony of sensation, Greed’s mind erupted in a repetition of Envy’s name, but he bit his tongue against it, the pain forgotten with the surge that vaulted through him. Beneath him, Envy writhed with the same involuntary rhythm, his nails digging into Greed’s back just above the smooth legs locked around his waist.
And there was something else, Greed thought, as the culmination left him much more quickly than it had crept up. Drained, and panting lightly, he could still hear it in his ear: his own name.
* * *
Greed left the establishment the same way he’d come in; he could only assume Envy had done the same–through the window–from his readiness to confront him on the pier.
But Greed ignored him, hands shoved in his pockets and a scowl on his face that didn’t know if it was angry or confused or just maybe a little hurt. Whatever it was, he kept just a little ahead of Envy’s pace to keep him from distinguishing it for him.
“Greed, would you just slow down?”
Greed couldn’t think why he would want to do that.
He couldn’t decide exactly why he wouldn’t, but it didn’t matter. He just couldn’t look at Envy right now, and he timed his march to keep Envy behind him while not running from him outright.
But Envy wouldn’t have it. With reflexes always a little faster than Greed’s, Envy finally forced himself in front of him. In his urgency he was almost as close to him as he’d been in the brothel, though he wisely took a step back once Greed finally leveled his gaze at him.
“What?”
“Look, I was just trying to–”
“Trying to what?”
“You’re always leaving–”
“I have things to do.”
“Greed, I can be whatever you want.”
Greed’s coldness wavered for just a moment with Envy’s words, their tone strangely quieter, his eyes suddenly more interested in the putrid water than in Greed.
“You know I want more than anyone could ever give me,” Greed muttered, almost by default. He stepped around the immobile Envy to continue on his way, slower than before, but still putting distance between them.
“That’s not what I meant,” Envy finally answered behind him, but Greed had no further response as he kept walking. He had an idea what Envy did mean, but Greed wasn’t ready for it.
Envy had lied to him. Envy was designed to lie, but he’d never lied to Greed before, and that was Greed’s only means of trusting a creature whose very nature wallowed in deceit.
Or maybe this wasn’t the first time Greed had been fooled. Maybe his trust had been unfounded for some time–how would he ever know?
Greed hurried on, and Envy, whose steps had remained behind him, did not match his pace.
* * * * *
Greed had passed the disintegrating warehouse hours ago. He’d instead travelled the length of the pier until he came to rest at the edge of a dock he wasn’t sure would support his weight for long.
When he’d first sat down, he’d understood that something fatal had occurred in their agreement. Truth be told, as homunculi went, they’d surpassed all expectations concerning how long they could remain civil to each other. Their little pact had almost reached the level of friendship among humans, and now that Greed thought of it, he realized how short-sighted he’d been. Envy had saved his life, out of the other six, and above Dante herself. Yes, that had meant something, but it probably meant less than what Greed had made it out to be.
The smartest, most self-preserving action Greed could take at this point would be to take the journal and set off on his own. They weren’t that much better off together than alone, and as Greed, he shouldn’t care that Envy would have no means of finding more of the remaining stones in the world. Greed should want them for himself. He did want them for himself.
But with respects to their former agreement, Greed knew the better compromise was to split the journal between them. Then they would both have an equal chance of surviving in the world, and Greed would have no further vulnerabilities, no further questions about trust and–dare he think it–friendship.
But as dawn finally illuminated a harbor that was better off in the dark, Greed rose with the conviction that he just didn’t want what was wise or even what was fair, and Greed’s wants were not easy to overcome, no matter what his artificial conscience was telling him.
He entered the warehouse quietly, no door to creak or to clatter behind him. Envy sat at the table with the journal open before him; as Greed expected, perhaps gullibly, Envy had not disappeared with it.
But Envy heard him. He lifted his head just a little, though he didn’t turn.
“If you ever deceive me again, it’s over,” Greed said from the door.
The silence that followed was brief, but in its space Greed knew Envy had truly heard him.
“Yeah.”
But there was more that Greed wanted to set right. His departure from wisdom was just about complete.
His footsteps were dull on the moldy floor, but again, Envy could not mistake his approach. Grasping his arm, Greed drew him to his feet and brought him as close as they’d been last night.
Envy still seemed uncertain of his mood, but Greed tried to make it obvious.
“You want her again?” Envy guessed, his voice more acquiescent than usual.
Greed met Envy’s eyes only briefly before he drew in closer, losing sight of them.
Envy’s hands swiftly found Greed’s shoulders to stop him. “Greed, who?”
Greed ran his tongue over his pointed teeth in final resolution.
“Let’s try just you.”
Envy seemed startled when Greed met his mouth, vulnerable and unprotected by disguise, but the trust Greed had once rebuked him for eventually kicked in. Envy’s arms tightened predictably around him, and Greed had pressed him to his back on the table–journal forgotten at the edge–before either had paused long enough to breathe.
Under Greed, Envy’s fervent expression was a hundred times more satisfying now that it was his own.
“You did say all night on just one, didn’t you?” Envy murmured, lifting his chin as though Greed needed the temptation. “You owe me.”
Greed smirked, holding his head a little higher.
“I am a man of my word.”