Notes: This story is absolutely NOT recommended if you are under the age of at least 16, are easily squicked AT ALL, are not a fan of dark, weird, creepy shit, or cringe at the following warnings:

Warnings: Hughesmunculus, gore, implied incest, implied rape, necrophilia, cannibalism, murder/suicide, human transmutation (lol), crazy!Roy, crazy!Hughes, character deaths in quantities that would make Shakespeare reconsider the ending to Hamlet, weird grammar, weird style, extremely crowded story. This all happens in about 6 pages. It's PACKED, and that's just the style of the story. It's kind of... ridiculous. If you came for the lulz, I hope you're not disappointed.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. I appreciate feedback, but please keep the critique to yourself this one time. Even concrit. And, obviously, no flaming, since you were WARNED.

Thanks and uhhh.... Enjoy? ::blink::

Crash.

Roy blinked, his weary eyes darting about the room of their own accord. He blinked again, trying to speed up the process of his vision adjusting to the light – if, in fact, there remained light to be adjusted to.

Crash

A groan. With weariness that had yet to fade – and hadn't since that Night – he slid the too-thin covers off his legs and heaved himself up.

The noises came sometimes – in the dead of the night, usually. He – the Creature – could never sleep a full night. Like a nocturnal beast, or the demons and ghouls of folklore, He seemed to be a creature of the night. How fitting. How fitting that the Creature had been conceived in the dead of night, fed in the dead of night, and, this night, on a full moon as well. The full moon – the scene that set the stage for the most horrific of tales… Goblins, the undead, demons, ghouls and haunts - revival of the dead.

Moonlight – such a twisted thing. Mimicking sunlight – creating false images and distorting one's views. It was that which had led him to into temptation, to see the image of Maes Hughes bathed in blood and think it was beautiful. Majestic, even. In the blue-white light, through an open window, Roy had watched Him kill for the first time.

And it was beautiful. Because the moonlight hadn't only distorted Roy's views – it had distorted Roy. The cycles of day and night were there to alter him – by day, he was the man he'd always been. By night, he was the man he'd become. To call himself a man was outrageous – too human a title for a being who'd given up his humanity.

That had been the Price. The Price for reviving the body of Maes Hughes.

He did not come down the stairs with fear or any particular type of anxiety – only quiet irritation. He needed to feed, the Creature did. And He could never seem to do so without breaking something, knocking something over, or, putting it plainly, waking Roy up.

The moonlight, the shadows it cast, as sinister as its light, had created a pattern of blue-black shadows like human silhouettes. He'd heard tales of beings who thrived in the shadows. The beautiful, sinister patterns seemed to mock him, the souls beyond and within them – as in the Gate – neither loathing nor caring for his existence, only mocking it.

There was no light at night – the man he'd become was not allowed to see the fruits of his Sin in anything other than the beguiling rays of the moon.

The dark side of the moon held no trickery – no masked horrors or delusions of grandeur in his Sin. He longed for it – and did not deserve it.

It meant sacrificing more than he had.

And it meant death.

His footsteps were quiet, but the Creature always heard. From the doorframe of the front room, Roy made out no destruction, no devastation upon his possessions. The shadowed, hulking shape of the Creature turned to him.

In the sinister glow, He smiled to Roy in greeting.

There were rules about feeding. He was to kill all the Hunted before bringing Them to the house. There would be no live victims. He was to be humane – snap necks before the Hunted knew they were to be martyrs. When the bodies came into the house, He was to always clean up the inevitable spatters of gore. Roy burned them to ashes, and by day, scattered the ashes into the wind.

There was envy. He willed himself to be reduced to ashes, be free to give himself to the mercy of the wind. But there was no such freedom – no escape from his Sin. He wished the Creature would kill him, feed on him… But there was a degree of respect. There was repulsion at the idea in His eyes. It could have been called love – if the Creature could, indeed, love Roy as he often claimed to. He would not kill Roy. And Roy was never afraid. Only hopeful.

Tonight, the Rules had been followed. The victim – small beneath His large frame – was dead, the body ravaged and torn, fresh meat still surrounding the face of the victim's hunter.

He never wanted to know. Roy never wanted to see the faces of the ones he'd been responsible for killing. Defiling – the Creature's lack of ability to reproduce made Him fascinated by the function of others' sexual organs. He had a perverse kind of libido – one might theorize it stemmed from his own lack of natural conception.

His victims were seldom old enough to be adults – mostly children, too young to have developed. They fascinated him – young, innocent, and, above all, closer to a natural birth that the Creature had not had. They seemed to make him grow closer to that Desire – the Desire to have been born.

One time, Maes Hughes had been born a baby boy. And now the Creature was everything Maes Hughes was not. Never had been. Never would be.

Finished with his meal, the Creature stood up, naked in the moonlight, blood spattered along his thighs, groin, and stomach. It was to be expected, as much so as the blood covering his face and neck.

It was beautiful.

"She was beautiful," the Creature said almost dreamily.

A She.

"Don't tell me. I don't want to know."

Too late – a glimpse of blood-streaked dark blonde hair and empty, broken blue-green eyes. A beautiful, familiar little girl.

And the world stopped. Stopped cold. It was as though the cold, broken body had projected its state of ruin onto the very face of the Earth.

Visions faded and dreams were shattered – children were burned and women devoured by explosions of roaring flames. Existence, mankind, the whole of his life as he knew it, and humanity itself broke cleanly down the middle and shattered to rest among puddles of dark blood the moment he saw Her pale, unmarred face.

