Work Text:
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Entry tags: |
flashfic, fma, lust |
(flashfic) 50/50 (FMA, pre-sin!Lust, PG-13)
title: 50/50
fandom: FMA
character: Lust
rating/warning: PG-13, mild angst
note: written because it's been in my head a while and needed to come out and make way for other things. Lust before she became a Sin.
In her experience, it wasn't a 50/50 proposition. She knew that most people liked to think of it that way; that most people convinced themselves that it was like that for them - and maybe a few of them were even right - but that wasn't her experience.
In her experience, one person always loved more than the other one. Sometimes just a little bit. Sometimes a lot. In her experience, she was almost always the one who loved less. Which wasn't to say that she didn't love at all - she did, but not as much. And sometimes she felt terrible about the discrepancy. Sometimes she tried to fool herself into loving more than she did. Sometimes it worked, but usually it didn't - it was hard to believe in love you had to tell yourself to feel.
She was a woman who thought too much, and sometimes she would get lost in her own mind, moving from one thought to the next, and she liked it in there. She liked her own thoughts and the way they moved, so much so that she would spend all her time with them if she could. If it wouldn't make him so upset; so angry and so sad. She didn't mean to hurt him - had never meant to - but if sometimes following her own thoughts in her own head was more interesting than listening to him blather on about his...well. She'd never meant to hurt him.
Her curse was her face. It was too pretty to hold all those thoughts - at least, that's what people had always told her. As for him, he was proud of her pretty. More proud of her pretty than he was of her thoughts, and that was how she knew he loved her more than she loved him back - because he could let her pretty convince him that she was everything he wanted and more. Even though she knew she wasn't; that she was only part of what he wanted and less. That was how she knew she loved him at all; because she was willing to let him pretend.
When she found out she was dying, she saw it as a blessing. She could lose herself in her thoughts completely and leave her face behind; and after she was gone he could find someone else, someone easier to pretend with than her. Best thing for both of them, and when she told him this, he cried. He curled over her bed and wept-promised that there would never be another, and the part of her that feared knew that he was right. She stroked his hair and whispered little things to him - on her deathbed and still, even here, he had to be the center of her attention - whispered little lies about it all being okay while she wondered when her life had become something to be escaped rather than lived.
She died, and it was nice. It wasn't so bad, really, being dead. She rather liked it. There was time, finally, to sit and watch and think about things, and no one demanded her attention when she wasn't of a mind to give it. No one was saddened because she was doing something that didn't involve them. It was liberating, being dead. Never in life had she felt so unencumbered.
And then, suddenly, the niceness of being dead ended.
It hurt - searing pain; a world of violations - to be dragged back into living. She could feel her thoughts being torn away from her, and with each one lost she screamed herself raw. When they were gone all she felt of herself - all she knew of herself - was blood and flesh and nerves without the luxury of skin to hold them all together. Some part of her was aware enough to assess her surroundings, and when she saw his face again it was meaningless. His face - eyes filled with pain from his meaningless sacrifice and all the hope in his meaningless heart - she knew she should know that face, but she didn't know why. She looked into his eyes and simply thought, "You again?"
He was the one dying now, and she envied him as she left him there. Yet, even in her envy, she felt her footsteps on the precipice of a second chance. She wasn't sure why she wanted another shot at life, only that something was owed to her. And she meant to take it - whatever that something was - take it for all it was worth.
She found others like her and they called her Lust, and this time around when people judged her by her face she didn't take quiet offense. Instead, this time, she let them.