Okay, so I dropped the daily thing whoops, but I'm gonna keep trying! This one is 'Setting You Free' plus the trope 'role reversal'; I want to play with some of the well-established Edvy tropes, and this is a big one. I've never seen this specific flip before, and the most obvious 'role reversal' prompt is one I'm exploring in MAJOR detail over at Hero of the People.

TW: referenced suicide, grief, child death, genocide, parental abuse and C-PTSD resulting
NOTES: Brotherhood canon, mild AU

3. Setting You Free

or

Like Blood, Like Roses

Envy doesn't feel guilt. Guilt is one of those sticky, human emotions – related to sin, tangentially, but not the kind of thing he ever has to worry about. Guilt is for humans – he's too busy having fun. And it's fun, isn't it? Doing what he wants, or what Father orders him to, and they're meant to be the same thing anyway.

Guilt is pointless.

So when – something – starts to sink into his flesh, alone in an empty hostel room somewhere in the slums of New Optain – he can't identify it, at least, not right away. It stings, and bites at the edges of his mind, and he closes his mind, trying for some semblance of sleep, but it's just all the stronger.

Red eyes, like the setting sun, like blood, like roses.

He's shaking, and he's not sure why. He doesn't like being alone. With Father, he was never really alone, but all of that is over now, and he just wants it back.

He should have died. It would have been easier. Greed had the right idea.

Envy squeezes his eyes more firmly shut. He's not some whimpering child, alone in the dark with only the slowly-breaking orange bedside candle to keep him company. But-

But part of him still wants to go home.

When the Fullmetal Alchemist – Edward, that fucking brat – saves his life and sets him free, it's with a few rules. No death. Obviously. Envy can stick to that one better than Ed thinks – killing people is fun for a while, but without any reason to, it just kind of gets dull and repetitive. No general mayhem, which is a lot more boring, but Envy supposes is fair.

Then the hard one.

"I saved you because I think everybody deserves a second chance. But you should do something with it. And I don't –" Ed had rubbed the back of his head. "We part ways here. Understood? You don't talk to me, I don't talk to you, as far as everybody else is concerned I finished you off, and you go do something useful with your life."

Envy probably should have asked for a definition of useful. Right now, he's just trying to figure out what humans do. They work. They fuck. They shit. They eat. And Envy just… watches.

And at night, when it gets dark outside and Envy starts thinking about Pride's shadows, punishing and comforting in equal measure, he buries his face into the pillow and wishes he was brave enough to end his second chance here.

Red eyes, like the noonday sky, like cherries, like autumn leaves. And the blood had come so quickly after that, streaming out the back of her ruined head –

Envy wonders what her name was.

He never found out.

He doesn't identify the feeling as guilt until he starts to practice putting words to feelings. It wasn't the kind of thing Father encouraged. You did what he told you. The rest was irrelevant. But having nothing to do and his emotions swarming him like unexpected horseflies is pointless, so he digs up a list of Emotions and tries to identify them in himself.

Anger. Obviously. He's angry at most things. He's angry with Greed for dying on them. He's angry at Edward for saving him. He's angry at… everything, all the time.

Sadness. Yeah, no.

Grief. His hand hovers over that one, then moves on. Maybe. Maybe, but he doesn't know. He doesn't know what grief feels like, or looks like, to even start identifying it.

Regret and guilt.

He stops, then with a growl, rips the paper in half, watching it flutter to the ground and feeling his mind try to untether from his body. He wants to let it.

The memory keeps rising like a bloated corpse, a thousand bloated corpses, plenty of faces he never had to pay attention to, but they're all her. Red eyes, like rubies and garnets, like poppies, like hearts, a battered teddy bear in her hand. Maybe her father gave her that. Maybe a mother, a brother, a sister, a friend.

Anything that anybody ever gave Envy, Father took away. He hasn't thought about it for years, but back before Greed left, over a hundred years ago, Greed made him a daisy crown. It was silly. It was fun. And in the sunlight, Greed had placed it on Envy's head with a little laugh, and then told him he looked nice.

The stupid thing would have rotted within days, anyway. It didn't matter.

He makes it further into New Optain, learns how to pickpocket – or relearns, really – and sleeps in the foyer of the library. The books there are interesting. Envy was never much of a reader before, but now he doesn't know what else to do, so he reads anyway.

He's been told all his life that homunculi can't do alchemy. He finds himself reading the books anyway. And then, tucked into the back of a book, where nobody could ever have seen –

Water – 35 L
Carbon – 20 KG
Ammonia – 4 L
Lime – 1.5 KG

He closes the book in sudden fear. But not soon enough not to see the circle, sketched out but detailed. Somebody had written it here, before returning the book.

