Chapter Text
Run. Run. Hide. Run. Get away. Find outside. Run.
Envy barely notices the stone walls scraping his hide as he slams and writhes his clumsy, limbless body through the corridor. No more than he notices the sting of bullets hitting the end of his tail. Injuries don't matter. He won't get another chance at this.
Run run run RUN!
He can see light up ahead, more silver than the dim orange sconces he's gotten used to from that round chamber. It's moonlight it's moonlight it's outside he's so close!
The glass from the tall windows cuts into his face as he bulls his way through them, but then he can smell the fresh, petrichor air in his flared nostrils and he can feel wet grass and mud underneath him. Thunder rumbles loud in the distance. Men are shouting, but not very many.
He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know where he's going. But anywhere is better than back inside that building. If he can just run fast enough, if he can just hide, they won't catch him again. Envy picks a direction and goes, smashing through an ornamental stone wall and multiple hedges on his way.
Lengths of chain rattle behind him, but what's left of those are already starting to slide off on their own as he slithers and pushes his way forward along the ground. He'd never gotten the chance to learn how to move this massive form with any grace. So the writhing isn't graceful, probably not as fast as it could be, but still fast enough that soon he can't hear shouting behind him anymore. Grass becomes cobblestone under his belly. A road. Raindrops start to hit his skin in cold pops, and lightning flashes light up the countryside around him. Some part of him, the part that's still thinking anything at all beyond animal panic, knows that the coming storm will provide much needed cover. Staying on the road will make it easier not to leave a huge, muddy trail to be followed.
Before long, the rain's coming down so hard that even his eyes are struggling to make out too many details ahead. All the harder for the humans to find him, then. The road forks, and he can see the lights of a city in the distance in one direction. In the other, there’s only dark country and the occasional lights of a single house, or smaller cluster of them. He takes that way.
He's not sure how long it's been when he hears a car engine behind him, faint but getting louder. Fading adrenaline surges, and the next thing he knows he's off the road and crashing through underbrush, wind howling and slapping wet branches into his face. He has to lift his chin up off the ground enough that the great loops of chain wrapped tight around his jaws don't catch on anything. He can still hear the car. And then a familiar sound by now: the click and hiss of a floodlight. His eyes roll wildly in the direction he heard it, and he finally notices that there really is a lot of wooded brush around him. Enough to hide in, if he's careful. He drops where he is, flattens to the ground as much as he can and goes still. Shuts his eyes, so they won't glint. The light he saw wasn't too big, it couldn't have been to be mounted on a car. It should be near impossible to actually spot him with it in this weather.
Minutes drag. Envy listens to the rain and wind and his own massive, pounding heart, and waits for the sound of approaching humans crashing towards him to drag him back to that room and the chanting and the pain. His tail throbs where the bullets had peppered it. He wishes with everything he has to shrink, to shift as he's always been able to. The power doesn't respond, just the way it hasn't ever since he fell into this place. His body stays exactly as it is.
No footsteps approach him. No more guns fire on him. The car engine turns over, and begins to move farther away until he can't hear it anymore. They've missed him, in the dark.
A crack of thunder right overhead startles him, provokes him forward again. He has to move. Has to get away. No room for anything else.
Run. Hide. Run. Hide.
He thinks he can see the edge of the small wood, and starts towards it, if only so that he can get some idea of where he is. The treeline’s so cleanly cut that it’s got to be another road or a wall or something manmade, right? When he reaches it, Envy only gets a glimpse of the steep drop and the river below before the ground crumbles beneath his weight and he's falling, tumbling in a slide of mud and brambles. His chin hits the water so hard it might as well have been made of stone. The feeling of half of him being yanked under and along by the swift current while the back of him is still falling is beyond disorienting--Christ, why had he made himself so fucking long?!
Envy writhes in the water, nose slamming against the rocky riverbed as he first goes down instead of up, and eventually manages to break the surface...for a few seconds. The river is swollen with the storm, rushing too fast and too deep and tossing him in every possible direction. It feels like every boulder in the river is hitting three or four different parts of him one after the other on his way downstream. He tries to move the way he knows snakes do in the water, but can’t get the rhythm of it. Either he hits a rock or a floating tree or an unseen roil in the current pulls part of him down and then he's just floundering again. When he can see them, the banks are still just as high on either side of him. Even if he could manage to lunge out, they'd just collapse under him again. He can't even try to grab at anything with his teeth. There's nothing he can do but fight to keep his head up and be carried along to wherever the river is headed to.
