(no subject)
Title: Satisfaction like a Skin
Author: demoerin
Recipient: ojuzu
Rating: PG-13 (language, mentions of violence)
Characters/Pairings: Lust, the other homunculi
Summary: Lust and the fallout of the first and only defection among the homunculi.
Notes: Spoilers up to about Wrath's backstory.
"You have no imagination, Father."
The ensuing silence was awkward. Envy went extraordinarily bug-eyed and Gluttony clapped his hands over his own mouth, then over his ears - but at least it was a change from the stunned vigil over the fact of Greed's absence.
"Lust," it ground out of Father and the machinery they had begun to bind to him, "if you also choose rebellion at this point, be assured that it's a poor time for it."
"Greed's form could have been chosen differently. Couldn't it? His own form could have directed his greed to something else. It's been obvious for a long time that he was unhappy here."
Father leaned forwards in his chair and spoke simple words so that they were violent. "He should have been weak, so that he would be greedy for strength? Slow, and he'd be greedy for speed?"
And then he eased back into the vast armchair, and Envy returned to a slouch and Gluttony tentatively drew his hands off his ears. At this time, when allegiances felt easy to question, it was good to see that Envy looked relieved at the peaceful turn to the conversation. Normally some kind of destruction would have counted as entertainment.
"We would have done half of what we needed if Greed had been a moment slower or slightly weaker. Robberies would have been - and now will be - smaller and more difficult." His hand rasped over his beard in a repeated impatient motion. Envy would have to get around to trimming that soon. "We wouldn't have this house."
He looked around the room with long glares, most likely finding points in the construction to exploit during demolition. There would then be a fire, for certainty. They could sell the house, managing the process from their new base of operations, but that would not leave Father satisfied. Greed had liked this place a lot. Destruction was required.
Well, they couldn't do anything about that until they'd established a new base. Envy would be better at finding a way around hidden corners, though inevitably rude in approaching landowners to rent from, and Gluttony followed plain instructions without complaint.
"I'll inform Pride of what happened," she said, rising and brushing dust from her dress. "He'll want to know."
*
She packed for the journey, which was a nuisance. This visit was to be quick and attracting attention would waste time, so she piled her hair under a hat and donned a second-hand dress and cardigan in faded blues and yellows. The bag was the most annoying extra, as it was a prop she almost never used, but it completed the camouflage. It held money and a change of shoes, and was further stuffed with scarves to round it out. The average man to check the luggage - and it would almost certainly be a man, bent over the bag and stretching small talk to its limit - would think 'ah, pretty little things; that makes sense for a woman', even if out of her company they'd find the baggage unusual.
But even the small obstacle of suspicion did not come up, and the journey to the mountainous part of Amestris was quiet. The number of men who'd come over and talk too much was drastically reduced by simply being quiet, badly dressed, and crossing her arms over her breasts.
Humanity's mores had settled on the more side in the north of the country for the last handful of decades. Times, they declared, were changing now, and Lust did note that hemlines were being allowed to rise. Something to remember in future. For now, she opened her bag and changed out of petite shoes and into work boots that more or less made her a destitute woman allowed to work in the mine factories.
Envy would also have been a good choice to send up here, really. Taking on a miner's appearance meant a greatly decreased likelihood of getting questioned, and she could have helped Gluttony do his job decently and not get as annoyed as Envy would. Envy would soon be setting Gluttony on people for the entertainment value, most likely.
Lust walked out of the train station and directly onto a road that she remembered would take her out of town. The sooner she got to Pride, the better.
Along the way a woman and her husband offered her a lift in their cart, with sympathetic noises as she told of her brother, who had yet to receive notice of a death in the family (it certainly looked like that was the kind of mood Father was in). They dropped her off at the first mining complex she saw, and Lust waved gratefully over her shoulder, and then stood in front of the gates for as if it was difficult to enter. It would have been less easy to explain why she took a sharp turn right near the compound wall and then ran over hills, but if anyone noticed they didn't try to impede her.
The shaft that the homunculi used was liberally decorated with danger signs, and certainly looked in danger of collapse for the first score of metres. Then the struts improved and the floor, walls, and ceiling evened out. Lust tied her dress around her waist to get it out of the way.
