autumn_winding @ 2007-01-24T01:19:00

2007-01-24T06:23:56Z

Title: Remedy for Nostalgia
Original Story -- No Fandom
Request by rosehiptea -- 'A woman with scars finds acceptance.'

An old woman bares the scar of time, and a young woman bares the scar of beauty. The looking glass is a cruel mistress, with her glossy sheen that speaks only in tongues of shape and colour. She is impossible to ignore, with her glittering honesty, and winsome malice. She is a rumor far too tempting to decline.

This woman in question, she also is lured by the mirror’s call. Her hand fiddles upwards, and the movement is reflected back at her, so that she sees the pads of her fingers brush the skin of her cheek before she feels it—cool, pulsing, nervous. Those digits slip down, past the grin of a slanting bone, and come to rest upon an unnatural line. Here, the skin puckers, sheer white against a rosy backdrop. It explodes from the plane of her countenance, craters and blossoms of abusive mutilation. Her scar is neither age, nor beauty. It is very real, and the mirror notes its unpleasant curvature with a smirking glare.

This used to bother her. Phantom eyes would trail after her as she walked, wondering if this squirrelly woman was as double-sided as her own face. Her companion, her shadow, a blank canvass of smooth perfection, shown only mute hatred for its counterpart, and would try always to slink away in the noon day sun. The scar was a root of evil, slowly infecting her, injecting paranoia from its spindly veins into her blood stream. She sat in coffee shops with her head ducked low, and her collar pulled high, secretly begging the steam from her mug to melt off her scandalous blemish.

It never worked. The mist slowly evaporated, leaving her alone with only the faint smell of tea leaves, and the remedial taste of routine disappointment.

An outward scar can become a disfigurement of the soul, with a mirror’s meddling. But you see… the mirror is only as potent as its ability to convince. And this woman—she was no longer convinced. As her own fingers played over the tender area, she no longer spat insults at the bumps and lines that had once disgusted herself as much as the phantoms of her anxious imagination. For the scar she had always villainized was nothing more humble than a part of herself, no more or less evil than a smile, a wink, or a kiss. Yes, that’s what it was.

A kiss.

A long, ashen kiss that flourished where others had none. A beauty mark, whose beauty was earned through tears, making it modest and shrewd. A history, that made her an elusive book, a stranded love letter in a floating bottle in a sea of seamless, dreary faces.

As her fingers ran the length of her disfigurement, she imagined that they were his hands instead. Calloused and warm, caressing the delicate bundle of chewed nerves with as much care as foreign glass. Under his phantasmal touch, she was a prism, a rose, the undiscovered. She was tender, and lovely, and somehow, so scrupulous; a woman who wore her wounds on the outside, who did not lie to the mirror, as the mirror lied to her.

No; no honesty can be found in a two-dimensional reflection of a person’s heart. She smiled, and her reflection smiled back, indefinable and impish. They shared this secret, they shared this darling, both knowing the potent sensations of affection and their power to ease. And they no longer needed a gossiping mirror to whisper words of discouragement. They had not ears for redundant criticisms.

She was loved, and love was a splendor more timeless than age, and more virile than youth. Let the others worry over their scars.

She was free.

FMA: Elricest: Whispers

2006-12-13T10:12:15Z

Title: Whispers
Genre: AngstFic
Pairings: Elricest, AlxPeaches (…Kidding.)
Rating: PG-13, for suggestive… ness.
Warning: Bigotry the likes of which might frustrate, and unhappy endings. Taking place on the other side of the gate, post-CoS.
Notes: A open request by grey_meets_gold @ the elricest community that was really intruiging. :)

German was a strange, harsh language that caressed the ears with as much care as sandpaper. Guttural and severe, it made foreigners warily shrink into their skins, paranoid of what was being said around them. However, for Alphonse, that mistrust of language was only too real.

His steps took him around the marketplace with practiced ease, and for each dull thud of his foot against the planed wood floors, a thousand whispers rose up in echo. These murmurs were coy and cloistered… so that, one moment, Al was sure the words were being spoken right up against his ear, lips sneering against his skin. And yet, a second later, when he’d turned to find the perpetrator, all eyes would shift away from and he was alone again. Isolated. Abnormal. Unwelcome.

His stomach gurgled and twisted into knots. His lips twitched into a forced smile. His hand groped blindly in front of himself, to feel the ripeness of a smooth peach. Against his fist, it felt matured, and faultless. Its colour was a deep, rich orange, with gossamer hairs freckling its rosy surface. An ideal fruit.

Al put it into a bag, and purchased it. Though, not because it was so flawless, nor because he was hungry for it. But because… he’d touched it. And behind his back, with narrowed, glowering eyes, the people had watched him caress its surface, and they whispered about it. They would never buy the slandered peach. No one wanted to eat fare that had been stroked and prodded by the hands of a sinner… the same hands that, evening after evening, slid over Edward’s smooth form with nimble, wanton grace.

Alphonse never thought he’d feel remorse in loving, so naturally, his brother. But, ever since the whispers had begun… ever since he could not step foot into this new world without feeling as if he’d walked into a spider’s web, covered in thin, disgusting rumors… well. Al was learning something about remorse…

------------------

“Brother! I’m home!” Al’s voice had a hint of cheerful relief to it, as packages were shifted in his arms, and shoes haphazardly kicked off-- narrowly missing the cat, who’d come to the door to sniff at the familiar intruder.

“In here, Al.” Came the faint reply, predictably from the direction of the kitchen.

