"...and this is the music hall. It used to be the center of the Pendleton cultural scene… that is, before the Border Wars began." Envy chuckled, draping themselves against the side of the ancient piano. With a careless gesture, they indicated the wide, empty room, its few tables and chairs haphazardly scattered across the floor. "Then things changed. This place was just where the soldiers would spend their time, trying to forget their misery until it was time to go back out onto the field." They peered over the top, folding their arms over the top of the upright instrument, arms covering the yellowed and crumpled pages of music. "It's a little before your time, I guess, but I thought you'd be interested."

Kimblee pressed the middle 'C' on the piano with a cautious finger. Its sound was harsh and disconcerting, the pitch somewhere between an A and a Bb. The discrepancy between the named pitch and the sounding one was disgusting. "It must have been before my time," he said, not bothering to smooth out the rough edge in his tone of voice (Envy never cared, so why should he bother?). "This thing hasn't been tuned in absolute ages."

"Oh, your poor delicate ears." Envy stared down, expression dripping with mock-sympathy. "I hope you're not in pain."

"Oh, stop." Kimblee stood, lacing his fingers together. "I thought that we had work to do. Do we really have time for a tour of a ghost town?"

He realized his inaccurate phrasing too late. Envy rolled their eyes. "Crimson, Crimson. We have all the time in the world, and, really…" They shrugged. "This is a ghost country. There's really nowhere else to explore, is there?"

"There is, if we go outside the borders," Kimblee said lightly. "Which is what I thought we were going to do today. Endless time or not, jobs need to be completed at some point or another. The world won't conquer itself, after all."

"Yeah, okay." Envy sat down on the stage, legs carelessly swinging over the edge. "In a little while. I thought you might be tired after travelling up here."

"Don't be an idiot." With a sigh, Kimblee sat beside them, resolutely keeping his legs from swinging (someone had to be the sensible one). "I'm not so fragile that a little bit of weather and distance could wear me out. There's really no other obstacles anymore." He glanced towards Envy, a wry half-smile on his face. "You're silly, you know. You never used to be so anxious."

"Yeah, well." Envy's grin faded. "You don't exactly have a great track record with your self-preservation."

A gust of cool air (which must have wreaked havoc on the piano over the years) moved in through the broken glass of the window, messing Envy's hair, and the movement drew Kimblee's attention to the sunset light streaming through the window. The light was so very like the golden beams that constantly burned in Central now, the light of Envy's Father. Envy's face, bathed in the light, looked very much like their Father's: sharp, determined, agelessly young, endlessly immortal. And somehow, the image reminded him of a memory that he had almost forgotten, of their wide eyes staring down and he staring helplessly up through half-closed eyes.

"Pride, you've got to… got to do something…"

It's nearly impossible to breathe at this point; he's lucky if he can swallow down a mouthful of air in between choking on his own blood. Coughing the stuff out is an action that takes far too much effort and pain to be worth trying, even if it is his last chance at life.

"I was." A thousand garbled voices speak. "I was going to put him out of his misery. He's of no use now, in any case."

"I can… I can figure out something for him to do. He's my responsibility—"

"Don't talk to me about responsibilities, Envy. You've spent months away from any of us, months without doing any work whatsoever, and you try to—"

"It wasn't my fault! It was…"

He coughs suddenly, involuntarily, blood bubbling from his lips. He's going to die—

"—isn't he?"

A hand rests against his wounded throat, a familiar warmth entering in from it through Kimblee's pallid, cold skin, and spreading through his entire body. "Please don't," says a small voice, as through through a tunnel, as Kimblee consciousness fades into oblivion.

"Why did you save me?"

Kimblee's voice was soft, but Envy started nonetheless. "What?" Their voice was nervous, and their body tensed.

"Why did you save me? Your brother was right; I really should have died." Kimblee looked Envy in the eye. "A part of my creed is the survival of the fittest, and I've proved multiple times that I obviously don't fit that criteria."

Envy blinked, and looked away. "Isn't that obvious? I couldn't let you die-I have work for you," they said, smiling carelessly, speaking a little too rapidly to be sincere. "We have a lot to do. We have to expand the borders for Father. And we're going to take over Creta now; that's what we came here for, isn't it? We've been here long enough; why don't we get started on doing that now—"

"Out of fifty million people, I was the one that's best for your work?" Kimblee shrugged. "Don't make me laugh. Both Fullmetal and Flame were more talented than me. They would have been able to do everything that I do and more. Really, if what you wanted was talent, you could have done a lot better than me. And for all of your talk about us doing things and doing work, we really haven't done much at all. All we've done is explore the country, really. We're not doing the jobs that we were supposed to do."