By the time he catches sight of the half-fallen down stone bridge, he barely knows what he's looking at. Just that there's a big, solid shape ahead, sticking into the river and within his reach. His desperate lunge towards the base of it nearly misses the mark, but he's able to catch his body up on it without just breaking through the thing. Wrapping around it helps get him enough leverage to start shoving himself up out of the water.
A bit at a time, he hauls himself out. First his chin slams down onto the bank, then his neck, then more and more of his body until he's a coiled heap on the ground. Covered in river mud, battered, sides heaving, but out of the water. Who knows where he even is.
Somewhere far away from his pursuers, hopefully. A fit of coughing takes him, his body trying to expel the water he'd inhaled even if he can't actually drown on it. The muzzle makes it even harder. The longer he lies there and coughs, the more aware he is of the restriction and how much he can’t stand it and wants it off of him. When the fit dies down, he lurches to start scraping the side of his face against the bridge, against the ground, against his own sides trying to loosen the chains. Strains to open his mouth wider in hopes of breaking them. Scrape, shake, try to open, over and over.
It takes a long time, but finally, finally he feels the links begin to give. One loop snaps, and he flings himself all the harder into it as the rest go one by one. The chains clatter onto the ground, and for a few moments he simply stares down at the pile. Breathes, ragged and deep, through an open mouth for the first time in…in a while. He’s done it. There’s no more chains on him. He’s ripped loose of every single one that the humans had used to catch and bind and make him into nothing but the thing they could use to play at being wizards. Something lesser than even a homunculus. Something in Envy’s head sparks. In a furious rush he bites down on the chains and a sizable amount of mud, then whips his head to fling them into the river, snarling after them as they disappear.
It’s not long before the spark starts to fade out, too tiring to maintain longer. His fins droop, and Envy sinks back to the ground, earth squelching underneath him unpleasantly. Maybe he could just lay here for a few minutes. That couldn't hurt anything, could it? All he can see around him are thick woods and an overgrown, abandoned road leading to the broken bridge. He'd floated a long way. The humans wouldn't be driving down here any time soon. The loamy smell of soaked forest fills his nose. Rain trickles through the thick pine boughs above and runs down his aching sides. It could be worse. How long has it been, anyway, since he's felt rain?
Envy opens his eyes to lighter rainfall, a little bit more light in the sky, and the sputtering drone of an engine. He freezes in place, eyes darting around the forest and up the road--how long had he been asleep?! He can't see anything, and it doesn't sound like a car...it's not coming from the road.
It's coming from somewhere above.
Some instinct seizes him, pushes him to squirm further under the cover of the trees, winding the length of his body in between the trunks. Carefully, so as to keep from shaking them or knocking one over. What is he hearing? How is he hearing an engine in the sky?
When he's as hidden as he can be, Envy looks up. He can't catch sight of anything right away, not through the branches, but when he does...what is that?!
At first he doesn’t quite believe that he doesn't just have mud and rain in his eyes. It’s a metal tube, moving fast with stiff, protruding wings on either side like a gliding bird...Envy's eyes widen. The humans can fly here. They don't need to be on the ground to chase him at all.
Envy's been a bird on occasion. He's seen pictures from military spy balloons. Seeing the signs of anything from the air is so much easier. The fins coming off the back of his face are trembling, as though they want to flare out. Those, at least, he's gotten used to managing, and he presses them flat against his neck instead. Maybe whoever's in the flying machine won't see anything. It's still dark and raining. The rain hasn't washed away most of the mud on him. That would help disguise his shape, wouldn’t it? He forces his eyes off of the thing in the sky and towards where he'd left the river. Had he disturbed the ground there too much? Left a track? More of one than would be caused by the storm? Impossible to tell from here.
The machine doesn't circle, like he imagines it would if the driver saw something. Like a vulture would. It simply continues to buzz through the sky on its way, following the river.
It's a struggle to make himself move again, even after the droning noise is long gone. The adrenaline of the escape has abandoned him. What if another flying machine comes and he's not in as hidden a spot? What else doesn’t he know about? With a growl, he snaps his teeth with a gunshot crack to break the frozen uncertainty. ‘Don’t be stupid. Keep moving before the sun comes up or you’re gonna find out what else there is.’
It works well enough for him to start to heave himself forward. With extra reason not to leave a trail of smashed timber, he's having to really figure out how to slither through the trees. The road would be easier, but the cover isn’t as good, so tree dodging it is. It’s something to focus on besides not having any clue where he is. He could almost mistake this forest for an Amestrian one. The rain keeps up, leaving more green streaks through the mud on his back. Birds are waking up in the soggy branches to sing, and squirrels start to emerge and chatter warnings at each other about the unknown creature bumping against their trees. He's not about to call any part of this nice, but it's better than the sound of cultists chanting magic spells at him.