And now, she considered, thinking of her runaway brother as she leapt down to a deeper level of the shaft, what to tell Pride?
*
The questions had always been inevitable.
Lust sighed when the door of the smaller lounge opened behind her and no greeting followed. Envy would have made a grand announcement and Gluttony would have called out to her.
"Charming," said Greed. "A downright lovely welcome. You are in all ways a vision, Lust."
She supposed that there was something to be grateful for in the fact that he and Envy had let the sibling rivalry sit on the shelf tonight, rather than taking it off for a polish and the inflicting of blunt force trauma, as per tradition when they had to share a space.
He came to stand beside her on the balcony, looking downhill at the city view as she had been doing, and he showed a few teeth. Premature to be smiling like that - you couldn't say they owned it yet - not the way they would, with about a century's work.
Now she smiled, but it faded when she said, "So ask. 'What do you want, Lust? What is it?'"
He gave her a look. "Usually I like to work my way up to it."
"Exactly my point." Lust turned her back on the lights of the city in the distance and leaned back against the railing. "I think it's safe to skip the prelude. It ends up the same. 'What's in it for you?' 'Why do we listen to him all the time?' 'Don't you want to...?'" She waved a hand. Sometimes she did want to, depending on the suggestion, and this part of the night would find them heading for town. Greed had been having his bouts of questions rather too often, lately, and since Pride was busy elsewhere, she was the best candidate for annoying.
"Look-" His brashness was tempered with despondency, to her surprise. At least it wasn't the usual howl, but depression was more likely to lace Sloth's voice or bring colour to Envy's manias. Greed sighed and said, "Have you fucked somebody yet?"
"It's the name, isn't it? You will never, ever get over it."
"Yeah, it's the name! Call it a clue!" Greed subsided, leaning over and resting his arms on the balcony railing. "Works for the rest of us."
"I told you about that girl."
"That was decades ago."
Envy was always decently happy when somebody played along with little games. Envy even shut up. "And? What more do you expect me to get out of something like that?"
"You didn't enjoy it? Because lemme tell ya, it can, as a matter of fact, be enjoyable. Biological imperatives: God got some stuff right."
"Humans," said Lust, and shrugged. "However much fun sex might be, I really find it difficult to care less about them."
"Who says you have to care?" There he went, starting to work his way up to a shout. Greed straightened, gripping the railing so that muscles worked under skin. "What I don't get is how you don't even give a shit about what you want to do. It's all for Father. Unwavering in your fucking duties."
Was that a quote? Lust had an idea that Father shouldn't try that one on him. He didn't need an excuse for petulance. A chunk of balcony squealed and curled around his grip, and she snorted.
And she thought about all his questions, because even Envy and Pride looked at her askance sometimes and avoided explaining themselves, and sometimes she watched Sloth and Gluttony in their simplicity and then took second looks at herself; because so much of humanity would look at and call a tragic breakdown in the marriage of form and function.
"I want millennia, maybe," said Lust, and tilted her head to look at the sky. "Geological ages. Can you imagine what we could do?" Like diamonds forming under an aeon of irreversible, irresistible change...
Greed stared at her, aghast, and did indeed start howling. He was dependable that way. "You always want to do the same damn thing you've been doing for him?"
Lust unfurled her arms in a shrug as she walked back into the house, laughing to herself a little, but mostly at him.
*
"It should have been obvious," said Lust. Since that night, several years ago, Greed certainly hadn't settled down. They should have expected this from him.
She kept her eyes on a point on the ceiling to meet whichever of Pride's eyes revolved past. He had been stretched far down the twists of the shaft, but now all of him rushed into this cavern, leaving the vital little struts he'd been dismantling, slowly and regularly once safety inspections had finished, in the parts of the mines regularly used by humans.
"No it should not," said Pride with cold clarity. "How dare he betray us...? How could he?"
Pride hissed all along the length of himself, the noise echoing and clamouring up from the dark distance of the mine shafts.
"We'll find him," Lust said, resisting the urge to remind him to be quiet. He'd stop soon enough, not daring to endanger their plans with discovery. "Father's getting angrier and angrier lately."
The hissing subsided abruptly. "You think it's time for the birth of a Wrath?"
