The Knight in Slightly Tarnished Armor (yuuo) wrote in chaotic_library, @ 2007-06-11 17:53:00 |
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Current music: | Meredith Brooks - Nobody's Home |
Entry tags: | dante (fma), envy, fma, fma: pre-anime, gen, hohenheim, pg-rated, short story, yuuo, yuuo-lj, yuuo: fma |
[Hohenheim; Envy; Dante; PG] Cradle to Coffin
Characters/Series: Hohenheim and Envy; Fullmetal Alchemist
Rating: PG
Notes: Part one in a series of short ficlets centering primarily on Hohenheim, even if not all the parts will be from his perspective. For the purposes of this series and drawing the parallels with later parts that I wanted to, I went with a name for Envy that paralleled Ed's in meaning- William. The middle name came from RP sessions and I kept it 'cause I could and I was too lazy to go with anything else. :D Fullmetal Alchemist is copyright Square Enix and Hiromu Arakawa and used without permission.
Title: Cradle to Coffin; Part 1/?
Author: yuuo
Word Count: 2050
Summary: That woman did not deserve this.
Original LJ Post Date: Feb 11, 2006 @ Chaotic_Library
"What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin."
-Henry Ward Beecher
Cradle to Coffin
That woman did not deserve this.
It was tragic, really, that that was his first thought upon hearing his son's idea, but it crossed his mind all the same and stayed there, repeating itself on a loop as his son excitedly explained his idea for a gift for his mother.
That woman did not deserve this sort of devotion or love.
It had not taken long to see that Dante resented their son to the point of cold and thinly-veiled hostility, and the boy never understood her actions, the way she spoke to him, when she even bothered to acknowledge him at all. Hohenheim, on the other hand, adored the boy, his golden smile and that keen brilliance that he recognized from his own youth.
Perhaps it was purely egoism for how much the boy was a reflection of himself that caused his adoration, but he highly doubted it. For as logical as that answer seemed, it simply did not feel right. He was a scientist, certainly, but he'd learned over the last three-quarters century that even though everything, even emotions, could be very logical in nature, there always was and always would be a bit of chaos threaded through it, something wholly illogical and impossible to predict.
Dante's emotions, unfortunately, were not so illogical to guess at the reason for. She was jealous, bitterly envious of the attention that Hohenheim gave their son that she'd once had a sort of totaltarian dominance over, and it was eating her alive. It hurt him to see it; part of him very much missed the woman he'd loved that had seemed to completely disappear since she gave birth-
(she was never that, really, it's me that's changed; I'm getting a glimpse of life outside of my experiments and that woman)
-and she never failed, however subtly and wordlessly, to remind him that it was his fault for continuing to make an effort to be a father to the boy.
She always managed to push it down to a 'him or me' choice, and in the end Hohenheim always favored his son, put off by Dante's emulous pettiness and completely enamoured with watching his son grow and learn and become his own person. Slighted, Dante always made the boy suffer for Hohenheim's choices, and Hohenheim in turn would make every effort to make it up to the boy and shield him from his wife's insecurities as much as he could, creating a vicious cycle, with his golden child caught in the middle of it all.
That woman really did not deserve this.
He'd wanted to tell his son no, to try to talk him out of the idea, but it was clear from his expression that he would not be deterred; he was determined to follow through with this, with or without his father's help.
"It's for Mother's birthday!" the all-together too willful eight year old insisted stubbornly, arms crossed and jaw set tightly as he waited for his father to give him the answer he clearly wanted to hear, rather than the one he'd been hearing.
Hohenheim studied him over the edge of his book for a moment, then sighed and marked his place before setting the book aside. "All right," he relented, the thought that Dante did not deserve such devotion from her son echoing louder against the inside of his skull as the boy's face lit up triumphantly.
"Great! Come on, I've got everything all set up in the laboratory already," he said quickly, practically leaping forward and grabbing his father's hand, trying to tug him to his feet.
Hohenheim frowned as he let himself be dragged out of his chair. "What all do you have set up?"
The boy paused and looked at him. "Hm? Oh, the silver and the copper ores and I got the flask with the mercury out-"
"William," Hohenheim interrupted him, tone stern as he pulled his hand back from his son's to take his glasses off his face and clean them on the edge of his shirt. William shrank back a bit in front of him at his name and Hohenheim had to bite his tongue to keep a spiteful and decidedly 'not for children's ears' word from slipping out at the way he recoiled. Dante had made the sound of his own name fearful to hear for him, with the way she used it as an insult whenever she addressed him.
Kneeling down to his level, he put his hands on the boy's shoulders gently. "Brian," he said with a gentler tone, using William's middle name to address him to leech a bit more of the sting out of his statement, "I know very well you're a capable boy in the laboratory, but you know that I don't want you handling the dangerous chemicals until-"
"But Father-"
"-until," he cut off his son's protests, "your hands have outgrown that clumsiness that every child goes through." William seemed moderately, if begrudgingly, pacified by that statement. He rose back to his feet. "Now, let's go make this present of yours, shall we?"