That more peaceful line of thinking lasts until, with his eyes up to the sky to check for machines, he runs nose-first into a blackberry bramble and has to clench his jaws tight to stop himself from screeching out every single curse he knows.
It's slow going, inching along with his eyes now firmly on the ground in front of him. Worse when the road is right there and wouldn't be making him feel like he's tying himself into knots. The extra cover is still worth it, because he hears two other machines pass overhead and keep going like the first had.
Eventually, the road leads to something. A moss covered stone ruin, half fallen in. It's been thoroughly consumed by the forest, without even a real clearing around the walls. It's hard to tell what it might have been, and Envy couldn't care less. It's got at least part of a roof, big enough that he might be able to rest out of the rain and out of sight. He starts forward, then pauses. The variety of stinging, burning hurts lingering all over his nose remind him not to rush straight in.
A little distance outside the arched entry sits a sentinel. A huge natural boulder, hacked into the rough shape of a crouching, bat-winged beast. Some matching company for him. He thinks it's big enough that he might be able to get up onto it and net a better look inside the walls of the structure before he sticks his face in there. It's still under tree cover, and he'd get out of the damn mud for a few minutes.
He's halfway up on it, body wrapping back and forth to fit like he's seen tree snakes do, when he hears another engine. Faster than he can think, he's managed to coil his entire length up and over itself in a frozen ball, as though he's become a gargoyle himself. His eyes are trained upwards, wide and heedless of the rain pelting into them. The sound passes by like the others had, so far to the left of where he is that he hadn't even been able to see the source of it.
Envy can't bring himself to move for a long time, and pretends that he can't feel himself shivering.
Another squirrel starts up a scolding chatter from the nearest tree. Then he feels the lightest tap on the top of his head, and something tiny rolls and bounces down the side of it. A minute later, it happens again.
The squirrel is throwing things at him.
It's so absurd, so stupid and harmless, that it breaks his paralysis. He’s not going to be outdone in bravery by an actual rodent. Envy shifts, muscles unknotting themselves as he does finally lift his head to peer inside the structure like he'd planned on doing in the first place. There's not an obvious pit inside, no more thorns and no wild animals big enough to cause him a problem worse than a tossed acorn. He thinks the part that still has a roof is even large enough to fit him under it with room to spare, if he coils up. Good enough for him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of the very brave, very stupid squirrel darting back into its hole. Considers snapping at it.
Not worth his energy. He can let it live this time.
Once he's gotten himself inside the ruin, which even has a debris-strewn but solid stone floor instead of more wretched mud? Once he's out of the rain, and is truly hidden from the flying machines? Envy lets his eyes fall closed. Opens them again to grey, daylit drizzle. Then opens them again to night having come back around. He itches all over under the drying mud, and the deeper bruises still ache. To say his nose stings would be an understatement, unless that meant being repeatedly stung by an entire swarm of hornets. He can tell it’s started healing, but nowhere near as fast as he’s used to. Every lingering piece of glass or blackberry thorn still stuck in it are shooting little lightning flares through his nerves to make sure he doesn’t forget them. His tail hurts like hell too, the skin tight and swollen around the wounds, and hopefully the bullets embedded in it get pushed out on their own like they used to. If they don't, he doesn't know what he'll even do about them. It's exhausting to think about.
He opens his eyes a third time to real daylight, the first he's seen since...he struggles to remember. It must have been since...had it been when he'd gone underground that final time, carrying Alphonse?
Years ago.
He doesn't want to think about it. It doesn't matter anymore. What matters is...is that he's alive, right now. That's what he has, and it has to be enough. Just like it always has.
Fighting not to fall asleep again, Envy starts trying to think about how to stay that way.
It's not an easy puzzle, with so much unknown. What else can humans do in this place that he doesn't know anything about?
He can't exactly sneak into a town or city to ask any questions, looking this way. He doubts he can sneak anywhere like this. This form is too big, too unwieldy, too flashy. He’d been going for ferocious and interesting when he'd first designed it decades ago. Figuring out a dragon shape had been a dare from one of the old Wraths, and he'd idly kept up with tweaking at the concept over the years, mostly when he'd been bored on missions. He hadn't ever tried to change into the full size. Not until he'd used it to bull his way through the Gate, when gravity hadn't mattered and moving had been like flying. He'd never designed it with the thought of staying in it. In reality it weighs all around him like a suffocating blanket. It's the reason the humans had been able to catch him, and why he knows they could do it again if he gives them the chance. He doesn't even have hands, nothing he can use that way except his mouth. And that isn't fit for anything except tearing whatever's in front of him to pieces.