Pride had been the one to discover the reference to the Seven Deadly Sins. A book mentioned some obscure manuscript written by a monk whose name, home, and god had been lost in history, but not, it seemed, to Father. Even Gluttony had paid enough attention to the 'stories' to have been waiting for a new sibling for a long time. After all - Father lacked imagination. There was almost no doubt that there would be seven of them in the end.
"You know it's rare to see him emotional. We think he's gearing up for something big, and maybe different to usual."
"The machinery," said Pride.
"Father makes constant adjustments to it. He doesn't seem to be satisfied with it yet, but he keeps working at it."
"Wrath," said Pride, testing the word as if the homunculus could already prove itself that way, and added with a resurgence of fury, "And no Greed."
"I'm sure Wrath could help with that," Lust murmured. "The way Father is now, it would please him very much indeed."
That left Pride almost pacified. She wouldn't give much for Greed's long-term survival if Pride got lucky someday and found out which was the right door to slide under in the dark, though at least Pride would be conscientious enough to keep him alive until he'd spoken to Father. Still, thinking about the possibilities of Wrath would keep things in the mine quiet and continuing as normal. A few more years, and they could be comfortably brought to collapse, marking one more point on the circle.
*
There was a lot of running around the continent after the defection, hunting rumours and searching old haunts. Greed wasn't stupid, though, and both hid himself well and kept out of their business. The hunt stopped some time after Father had formed the fragment of himself that would become Wrath, when he had begun to shape a plan for it. This one was indeed going to be different.
It suited Father better to remain calm, centred in all meanings of the word as he sat on the dais in the centre of the machinery. Lust smiled when she came to give reports, receive instructions, or discuss the adjustment of plans, seeing the completion of the next phase of their goals take form.
"It might even be a good thing Greed left," she said one day. "It changed our plans, but now they might be better than before."
"And yet these ideas were never suggested," said Father, quietly. It had been a fair amount of time since Xerxes, Lust would admit, and they had all exerted great strength. "I suppose you haven't much imagination either."
"Ha, no," Lust agreed. "No. I never said it was a bad thing. We know how to plan, Father, but I think it's in a way where we know how to get from one point to another. Real inspiration is more Envy's forte."
Father's eyes shifted into the middle distance, thinking perhaps of that, perhaps of something else entirely.
"Greed," he said at last. "I can see again it might be good to have him back. Still, spending all those resources..."
"When all he'd want is everything outside the walls you put around him."
"The lack of subtlety was useful. And he also had some of that knack ... inspiration." Father creaked out a sigh. "Subtlety, however, has done the job for a long, long time." And his eyes actually met hers, briefly; not measuring as usual, but accepting.
Acknowledgment. What a surprise.
The biggest surprise being that Lust was herself surprised rather than pleased, even when the realisation sunk in. Father wasn't big on acknowledgment, increasingly so in these latter years, and mostly it was Gluttony that got an occasional pat on the head. Even now, Father's eyes closed and he fell to stillness.
Lust jumped down from the dais, heels striking the floor loudly. She was proud to be praised again, she supposed, after so long.
What do you want?
Perhaps it was an inevitable thing to think of, Greed's ranting and escape from all this. Simple: To win. Lust wanted to glide through crowds and to be her name and a rejection of it, trailing a claw in the pool of humanity and watching the ripples expand as she chose. Call it a game, call it art. Call it life. The warmth of an arm around her shoulders, at times, as the sun warmed a picnic afternoon spent with some grandiose business-owner sot, all for herself and her family to use with the quietest pressures on her part. She wanted exactly what she was and what she had, whatever might be thought of what she was made to be.
Lust wondered if there was a bit of Pride in her. Father might not have worked out all the kinks in the system of creating homunculi when making them.
She wanted to win. It would please her infinitely to see Father when he achieved his goal, as much as it would to see the circle in its completion, renewing her own ouroboros mark.
Lust sent a knowing smile towards the dais. Such a realisation hardly even counted as independence, but even now Father might take it for insurrection. She shrugged and decided to keep it to herself.
For now, she left Father behind, asked Gluttony along for where subtlety would not do, and went to the city of Lior, with what would suffice as ancient religious texts in hand.