He can't do alchemy anyway.

But he steals the book, and curls up on the floor of another hovel, and his mind keeps going, going, going.

This is an important job. It'll light the powderkeg we need for this seal.

Envy nods, and prepares, and it's only when he's alone with Lust that he whispers, "Does it have to be a kid?"

"Of course it does. Humans are so protective of their babies." Lust pats his cheek. "Don't get too concerned. It's just a human. Think of it like putting down a dog or something."

"I don't like that either," he whines, but it does help. Humans are stupid, and worthless, and this is the best use Father has for them. That's reasonable. That's reasonable.

When she comes skipping by, Envy knows this is the one. She's perfect. She's sweet, and adorable, and the perfect martyr.

And still, part of him protests. It's probably just all the extra souls in his heart, crying out like they always do.

He takes the shot, but he doesn't expect her to look up at him with such surprise. He doesn't expect their eyes to meet.

He almost apologizes.

But he shoots anyway.

The more Envy reads, the more he understands. The impact of the Ishvalan War, the number of people who died – so many lives – the unrest in the East since then. It's been two years since the Promised Day by now, almost nine since the Ishvalan War. It shouldn't matter.

But somehow, it does.

"Such a small thing," he murmurs. Such a small death. And it had just gone on and on and on, fuelling a war machine. The war machine was a good thing. It got them what they needed.

And that had gotten them – where?

Nowhere. Six feet under, or vanished into air and ash and dust.

A wasted life. An unlived life.

Envy doesn't want to be thinking about this. But the days stretch on and on, and he's scared and alone in the dark, and he thinks, if there was someone here with me I wouldn't feel so lonely, and he thinks, why shouldn't I? and he thinks just because humans can't doesn't mean I can't.

The chalk is easy to get. The ingredients are harder – he steals money and takes a form to go buy them all at once, and they don't cost much at all.

And the seal –

The seal he draws out in the empty room in the wrecked building that he won't call home. It takes him a lot of tries. He's not used to things that have to be so precise, and he takes calipers and a ruler to the angles, keenly aware that this is not alchemy, he is not an alchemist, but he is something better than an alchemist, and finally he'll have done something special and have something of his own.

His mind spits the names of emotions out at him sometimes. Anger. Jealousy. Fear. Bitterness. Grief. Guilt. Passion. Excitement. He tries to learn them, to stick them to his own mental patterns, but they're slippery things.

Then the circle is ready. He can't even explain to himself why he wants to do this so badly. All the reasons seem – not quite right.

He piles all the ingredients in the center. It's messy, but he supposes nothing about this isn't, and he's got lime and sulfur on his fingers, and he adds a little human blood too, because that's easy enough to acquire.

But when he presses his fingers to the circle, nothing happens. He even summons up her deaths'-head face in his mind – red eyes, like blood, like poppies, like rubies, brown skin, so small he could have picked her up with one hand, hair the off-white of new paper or crusted snow.

"Come on," he seethes, pushing and then slamming his open palms on the circle. "Something! A spark! Anything!"

Nothing. The chalk design on the wood is pretty, and that's all.

"Fuck you! Fuck you, let me fix this," he pleads, and he's not sure who he's begging, but suddenly something is breaking and sliding and giving way and this is weak this is cowardly this is cruel- "Do one goddamn thing right and let me bring her back," he says, eyes starting to fog, and he can't see the room properly.

The silence is mocking him. He's some monster borne of alchemy and he can't even make it do this one thing for him.

He leans over and rests his head on the wooden floor, arms clutched around his stomach like he's holding his own insides in. He kind of wants to throw up. "Please, please, please," he begs, and the circle seems to whisper it to him, the finality of it, the simple human truth that death is forever, that killing and murder and death isn't the kind of thing he can regret and fix and erase from history.

He begins to sob. It's not like there's anybody to hear him.

But, suddenly, he realizes, there is. He didn't hear his footsteps through the yelling, or maybe he was just distracted.

Ed kneels down next to him. "It's a good circle. Well-drawn."

Envy tries to stop the noises coming out of him, but he can't, he can't, he can't even find it in him to ask what happened to their agreement, you don't talk to me and I don't talk to you-

"You know, when I got told somebody was buying a bunch of concerning ingredients at the same time," Ed sighs, "I was expecting… somebody else. Anybody else." He reaches out to touch Envy's shoulder, but Envy shoves him away, and he topples a little against the wall.

"Go away."