The window through which the moonlight cast its ethereal rays onto Her was stained with gore. Stained glass. The crude pun twisted his mouth into a humorless smile, and he turned accusing, horror-stricken eyes to the Creature.

"You killed her!" he rasped in a raised whisper.

Confusion. "Was she special?"

"You killed her!"

A bow of the head. "I'm sorry, Sir. I had no idea. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have to kill anyone. I'm sorry. I love you."

A manic laugh and the shattering of glasswear. "I love you…. I love you… But what have you done?!"

What have you done?

Realization. The first Maes. Grief. Horror. Anguish. A thousand times worse than death and rebirth.

Their world had been stained glass – a window that through which one could see only horrors. It was the only world Roy had known, and it was now as shattered as he was.

Manic, meaningless touches and actions, tangling themselves in the other. He didn't remember the trip to the bedroom, but found his surroundings the moment his naked skin touched too-soft sheets, still warm from his earlier resting.

"Sin," came a harsh whisper against the Creature's neck, "I won't do this again."

Citrine eyes – bright and beguiling as moonlight itself – met his, darker than the sky where the moon held its place away from the Sins it masked.

For a moment, Roy was there. The man he'd become and the man he was were no more – he was merely Roy Mustang.

Heaven did not weep upon the man and his Sin – only mocked them. Tales of Heaven and Hell lived to deny his right to a Place in the world – he had no Place amount saints nor sinners.

And Roy Mustang was a man who, when he was truly him, would not live to watch people die at his hands.

It was selfish – he was horrified at no other death than Hers. Because he knew her? Because She was important to Him, and He had slaughtered and brutalized her?

He should have killed Him to begin with… But he never could. The Creature looked like Maes… Smelled, tasted, and sounded like him. Occasionally, there would be a flickering – as if in a flame – of the man he'd known, reflected in the Creature's gaze.

Selfish. Horrible. A demon. More of a monster than his own Sin – the very fruits of Sin itself, purest and most evil, couldn't begin to compare to a man who, while retaining his humanity, had unleashed a horror unspeakable upon the world.

"I'm going to kill you," Roy said silently, in the tone a man would use to comfort his child – present false promises of better times.

The Creature nodded.

"Roy."

"Hm?"

"…I love you, I loved you so much… But this… I can never forgive you. Never. I never thought you would go on to contradict everything I'd ever done for you. Because of you, what was the most important thing in my life is dead. I will forever hate every fucking breath you take… And I will forever hope you spend eternity in unspeakable anguish… I hope you suffer. Because death is too good for you."

Maes was here. Finally. Because the Price had been paid. Roy's hand found cold metal.

"You're entitled to that wish, Maes. I hope it comes true for you. If it does, it will be my last act of redemption."

Eyes narrowed. "Don't even try. You won't be saved."

The sound of a gunshot was silence in comparison to Roy's tortured, agonized screams.

And there Maes lay, even in death, frantic and horrified.

The Creature had inhabited this body, but still, it had belonged to Maes, and, still, their act of goodbye was incomplete.

What did Roy know of lust? Of irrational desires for the pleasures of the body? Such things had long since failed to satisfy him – the one thing that could satisfy the craving was the strong arms and tender touches of a man who he'd destroyed – twice now.

He'd taken the all-too-willing Creature to bed, closed his eyes, and pretended and dreamed until memories brought him there moreso than the actions of his current partner. The same body did nothing – a meaningless vessel. No longer Maes Hughes unless Maes Hughes inhabited it.

He was still hard.

Maes's legs rested heavily on his shoulders, and Her blood smeared his thighs as he pulled the man's hips closer to him. He shuddered – the motion was too human for him. He was no longer human. He had no right to shudder, to be frightened by human things. He shouldn't be afraid of defiling this man's corpse; not when he'd watched the same body do this to the bodies of children. Who was he, to only be frightened when he was the one to take a body in an act of lust? He may as well have been the blood-covered monster crouching over Her body. He had no right…

A gentle push, and he was in. Maes's body gave no resistance to the intrusion. Roy figured he should take that as some kind of sign, but he didn't. There was nothing Maes would give him but disgust. His body was limp and free of tension because of death. The muscles making up His anal sphincter would be perfectly relaxed. There was no more time for illogical analysis of such things.

Instead of taking his time to enjoy the last of their physical intimacy, he focused on this one fact. He broke it down to the very elements that the body before him consisted of -- simple elements arranged into form through a process of chemical reactions and forbidden science.

It held no pleasure for him. He shouldn't have been so hungry for such a meaningless touch.

But damn it, he was. He hungered for a Maes Hughes that would not fight, criticize, hate, hold, or even love him. His idealizations seemed ridiculous now; it was death he had craved all along. Perhaps not the human death the man had died, but if he had seen then what he had come to see, he would have appreciated the perfect serenity of Maes's death; appreciated the beauty of the inevitability instead of the selfish anguish for his loss.

Supporting himself shakily on his arms, he leaned down, kissing the wound between the man's eyes and savoring the metallic taste of blood. Carefully, he climbed over to Maes's flank, smirking as he imagined how crude it was. The coroners' reaction to finding his semen in the rectum of the body of a man he'd illegally resurrected and murdered. His mens' reactions. Edward Elric's reaction.

The moonlight was a twisted thing, indeed. The process, when spread out bloody and cold before his eyes, seemed almost beautiful.

When the second shot rang out, a flurry of blackbirds screeched in protest, flocking together as they left their roosting and taking with them the shadow they cast through a stained glass window.