Middle Child Syndrome - (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood)

[alias]

Title: Middle Child Syndrome

Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of Hiromu Arakawa's characters from Fullmetal Alchemist. But I want them. All of them.

A/N: Hello FMA fans! As I have mentioned quite a few times, to anyone who will listen--and anyone who won't listen, it still won't stop me--I have fallen in love with Fullmetal Alchemist. So naturally, I had to write a fanfiction.

However, I have what may to some of you be bad news. This is not a Mustang fic. Or an Ed fic.

It is an Envy fic.

WAIT STOP DON'T RUN AWAY!

I really like Envy. Not in the way I like Mustang; I'm in love with that man and don't you dare tell me he's a fictional piece of animation. But there is something about Envy that draws me to him/her/it in that hate-to-love, love-to-hate kind of way. He's psychotic, cruel, and despicable, but he's complex and built up from so many layers, and I wanted to examine some of them. I love Envy. And, maybe I'm just as sadistic as he is, but I love tormented Envy.

So I tormented Envy.

This is a one-shot, and it takes place before the main events of the series, but there may be spoilers if you haven't reached episode 37 of Brotherhood or Chapter 68 of the manga.

I best get the show on the road then. I hope you enjoy!

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Middle Child Syndrome

“Why do we have to meet in this grimy tunnel?” Envy flicked a pebble over the lip of the precipice and watched it drop into the dark, where a plop at the dank bottom signaled its landing. He let another fall, and then a third in the same hollow cadence. His finger stretched out to roll a fourth over the ledge, but the rock—and his finger—were halted by the sole of a boot.

Wrath cocked his head down over his sibling, the red glow of his left eye smoldering with the heat of its namesake. Envy snarled and wrenched his hand from the wedge of rubber and dirt.

“Pride is confined to this circle outside of his body in Central. Don’t be dim.” Wrath slid his boot along the remaining pebbles and kicked them into the fire. The flames gave off a dull warmth compared to the bite of underground, but the cold was of small concern to the other figures encircling the fire. The fire’s function wasn’t to give off heat, after all. It was to give off light. For without light, there could be no shadows.

It seemed to be giving off more smoke than anything.

“I still don’t see why we couldn’t just meet in Central, then.” Envy drew his legs in and slumped over his knees.

“I should think of all of us you’d be the most at home here, Envy. Somewhere the outside can match the inside.” The torrid voice oozed over the fire, sultry with its own taste in the mouth of its speaker. Envy shot to his feet, fists tight.

“You wanna tell me what you mean by that, Lust?”

The curved silhouette dipped its shoulder, giving in to a hummed laugh. “Easy, tetchy. All I meant is that our meeting place doesn’t revolve around your convenience. If it’s too cold for you, feel free to put more clothes on.”

Envy’s molars dug into each other. I know what you meant.

“You could have at least picked a better stretch of the tunnel. Gluttony’s ass is taking up half of the ledge.”

An infantile whine seeped from the lump that filled the space between the wall and the edge of the outlet. Lust’s gloved hand glided out to pat it on the head.

“There, there, Gluttony,” she cooed. “Our dear sibling just gets petulant when he’s impatient.”

“Impatience doesn’t suit an operation this grand,” Wrath lectured, his hands latched behind his back. He stared away from his audience, into the black of the tunnel. Black to the rest of them, at least. “It makes one reckless. Patience is a virtue.”

This time Envy burst into a guffaw. “Pah! Virtue’s a bit ironic to broach in a gathering such as this, don’t you think?” He hissed another laugh to himself, and over the flickering firelight saw Lust’s velvet lip curl into a smile.

Virtue. What an asinine concept. It was just stupid enough for the humans to contrive. A useless moral code for their own ethereal security, betting on the hope that obeying some set of spiritual laws was going to harden some kind of armor over their souls. No, it only splayed them open, and made it that much easier to kill them. As if their pathetic lives weren’t fragile enough, they had to give themselves restraints. Virtue. Ha! Wrath had spent too much time with his feckless wife.

Envy squatted back down, his back to the ravine. It was cold in here, as much as the others didn’t seem to mind it. Or maybe it was just the waiting. Pride could make them wait until the end of the world if he wanted, and Father would have nothing to say about it. Envy scooted his socked feet against the ground, just to make a noise. The rocky crust was less rough than the quiet. It was the quiet that was cold. The tight kind of quiet that, whenever it fell, he felt like the whole tunnel could collapse with it, and then everything beyond the tunnel on top of that, letting lurking things drill into his head until they crushed him into a little, tiny tadpole…

A log snapped under the blaze, crashing the ember fort with an eruption of sparks that buzzed the air like hell-born gnats. A plume of smoke chased the bugs and scratched his lungs, and he hacked through the combusted air as it trickled innocuously amongst other nostrils. The quiet was cold. And the smoke was irritating.