It's a real monster's body. While he'd been trapped, he'd wondered sometimes if that had been the toll the Gate took for letting him through. But he knows homunculi can't make exchanges. They can't do alchemy. They can be a toll for someone else but can't pay one themselves. This form had been his own stupid decision, a last ditch effort to make himself strong enough to get the rest of the way through the portal to his father.
His father who's still back in that damn building. His father who'd been happy to allow those humans to chain him and slowly drain the energy and life out of him like parasites for years. The cultists had mentioned Hohenheim’s name sometimes, but the bastard hadn't bothered to so much as lay eyes on him once since Envy had first crashed through the Gate into their little ceremony. Not that that’s anything new. A growl rattles to life at the back of his throat. It echoes off the walls, filling the whole space.
He can't bear the thought of going anywhere near that place again, not even to catch Hohenheim. For now, his father is out of his reach. Again. Temporarily. Bastard's at least still alive in this world. That will have to be enough for now.
What other option does he have?
'Where will I go?'
The question drifts through his head in a different voice than his own. It carries the memory of cheap diner food and dismal weather and stirs a strange, hollow, aching sensation in his chest. He shoves the thought down. Doesn't matter. Not the question or the feeling. Never has, never will. Not for something like him.
It's just as she'd always repeated, for centuries. There's no point in pretending to be human when he isn't one. It's foolish, and pathetic, and she'd given him this name to make sure he would always remember that what humans have isn't for him. The body he's trapped in will remind him of that now, too. Can't even fake it anymore.
Something in his middle squeezes, hurts, and he bares his teeth at the floor.
He's just a monster. He's always, only, ever been a monster. Why should he bother thinking or wanting otherwise when it wasn’t ever going to happen in the first place? He can't afford to. He's got to survive out here in this alien place, and someday he'll find Hohenheim when that bastard's strayed away from that group and their spears and their chains. Someday he might even catch some of them on their own, too, and rip them apart like they’d been so eager to do to him. If they’re alone, and he’s sure they couldn’t catch him again.
The sunlight shifts and glints off the damp ground outside, catching his eye. Envy throws his attention back towards that instead of the unpleasant, consuming track his thoughts have drifted down. The soggy, sunlit ruin is a much better view than he’s had for a while. It’s okay, as distractions go.
Slowly, almost without even realizing he's doing it, Envy uncoils his head from the rest of the pile. Inches it forwards until he’s got half his face peeking out into the sun. It's warm. It’s...not bad, feeling it again. His eyes slide halfway shut.
He resists crawling out any further, in case one of the machines flies over, but...maybe when it's gotten dark, he could find his way back to the river to get rid of the worst of the dried muck. Figure out what kind of forest this is, see if there's any better shelter around. Something in him squirms in discomfort, an old itch that says ‘not so fast, what about…?’
Another thought flits across his mind in response: he'll have to make decisions on his own now. There's no Master. No what about. No orders. He's on his own. She's not here she won't ever find him he'll never see her again he's free he’s alone she's gone–
Envy blinks, dazed, and finds that the sun has almost set. His nose hurts so much worse it had before. What he can see of it when he crosses his eyes shows him that the worst of the glass and brambles are gone, but there’s a shredded mess left behind. The whole side of his head is throbbing, and feels damp and tacky. The part of his tail around where he’d been shot feels so mangled he’s afraid to look at it. He's pressed against the back wall of the ruin in a tangle, and there's less wall at the front than there had been. Stones are scattered where they weren't before, and there's something dark smeared in streaks on the ground. He can taste blood. He's shaking, violently, and can't seem to make himself stop.
What had even happened? He’d…attacked the wall? Why? And then…what, dragged his face all over the floor? Had he bitten into his own fucking tail like some kind of stupid cosmic joke? How much noise had he made, doing all that? He can't remember more than a vague blur. He doesn't want to remember more, in case that makes it happen again. It's too risky, he can't be out here having...having fits when he needs to stay hidden. He can’t afford to make his injuries any worse when they’re already healing so slowly.
It was that he'd been thinking too much. He's sure of it. It's always because of thinking too much when things like this happen.
So...he'll stop. It's not so difficult, he's had a long time to learn how to bury what he needs to. How much does a dragon need to think, anyway? All he needs to deal with is the immediate, and there’s plenty of that. Everything else is clearly a dangerous liability.
Run. Hide. Find Hohenheim.
Survive.