Author: demoerin
Recipient: ojuzu
Rating: PG-13 (language, mentions of violence)
Characters/Pairings: Lust, the other homunculi
Summary: Lust and the fallout of the first and only defection among the homunculi.
Notes: Spoilers up to about Wrath's backstory.
"You have no imagination, Father."
The ensuing silence was awkward. Envy went extraordinarily bug-eyed and Gluttony clapped his hands over his own mouth, then over his ears - but at least it was a change from the stunned vigil over the fact of Greed's absence.
"Lust," it ground out of Father and the machinery they had begun to bind to him, "if you also choose rebellion at this point, be assured that it's a poor time for it."
"Greed's form could have been chosen differently. Couldn't it? His own form could have directed his greed to something else. It's been obvious for a long time that he was unhappy here."
Father leaned forwards in his chair and spoke simple words so that they were violent. "He should have been weak, so that he would be greedy for strength? Slow, and he'd be greedy for speed?"
And then he eased back into the vast armchair, and Envy returned to a slouch and Gluttony tentatively drew his hands off his ears. At this time, when allegiances felt easy to question, it was good to see that Envy looked relieved at the peaceful turn to the conversation. Normally some kind of destruction would have counted as entertainment.
"We would have done half of what we needed if Greed had been a moment slower or slightly weaker. Robberies would have been - and now will be - smaller and more difficult." His hand rasped over his beard in a repeated impatient motion. Envy would have to get around to trimming that soon. "We wouldn't have this house."
He looked around the room with long glares, most likely finding points in the construction to exploit during demolition. There would then be a fire, for certainty. They could sell the house, managing the process from their new base of operations, but that would not leave Father satisfied. Greed had liked this place a lot. Destruction was required.
Well, they couldn't do anything about that until they'd established a new base. Envy would be better at finding a way around hidden corners, though inevitably rude in approaching landowners to rent from, and Gluttony followed plain instructions without complaint.
"I'll inform Pride of what happened," she said, rising and brushing dust from her dress. "He'll want to know."
*
She packed for the journey, which was a nuisance. This visit was to be quick and attracting attention would waste time, so she piled her hair under a hat and donned a second-hand dress and cardigan in faded blues and yellows. The bag was the most annoying extra, as it was a prop she almost never used, but it completed the camouflage. It held money and a change of shoes, and was further stuffed with scarves to round it out. The average man to check the luggage - and it would almost certainly be a man, bent over the bag and stretching small talk to its limit - would think 'ah, pretty little things; that makes sense for a woman', even if out of her company they'd find the baggage unusual.
But even the small obstacle of suspicion did not come up, and the journey to the mountainous part of Amestris was quiet. The number of men who'd come over and talk too much was drastically reduced by simply being quiet, badly dressed, and crossing her arms over her breasts.
Humanity's mores had settled on the more side in the north of the country for the last handful of decades. Times, they declared, were changing now, and Lust did note that hemlines were being allowed to rise. Something to remember in future. For now, she opened her bag and changed out of petite shoes and into work boots that more or less made her a destitute woman allowed to work in the mine factories.
Envy would also have been a good choice to send up here, really. Taking on a miner's appearance meant a greatly decreased likelihood of getting questioned, and she could have helped Gluttony do his job decently and not get as annoyed as Envy would. Envy would soon be setting Gluttony on people for the entertainment value, most likely.
Lust walked out of the train station and directly onto a road that she remembered would take her out of town. The sooner she got to Pride, the better.
Along the way a woman and her husband offered her a lift in their cart, with sympathetic noises as she told of her brother, who had yet to receive notice of a death in the family (it certainly looked like that was the kind of mood Father was in). They dropped her off at the first mining complex she saw, and Lust waved gratefully over her shoulder, and then stood in front of the gates for as if it was difficult to enter. It would have been less easy to explain why she took a sharp turn right near the compound wall and then ran over hills, but if anyone noticed they didn't try to impede her.
The shaft that the homunculi used was liberally decorated with danger signs, and certainly looked in danger of collapse for the first score of metres. Then the struts improved and the floor, walls, and ceiling evened out. Lust tied her dress around her waist to get it out of the way.