He coughed until he was ready to tear his own lungs out and let each capillary spark itself back together, just to rid them of the smoke. Snarling at the fire, he wafted the stream away. Over the flames Lust raised a sleek eyebrow, which he met with a glower. His body was supposed to be better than annoyances like scratchy throats. It must have been the waiting. Now it was vexing him with a headache, that throbbed—itched— like a pinpoint in the bridge of his nose.

Then his breath acted without his accord.

“Ihh’tSHHhoo!!—GAH!”

The force threw him backwards, and he hardly had time to react to the fall before splashing into the bottom of the ravine. The water was shallow and the ground hard, enough to soak his hair flat and snap the bones in his wrists as he threw them out to catch himself. A scarlet static lit up the tunnel as his injuries promptly began to mend, but they still shot a sharp throbbing up his nerves. He groaned at the pain, and then growled at the annoyance as he climbed back up the crag. They were all going to be looking at him when he summited.

“Damn it,” he grumbled as he hauled himself back onto the ridge, followed by a more mumbled grousing of words that were equally as incoherent as they were colorful.

“What was that, Envy?” Repulsion danced with amusement in Lust’s voice.

“Don’t make fun of me, you crone,” Envy warned. “I wouldn’t have fallen if I didn’t have to sit so near this damn ledge.”

Lust only raised her eyebrows, evidently having found something to satiate her boredom. “No, I’m not talking about your…coordination. What was that thing you did?”

He knew what the thing was. They all recognized it. But it was supposed to be something the humans did. None of them—as far as he knew—had ever done that before. I’m a homunculus. What the hell? Homunculi were the superior organisms. They didn’t get sick, let alone have to endure the trifles that came with sickness. It was another human fragility.

“I don’t know, I didn’t do it on purpose!” Envy snipped, and as soon as he said it he wanted to land a palm in his own face, realizing the notion of having done it on purpose was better than the alternative of having succumbed to… such a spasm. Lust hummed a snide laugh. Envy’s hands tightened once more into fists, but before he could brandish a retort he felt the itch returning, and he clamped both hands over his nose, effectively cutting off his airways, to stop the thing from happening again.

“What’s wrong with Envy?” Gluttony asked. To Envy’s dismay, he looked up to find their red eyes all piercing him.

“Nothing to be worried about, I’m sure,” Lust crooned. “He’s a little…different than the rest of us. It’s not surprising if his body isn’t up to par.”

“What?” The comment gripped Envy like a lasso, and he almost barged right through the fire to get to Lust, sidestepping it at the last second. “Are you saying I’m weaker than you?”

Gluttony scuttled backward into the shadows, emitting a mewl that wanted nothing to do with the argument. Wrath blazed them with a scathing look, but neither of the combative sins heeded it.

“Please. Don’t be so ornery,” Lust scoffed. “I didn’t need to say anything. You demonstrated it for us.”

“Oh, you want a demonstration?”

Envy didn’t give Lust a chance to brace herself. In one quick dart he snatched Lust by the wrists and pinned her to the tunnel wall, squeezing her hands tight and upward, and immovable. The rock splintered behind his grip, and even though the lascivious witch’s face betrayed no struggle, he could feel her muscles flexing in his clenched palms, and he knew as well as she that she was stuck.

“You want to find out who’s the weaker one?” Envy spat. “Let’s see those sharp fingers of yours, then. I’ll snap each one of them off.” Lust’s hands pulsed under the challenge, but Envy’s grip was too tight. “Unfortunately your tits and your hips won’t help you either.”

Her lip curled like a devil’s. “Careful, Envy. Your green is showing.”

More rock crumbled away from the wall, cracking around Lust’s dainty wrists, and in the flicker of firelight Envy saw her wince.

“You think I want to look like you?” he hissed. “Well guess what? If I wanted to, I would. Whore isn’t really my style.”

“Clearly,” said Lust, as if she had just received a compliment. She tried to wrench herself free again, but failed. A smile widened over Envy’s teeth, in synch with the steepening arc of Lust’s eyes. He was stronger. They both knew he was stronger, and he wasn’t going to let go until she said so.

“Stop your bickering,” spat Wrath, but it fell on deaf ears.