Envy was quiet. It would be hard, after all, thought Kimblee, to speak the truth from the stage for all to hear, even if it was to a room of empty chairs and only one other pair of listening ears.

Kimblee broke the silence unexpectedly, even to himself. "You know that you won't be able to keep me alive forever-"

"Shut up." Envy's fists clenched.

Kimblee fell silent. It was best not to push Envy; he knew from experience that if he was quiet, they would come around in their own due time.

Finally, they spoke, beginning with barely a whisper, voice climbing to a shaking treble. "Can't I have anything? I just want one thing. I just want one thing to belong to me. Is that too much to ask?"

The issue of being a "thing," the act of "belonging" to Envy, the possessiveness, the hysteria… there were a thousand things that Kimblee took issue with, and that he always had taken issue with, and yet he couldn't completely reject Envy's words; he'd never been fully able to turn away from that desperation. "You've never had anything, have you?" he said softly. "You just want, and you can't have."

Envy blinked, but stayed quiet, staring into the ground.

It was rather satisfactory to hear their quiet gasp when Kimblee took their hand in his.

"Well, you can't have all of me," he said, tracing circles around Envy's palm. "Not without asking. There's only so far you can go without asking. But you do have some parts of me already, even without it being my conscious decision: you have my loyalty, and my abilities. And you did choose me to be 'your alchemist' out of everybody else, and I suppose that counts for something. Even if you did forget about me until I was about to die."

"I didn't forget," Envy protested in a whisper, staying still as stone. "I was… preoccupied."

"I'm sure." Kimblee paused. "To be honest, if all you want to do with me is show me things, and sit and rest, quiet and far from the action, I may as well die now. There's no excitement there, no variety-I've lived in Amestris all my life, after all, and I've seen most of it without your help. What I'd like to do," he said, continuing to draw invisible designs on Envy's palm, "is to help you. I'd like to do your work again-that's always what I've loved doing the most. Give me that chance to work for you in a concrete way, fighting your enemies alongside you, and I think that would be the most practical way for me to be 'yours-' I'd be doing work for you, after all." His fingers halted their movement. "If… that's what you wanted."

There was no response, and Kimblee looked up. Envy's eyes were vacant, and they stared past him, through the broken window, into the golden light that was so like the light of their Father. "Yeah," they said distantly. "That's part of it." Their fingers slipped between his, grip hard as iron. "Alright. We'll do what Father wants. We'll conquer the other countries. Have your fun slaughtering those humans. But… don't you dare get hurt." Their voice cracked. "I'm going to keep you alive… as long as I can…"

The atmosphere was heavy, Envy's desperate eyes were unnerving, and Kimblee was sure that the sound of his (purely involuntarily) racing heartbeat was obvious; it was wonderfully fascinating how Envy had so totally destroyed his fight-or-flight response, and how his adrenaline ran wild proportional to the amount of raw emotion in their voice. His free hand took hold of Envy's hand, and he lifted it to his lips. "Alright," he said lightly, smiling towards Envy's incredulous face, watching a pink blush wash its way across it. "Alright. I'll be careful, if it's that important to you. After all," he said, standing up and drawing Envy up along with him, "if I die, I won't ever find out why on earth you find me so interesting."

"I think you already know why," said Envy, mouth quirking ever-so-slightly. The sharp light in their eyes softened. "I'm the one who needs to figure that out." Suddenly they stiffened, wrenching their hand away from his with their nose in the air. "Well. That's enough idiocy for the next hundred years."

"If you say so." Kimblee shrugged. "We can't keep the Cretans waiting, I suppose." Envy was already walking past him, and Kimblee followed a few paces behind. Envy passed through the building's dilapidated door, and for a brief instant, the gold of the sunset enveloped them. Kimblee paused, for a brief instant, before following them along their path to Creta. Envy had never looked more foreign, more divine.

Poor, lonely immortal.

A/N: This was a Tumblr request (thank you, shocotate!) that went horribly self-indulgent. I guess that I really enjoy exploring the themes behind the sin of Envy and what it means for the person that is overwhelmed by it. There's a lot of sadness and loneliness involved, when all that you want belongs to somebody else, and even when you get what you want the most, you're terrified that it will be taken from you. Kimblee's cynicism can at least keep Envy from being too deeply trapped in that cycle of fear (even if their ways of dealing with it include going off and killing an entire country... *sighs*).

Thank you so much for reading!