For Edvy Week 2015, day one: jealousy! (Sept 13th-17th – contribute if you can!)

Okay, I'll be honest, it's only sort of Edvy-ish. But I loves me some angst. 03-verse, diverges right at the end. Incredibly misanthropic reading of 2003 series to follow. Written in... three hours? Two and a half? Something ridiculous like that.

TW: mental illness/dissociation, death mention, blood, scars

My Skin and Bones

Things begin to be moved around, or go missing. A hair-tie. A book. A pillow moves from one end of the bed to the other when he wasn't looking.

It's just his imagination. But still Ed shivers, trying not to think of the past.

Life is good now. Al's alive, and even if Ed can't quite connect with him, can't quite cross the insurmountable boundary that has suddenly sprung up between them, it's enough to see his brother alive and well. Al lives in Rizenbul, and Ed tells himself it's not because both of them feel like they're looking at strangers – Alphonse a twelve-year-old with ancient eyes, Edward healthy and whole and hanging onto the world by his fingernails.

He still works for the military. It feels right. It feels productive.

(He's not sure what else he's supposed to do, because his skin still doesn't fit right.)

"What happened to you?" Mustang asks, and Ed shakes his head.

"I told you. I brought him back." He smiles, feeling the skin stretch and shift at the sides of his mouth. He doesn't know how to look sincere. "I'm fine."

"You don't yell at me any more."

"I thought you'd be happy."

Mustang groans in frustration, and Ed suddenly remembers that the eyepatch isn't supposed to be there, that Mustang used to outrank him, that he's only here in Central because Ed asked him to be, because the new notorious hero wants last generation's lauded war criminal around. To laugh at? To gloat? For advice? Ed's not sure. But it's not right without him around.

"Edward, you could talk to me. I'm not your commander any more. Shouldn't that make this easier?"

It doesn't. But Edward lies, laughs it off. "You underestimate how much I used to hate you."

Mustang's face isn't quite as unreadable as Ed's sure he thinks it is. Clearly he's made another mistake – but life Before feels like an impenetrable fog. He thinks he might like it that way.

There was a hole in the world.

Edward thinks, perhaps, he died. He remembers the blood, but the face he remembers is his own.

He breaks the promise he made to himself (he can't remember the specifics of it) and asks Mustang about it. Asks Mustang about his own death, or near-death.

Mustang is quiet for a long time, too long, and Edward bites his tongue – he's made another mistake, ruined things for himself, and unbidden, unsought, and barely understood the litany begins in his mind he knows he knows he knows – what?

Roy (the name suddenly rolls off his tongue in the next moments, a sudden flicker of the bond he thinks he might have shared with the older man Before awakening in his chest) lifts his eyepatch, brings Edward's fingers to the scarred flesh. He doesn't say anything. He just lets Edward try to understand, seeking the truth with two hands of flesh and blood, and for a moment Ed thinks Roy might kiss him. But it never happens – it just hangs in the air, an unspoken cue that Ed doesn't know how to interpret.

The night he first notices the things missing and moved, though, he knows something is wrong with his mind. And he flees, takes the first train back to Home, which belongs in the same realm as Before – an abstract thought lost in obscurity. There's nothing solid about it. He can't even remember the colour of Winry's eyes.

"I'm so glad you came back to visit," she chatters, trying to fill the silence. Ed feels like an interloper, and as soon as he's done having dinner with them he makes an excuse and slips outside.

Wrath is waiting for him. Something breaks quietly inside Ed's mind as he stares at him, all lanky grace and bone-white and obsidian black, automail shining silver. "Who are you?" he asks.

Ed refuses to answer, and sits down, a smile playing around his lips. "I've been asking myself that question a lot." Then, "You asking me that is hilarious, though. As far as identity issues go, I think you win." The smile flourishes into a smirk. "Don't you agree?"

For a moment he thinks Wrath will break his neck (how much does that hurt, he wonders suddenly and then pushes it away as another intrusive thought), but instead he stalks away in sulky, adolescent rage.

Ed remembers, vaguely, distantly, that he killed the woman Wrath considered his mother. But when he looks at Wrath, the memory that drifts to the surface like a bloated corpse is the feeling of Wrath in his arms, fighting, pleading, striving towards some goal that Ed can't quite visualize – and then the sound of his screams.

His apartment won't open for him. Effortlessly, without really thinking about it, he breaks the lock, lets himself in.

Edward turns around to look at him, mechanical limbs visible through the tears in both the plastic covering and his white shirt-sleeve. "Killing me wasn't enough?"

He shakes his head, mostly in confusion. "There...there was a hole in the world," he struggles to say. "I had to fix it."

Edward's fist tightens at his side, but he leans back and crosses his arms. "I was coming back. I was always coming back."

Envy doesn't have a response, not as the missing pieces slide back into place. "Were you always this lonely?" he asks.

Ed snorts at that. "Why would I be lonely?"

"Because nobody knew," Envy whispers, and it's like the world has turned on its axis, like he's been trapped behind glass with nobody noticing. "Nobody knew who I was."

He wasn't sure how he thought Edward would react. But the bags under his eyes deepen, etched in shadow, and suddenly he collapses to the ground, and Envy can see the blood on his shirt that, he already realizes, isn't Ed's.

"Nobody?" he asks, voice shaking. "Nobody missed me at all?"

Envy takes one step forward, then another. He sheds the skin he borrowed, leaves behind the life he's decided he doesn't want. He would have left, Before. He would have laughed, maybe. But Edward's skin is like sandpaper; the rough edges are gone, his flesh is rubbed raw, and he doesn't have the energy to fight. "I did," he murmurs.

"I don't believe you," Ed retorts, bitter and lost. That's his choice. But Envy stays anyway. (There's no shortage of lives to jump into, take over and own; he never thought his own would ever, ever be a relief.)