“You certainly maintain an interesting fashion sense,” Lust went on. “Though I think what you wear best of all… are the humans.” The grin fell off Envy’s face, and Lust retrieved it. “Perhaps you’ve spent so much time impersonating them that you’re starting to devolve into one.”

“Shut up!” Envy heaved Lust forward and then slammed her into the wall. Fury licked up in flames from his gut hotter than the fire that twitched light over their crazed faces. Red sparks crackled behind Lust’s deep raven curls as a trickle of blood rolled down her neck from the impact, but her hard stare never broke. “How dare you insult me like that. I could crush you in one hand until you crumble like a twig! I could—”

Envy was silenced by the black razor that impaled his stomach. The shadow whipped him from his detainee and hurled the two apart, until both were bent over clutching their gored middles. “Enough.” The high voice rebounded off itself in an echo that did not need the help of the hollow tunnel. “You are both acting like children.”

Envy staggered on his feet as he keeled around the solid darkness that skewered his abdomen. A gurgle of pain escaped his lips, and he took wary steps backwards to try to slip off of the blade that severed more of his insides with every movement. The shadow only followed his pace, refusing to dislodge until the caster gave permission. When he realized he could do no more to try and free himself, Envy pried his eyes into a grimace and traced the snaking shadows along the ground to the peak of firelight, where the vines of darkness opened with fathomless eyes, squinting dangerously around smiles whose sharp edges alone could have rent his body in two.

“Well,” Envy wheezed, grunting against the sting of the movement. “Looks like the firstborn has finally showed up.”

“I did not arrive to break up petty arguments.”

“Hello, Pride.” Lust hummed in her smoky voice, remarkably smooth for still having the spear in her gut. She arched her back against the shadow and groaned, an utterance that from her sounded more pleasurable than painful. “I’ll apologize on behalf of the both of us for the quarrel. Any further dispute on the matter would only waste our time.”

Pride held them stationary for a moment longer, and then the smiles curled steeper with satisfaction and the shadows retracted. Envy crashed to his knees and succumbed to a fit of coughing, spitting scarlet at the ground as his insides knit themselves back together, and it took more than a moment to calm his lungs and take a breath that didn’t crackle. When he finally began to heave the damp air, he whipped his head up to stare, bleary-eyed, at his company. Lust stroked the crimson moisture from the corner of her mouth with her gloved fingertips, spreading her lips upward as the blood vanished into her black attire.

“On behalf of both of us?” Envy finally picked up. He jabbed a finger in Lust’s direction. “You’re the one who started this whole thing, so you can take all the blame.”

“Father would not condone this behavior, Envy,” Pride’s voice bounced from each tendril and expanded down the tunnel walls. “He would want us to act as a family. It is not proper for siblings to treat each other as you have.”

Envy pushed a knuckle into the ground to bring himself to his feet. “Family! Siblings! Those are things the humans call one another. Are you suggesting we’re on level with the likes of them now?”

He opened his mouth to say more, but something weird happened to his breath; it drew in, sharply, in a distracting itch that overruled his body’s command. He froze there for a moment, somewhere between inhaling and exhaling, afraid to do either. He fought against the sensation, and then, realizing that it was the thing ready to happen again, he smothered his face into his gloves to hold it back.

“What’s wrong, Envy?” Lust goaded indulgently.

Envy held his breath. All of their eyes were on him again, this time accompanied by dozens more, popping open from the shadow tails. His own eyes fluttered in the struggle; a struggle that, despite his attempt to suffocate himself, he was losing.

The air jolted into his lungs in a sharp, deep hitch, and the thing won over before he could think to plant his feet firmly in the ground.

“Hah’ISHHhuu!!!”

It threw him backward onto his butt, where his too-heavy body split a web into the ground as it hit. He skidded on his elbows, mercifully missing the ledge this time, and he ground his teeth together against the pain he was more than annoyed with by now. The tunnel lit once more with the ruby static as his body repaired itself, but it did nothing to assuage the throbbing of the impact—or the itch in his nose for that matter. He fought the urge to claw at his own face, and the only other thing he could come up with was pinching his nostrils shut. This bought him only a few seconds, and the watching eyes were patient for them to pass, until his breath wouldn’t hold any longer. “Hhn’CHHh!!… Huh-CHHnk!!!—SHIT!” he cursed allowed as he failed to fight his own body. But it still wasn’t done. His throat ripped with a frustrated growl as he buried his face into his knees, desperately smothering his nose and all but forgetting about his leering audience. “Huh’KSHOO!! What the HELL!?!”