And now, she considered, thinking of her runaway brother as she leapt down to a deeper level of the shaft, what to tell Pride?
*
The questions had always been inevitable.
Lust sighed when the door of the smaller lounge opened behind her and no greeting followed. Envy would have made a grand announcement and Gluttony would have called out to her.
"Charming," said Greed. "A downright lovely welcome. You are in all ways a vision, Lust."
She supposed that there was something to be grateful for in the fact that he and Envy had let the sibling rivalry sit on the shelf tonight, rather than taking it off for a polish and the inflicting of blunt force trauma, as per tradition when they had to share a space.
He came to stand beside her on the balcony, looking downhill at the city view as she had been doing, and he showed a few teeth. Premature to be smiling like that - you couldn't say they owned it yet - not the way they would, with about a century's work.
Now she smiled, but it faded when she said, "So ask. 'What do you want, Lust? What is it?'"
He gave her a look. "Usually I like to work my way up to it."
"Exactly my point." Lust turned her back on the lights of the city in the distance and leaned back against the railing. "I think it's safe to skip the prelude. It ends up the same. 'What's in it for you?' 'Why do we listen to him all the time?' 'Don't you want to...?'" She waved a hand. Sometimes she did want to, depending on the suggestion, and this part of the night would find them heading for town. Greed had been having his bouts of questions rather too often, lately, and since Pride was busy elsewhere, she was the best candidate for annoying.
"Look-" His brashness was tempered with despondency, to her surprise. At least it wasn't the usual howl, but depression was more likely to lace Sloth's voice or bring colour to Envy's manias. Greed sighed and said, "Have you fucked somebody yet?"
"It's the name, isn't it? You will never, ever get over it."
"Yeah, it's the name! Call it a clue!" Greed subsided, leaning over and resting his arms on the balcony railing. "Works for the rest of us."
"I told you about that girl."
"That was decades ago."
Envy was always decently happy when somebody played along with little games. Envy even shut up. "And? What more do you expect me to get out of something like that?"
"You didn't enjoy it? Because lemme tell ya, it can, as a matter of fact, be enjoyable. Biological imperatives: God got some stuff right."
"Humans," said Lust, and shrugged. "However much fun sex might be, I really find it difficult to care less about them."
"Who says you have to care?" There he went, starting to work his way up to a shout. Greed straightened, gripping the railing so that muscles worked under skin. "What I don't get is how you don't even give a shit about what you want to do. It's all for Father. Unwavering in your fucking duties."
Was that a quote? Lust had an idea that Father shouldn't try that one on him. He didn't need an excuse for petulance. A chunk of balcony squealed and curled around his grip, and she snorted.
And she thought about all his questions, because even Envy and Pride looked at her askance sometimes and avoided explaining themselves, and sometimes she watched Sloth and Gluttony in their simplicity and then took second looks at herself; because so much of humanity would look at and call a tragic breakdown in the marriage of form and function.
"I want millennia, maybe," said Lust, and tilted her head to look at the sky. "Geological ages. Can you imagine what we could do?" Like diamonds forming under an aeon of irreversible, irresistible change...
Greed stared at her, aghast, and did indeed start howling. He was dependable that way. "You always want to do the same damn thing you've been doing for him?"
Lust unfurled her arms in a shrug as she walked back into the house, laughing to herself a little, but mostly at him.
*
"It should have been obvious," said Lust. Since that night, several years ago, Greed certainly hadn't settled down. They should have expected this from him.
She kept her eyes on a point on the ceiling to meet whichever of Pride's eyes revolved past. He had been stretched far down the twists of the shaft, but now all of him rushed into this cavern, leaving the vital little struts he'd been dismantling, slowly and regularly once safety inspections had finished, in the parts of the mines regularly used by humans.
"No it should not," said Pride with cold clarity. "How dare he betray us...? How could he?"
Pride hissed all along the length of himself, the noise echoing and clamouring up from the dark distance of the mine shafts.
"We'll find him," Lust said, resisting the urge to remind him to be quiet. He'd stop soon enough, not daring to endanger their plans with discovery. "Father's getting angrier and angrier lately."
The hissing subsided abruptly. "You think it's time for the birth of a Wrath?"