Ed doesn't make any move to leave. "…This isn't what I meant when I said do something with-"

"I said GO AWAY!" Envy doesn't mean to yell, but it comes out like that anyway, and he glares at Ed, half-panting, half-sneering, the effort to keep himself together at all just so goddamn much-

"I'm not leaving you here with a human transmutation circle."

"It doesn't work."

"It never works. Even if you could do alchemy. It never works. Understand?"

"I'm not human, I could-"

"Envy." Ed takes Envy's chin into his hands, forcing eye contact, and Envy can see the emotion in his eyes, read it better than he thought – Grief, he thinks, regret, and – one he doesn't know, can't name. "It never works. It doesn't work. Death is permanent."

Envy flicks his eyes downwards, too ashamed to meet Edward's eyes. It'd be easy to just kill him for interrupting, but he's right. And-

And death is so much of a scarier word now that the people he knew are there.

"Who were you trying to bring back?" Ed's hand moves to Envy's shoulder, and Envy lets it happen, because he's too tired for anything else. "Greed? Lust?"

Envy shakes his head, but doesn't clarify. He knows human transmutation doesn't work on people with no souls. But with that girl, there could have-

It doesn't work. It never works.

"Why?" Ed asks, and it's not quite the same as the last question, but it's close.

It's too humiliating, standing here in front of the person who saved his life, to tell him it wasn't good enough. That he's scared, that he's lost, that he's – he is grieving, and he doesn't know how. How did Edward explain, to the others in his life, to people he met later, that he had tried to break the laws of the world because he wanted his mother back? How had it felt, afterwards, with that bitter taste in his mouth knowing it had failed. Envy had never asked. There was never a good opportunity.

And now here he was, trying to do the same damn thing.

Envy tries to put words together, to explain something, anything. But the tears keep coming, and he keeps having to scrub them away with the sleeve of his oversized jacket, like some child, pathetic, useless. "I thought, maybe," and his voice is so small. No monster left in it. "if I could make it like it never happened – if I could bring her back –"

"Who?"

Envy shook his head. He still didn't know her name. "I just… thought maybe if she'd never died… everything would be fine. Everybody would be here." It sounds so stupid out loud. He didn't really believe that. Did he? He can't change the past. But he doesn't understand alchemy, and he doesn't understand death. "I know they wouldn't, but –" It's getting harder and harder to keep his face clear. "It's my fault," he says finally, and breaks down.

Ed pulls him into his chest, and Envy hates to think it, but the way he strokes Envy's hair, fingers dancing over his scalp and avoiding the knots – it reminds him of Lust, and that just makes everything worse even while it makes things a little bit better. If this is the only person he has left to go to for comfort-

"I'm sorry," Ed murmurs. "For everything. But especially- I'm sorry. I thought you'd be okay."

"Okay with what?"

"On your own."

"I'm not – I'm –" Envy chokes on the word fine, even though it's what he's supposed to say.

"You're just a kid."

Envy wants to protest. But it's comforting, too, which is even more surprising.

"You're just a kid," Ed says again, "and you're all alone." He glances over at the circle again, and Envy can hear the flutter of his heart, the fear still so present in him after all this time. He's gotten taller, broader in the shoulders, and when he gives Envy a warm smile through the tears in his own eyes, it almost – almost – makes Envy feel like he's not in trouble, like he isn't going to be punished.

He should deliver some snarky response, or fight, or lash out. Instead, when Ed takes his hand and leads him outside with all the care in the world, he follows. When Ed burns the ingredients and the circle to a char, he just watches, and lets his heart feel hollow.

"Alright," Ed says, as they both get into the car. "Let's start over. What do you want? Seriously, whatever it is, I'll help you get it."

Envy has lots of answers to that. A job, a house, all the trappings of normalcy. Friends. Wine at stupid little Aerugoan cafes with patios and umbrellas. A closet full of clothes.

"A second chance," he says finally. Ed looks surprised for a moment, then smiles. He doesn't ask, a second chance at what? He doesn't tell Envy off for not being clearer. He just starts up some senseless chatter on the drive back.

But during one of his rambles, he claps his hands, and spins something out of the cloth of his jacket. He hands it to Envy, doesn't acknowledge it-

It's a daisy chain. Not a real one, obviously, but-

Ed stops himself mid-sentence at the look on Envy's face. "Oh, don't give me that face. I know more than you think I do, you know."

Greed.

Greed had talked about him to other people. Greed had cared. They'd all cared, hadn't they? They were gone, but – but there were still pieces of them alive. Memories. Stupid little things. Stories.

Envy raises the daisy chin to his lips, closes his eyes with a little smile.

Sadness. Grief. Happiness. A touch of regret, still.

And more than a little love.