He swung his arms as if to hurl something in fury, but his palms were anticlimactically empty. At last the hitching abated, and the remaining violence of the rise an fall of his chest pumped only from the heat of his rage.

“Are you done?” Wrath snarled, propped in a soldier posture over his sword like a post in the ground. Beside him, Lust cocked her hip, her arms crossed with more patience, and at her side Gluttony sucked on his fingertip and stared in bemusement. Intertwined within them, all the shadow tendrils floated without expression.

Envy glared back at them, and before he could think not to he sniffed, which upon hearing only made him grimace harder. He rubbed his nose with his knuckles to expel the last of the itch.

The toothy smiles sliced back into the waves of shadow. “Well, Envy,” Pride’s child voice rang through the tunnel, “for as harshly as you disparage the humans, you seem to share more similarities with them than you’d like to think.”

Envy’s knuckles whitened as he clenched them into fists. His head pulsed with his own restraint to not lash out, for if he did he knew his insides would be severed again. Fighting with Lust was one thing. Arguing with Pride’s word was another entirely. “I do not,” was all he managed to hiss.

The smiles in the shadows narrowed until they were nothing but white, paper-thin boats in the sea of black, their points like curved needles.

“Let’s begin.”

The talk was irksome. So much talk and planning. Envy was tired of the talk and planning. And he was more than tired of this dank, smoky tunnel. He was ready to do something.

The stupid humans. So weak and pathetic. They were his playthings.

And he was nothing like them.

He palmed a rock as Pride’s accusation flashed through his mind again and he clenched it in his grip. The talking was too long, and too pompous, as only the dear firstborn could affect. He grew weary of listening to it, but tuning it out brought too much silence, leaving openings for other kinds of shadows to swim through his head. He compromised the ordeal by tapping at the ground with the rock, his thoughts absent from the action as his wrist moved of its own volition, and he let the beats and scratches hold up the world by piercing the silence, driving away words of anything before they could form.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap…

Tap. Tap. Scratch…

Scratch. Scratch…

Tap. Scratch…

Scratch. Tap…

[SterlingSilver]

Alias~! First I have to say that this is very, very well written and it's awesome to have it on the forum~! Even though I haven't seen much of FMA I can tell you did the characters here justice :3.

Also, thank you very much for encouraging me not to just leave the page once I figured out who you were writing about. Because of that I read the whole thing and really really really liked it! I'm sad there's not more ahaha~! Thank you for the opportunity to read something new~ >w<.. It's a lovely fic

EDIT: Can I also just say the angst here is fantastic~? I keep reading this little gift over and over, and I love it more each time QwQ

Edited August 22, 2014 by BlackScatter

[Pyrus_Fangmon]

This is incredible! I have not ever seen a FMA involving the sexy Envy

This is truly a welcome here on the forum.

I am hoping this we be continued, yes?

[SneezyHolmes]

I love Envy! Thanks for writting a fic on him!

[Emily]

This is...how do you put it, incredibly sexy? Especially the part where Envy loses control. I have essentially always though of him as a complete douche canoe but this is so well-written, and as BlackScatter said, so very angsty. And Envy would hate to hear it, but he's so human that it's easier to relate and much easier to not completely hate him. It's very different from the usual, and it's perfect. I love that Lust apologizes for both of them and all of them are so perfectly in character! The whole spear in gut thing while still trying to hold on to their dignity is so very...sinful.

This is amazing writing and I hope I see more FMA (or anything else in general ) from you soon!

[alias]

Thank you so much for your comments! I was nervous to post the story at first because I was worried it would have a limited audience, but I'm so happy you guys enjoyed it!

@BlackScatter: Thank you for your compliments! I'm glad I could convince you to stay and read! You should totally go watch the rest of the series now, because it is PHENOMENAL. And there is a good amount of angst throughout that too .

@fang815 & SneezyHolmes: I knew there had to be some other Envy lovers out there! No plans to continue this one, but I'm still on my FMA craze, so I may write something else soon! Thanks for reading!

@Emily: Haha, a "douche canoe," I'd say that is quite accurate. It makes me feel less bad about tormenting him, because boy does he DESERVE it. He's so cruel and evil, and he tries so hard to convince himself that he is better than humans, and yet, you almost can't help feeling sorry for him because of how pathetic his desperation is. He's such a complex, intriguing character, I could write an essay on him (though fanfiction is much more fun ). Thank you for your compliments! I would very much like to torment Mustang next but I have some priorities back in real life that I have to check off first.