Pride had been the one to discover the reference to the Seven Deadly Sins. A book mentioned some obscure manuscript written by a monk whose name, home, and god had been lost in history, but not, it seemed, to Father. Even Gluttony had paid enough attention to the 'stories' to have been waiting for a new sibling for a long time. After all - Father lacked imagination. There was almost no doubt that there would be seven of them in the end.
"You know it's rare to see him emotional. We think he's gearing up for something big, and maybe different to usual."
"The machinery," said Pride.
"Father makes constant adjustments to it. He doesn't seem to be satisfied with it yet, but he keeps working at it."
"Wrath," said Pride, testing the word as if the homunculus could already prove itself that way, and added with a resurgence of fury, "And no Greed."
"I'm sure Wrath could help with that," Lust murmured. "The way Father is now, it would please him very much indeed."
That left Pride almost pacified. She wouldn't give much for Greed's long-term survival if Pride got lucky someday and found out which was the right door to slide under in the dark, though at least Pride would be conscientious enough to keep him alive until he'd spoken to Father. Still, thinking about the possibilities of Wrath would keep things in the mine quiet and continuing as normal. A few more years, and they could be comfortably brought to collapse, marking one more point on the circle.
*
There was a lot of running around the continent after the defection, hunting rumours and searching old haunts. Greed wasn't stupid, though, and both hid himself well and kept out of their business. The hunt stopped some time after Father had formed the fragment of himself that would become Wrath, when he had begun to shape a plan for it. This one was indeed going to be different.
It suited Father better to remain calm, centred in all meanings of the word as he sat on the dais in the centre of the machinery. Lust smiled when she came to give reports, receive instructions, or discuss the adjustment of plans, seeing the completion of the next phase of their goals take form.
"It might even be a good thing Greed left," she said one day. "It changed our plans, but now they might be better than before."
"And yet these ideas were never suggested," said Father, quietly. It had been a fair amount of time since Xerxes, Lust would admit, and they had all exerted great strength. "I suppose you haven't much imagination either."
"Ha, no," Lust agreed. "No. I never said it was a bad thing. We know how to plan, Father, but I think it's in a way where we know how to get from one point to another. Real inspiration is more Envy's forte."
Father's eyes shifted into the middle distance, thinking perhaps of that, perhaps of something else entirely.
"Greed," he said at last. "I can see again it might be good to have him back. Still, spending all those resources..."
"When all he'd want is everything outside the walls you put around him."
"The lack of subtlety was useful. And he also had some of that knack ... inspiration." Father creaked out a sigh. "Subtlety, however, has done the job for a long, long time." And his eyes actually met hers, briefly; not measuring as usual, but accepting.
Acknowledgment. What a surprise.
The biggest surprise being that Lust was herself surprised rather than pleased, even when the realisation sunk in. Father wasn't big on acknowledgment, increasingly so in these latter years, and mostly it was Gluttony that got an occasional pat on the head. Even now, Father's eyes closed and he fell to stillness.
Lust jumped down from the dais, heels striking the floor loudly. She was proud to be praised again, she supposed, after so long.
What do you want?
Perhaps it was an inevitable thing to think of, Greed's ranting and escape from all this. Simple: To win. Lust wanted to glide through crowds and to be her name and a rejection of it, trailing a claw in the pool of humanity and watching the ripples expand as she chose. Call it a game, call it art. Call it life. The warmth of an arm around her shoulders, at times, as the sun warmed a picnic afternoon spent with some grandiose business-owner sot, all for herself and her family to use with the quietest pressures on her part. She wanted exactly what she was and what she had, whatever might be thought of what she was made to be.
Lust wondered if there was a bit of Pride in her. Father might not have worked out all the kinks in the system of creating homunculi when making them.
She wanted to win. It would please her infinitely to see Father when he achieved his goal, as much as it would to see the circle in its completion, renewing her own ouroboros mark.
Lust sent a knowing smile towards the dais. Such a realisation hardly even counted as independence, but even now Father might take it for insurrection. She shrugged and decided to keep it to herself.
For now, she left Father behind, asked Gluttony along for where subtlety would not do, and went to the city of Lior, with what would suffice as ancient religious texts in hand.