Alphonse Elric was nearly invisible as he tottered in to find his brother, hidden behind brown paper, and the chaotic overload of provisions—a loaf of bread was nearly poking him in the eye, what with the awkward angle it burst from the baggage. So, it was no wonder he didn’t immediately notice the slump to his elder’s posture, the clumsy lopsidedness to his frown, the slant of his eyes… narrowed in futile concentration. He couldn’t even see Ed, from his vantage point behind the celery.

Ed, meanwhile, had his fingers curled, claw-like, around a mug of pathetically cooled tea. He was staring deeply ahead, either at the wall or the sink, as if entranced by how spotless Al kept the place. But, the effectiveness of cleaning products had never been a past interest of Ed’s, so either he was lost in thought… or else, attempting to be mindless. As if truly thinking would light some everlasting fuse, and send him right through that pristine wall, in a rage.

“Brother, I was thinking. For dinner tonight I could make-“ Thunk. The groceries fell to the table top. And suddenly… Al could see his brother. And suddenly, those knots in his stomach distorted with painful fluency. “…Brother?”

“I got laid off.” Came the reply. Ed knew his younger sibling’s tones, and he wouldn’t bother in making Al ask outright ‘what’s wrong?’ “…And it seems like no one’s hiring, either.” A sharp snort followed that admission. No… plenty were hiring. Just no one was hiring –him-.

Al blinked, slowly, digesting the information. Both what Edward had said… and what he hadn’t. Ed’s face was drawn, his eyes rimmed embarrassingly in red. Suddenly, Al needed to breathe. To scream. …To escape.

Instead, he moved to his knees. His palm found Ed’s good leg, and his cheek was laid against a thigh. Soon, a hand was knotting into hair, pulling it loose of its unkempt ponytail. There was mutual comfort in this gesture… mutual warmth.

Who cared if anyone understood them? They understood each other.

“We’ll get by, brother.”

So why did the kiss, a moment later, taste so bittersweet?

----------------------

The whole trouble had begun near a month ago. Edward was on the sofa, preoccupied. Alphonse had thought it charming to sneak up behind him, twisting arms about his neck, ducking low to take in his scent, smiling that attractive smile of his. …According to plan, Ed was distracted, thoroughly. Head tipping upwards, he’d eagerly clamored to overcome the spacing of their two mouths, meshing them together, tasting, teasing.

The landlady had a master key. The Elrics were a bit behind on rent, by a slip of mind, and nothing more sinister.

One twist against the lock of a door that kept so much more in then it ever would out, and all was ruined.

The shriek she let out was nothing to the mirrored horror over their own faces. They were discovered.

Suddenly, they were not people. They were gossip. They were heretics. They were incestuous, and pedophilic, and queer, in a world that could barely stand perfection.

Ed and Al had always felt as if they were two halves to the same whole. And now, finally, in the eyes of everybody… they were as one. One Sin.

They were doomed.

----------------------

Dirty. They’d call it dirty, whether the boys committed the act or not. So they committed it.

Ed’s mouth groped along Al’s neckline, as something warm and soft slid against his sides with increasing frenzy. Probing, testing, grasping, and begging, two voices broke the stillness of air in whimpering tones of bliss. Every puff of warmth that escaped moistened lips as they dragged over memorized, sweat-sweetened skin, was tinged with the other’s aroma, until the room hung deeply with it. Lust and love, vice so tempting, and so rewarding, it was worth the grief that came after. Two bodies tangled and joined. Two people hysterical with want. …Two people equally sated, and content to curl against the other, when pleasure-hazed sleep finally came over them in a quilted, tender embrace.

The coupling stole them away, like a narcotic, like a drug. A moment, that made all other moments seem feeble and unhappy. Like a drug, they injected one another, drank one another, craved one another. And so, like drug addicts, they were slowly dying from that need.

----------------------

Had the ceiling creaked when they made love, last night? When Ed had poured all his frustration into pure energy, and taken Al against the mattress, letting the boy coo and croon beneath him? Would it have mattered?

Whether they made love or not, phantom creaks and groans caught the ears of the landlady every night. She was so sure of their evil, and evil must be rooted out.

----------------------

Al couldn’t say he was surprised when he arrived home after a trip to the library, muscles still a bit weary from the previous night. When what he found waiting for him was a ruin. Their flat, in tatters. Their possessions, strewn. And a single word, scarring the wall, in some kind of fluid that Al would rather not guess at. It spelled; ‘Faggot’, in clear, bolded letters.

----------------------

When Ed returned from the unemployment office, Alphonse was seated in the shambles of their ruined front hallway, twisting an eviction notice in his fingertips. His cheeks were stained with tears that had been held back for a long while. Ed was too surprised with the scene before him to tend to his brother just yet. He’d always thought that ‘unwelcome’ also meant ‘untouchable’. But here they were… merely humans, discarded.

“Al…”

“Brother. I- I’ve been thinking.”

“All our stuff… it’s- …Shit. Are you hurt?”

“I think… maybe that woman was right.”

“Al- you’re going to rip the notice. Here- let me help you up.”

“Maybe, somewhere, there’s a place like Shambala, brother. A place where no one judges love on… on scales of blood, and gender, and- and-”

“Al… you’re crying…”

“But that place isn’t the world we left brother. And it isn’t here, either. So- what were we searching for all that time?”

“Al…”

“Why can’t I say ‘I love you’, brother? Without hearing all those whispers…”

A.W.

autumn_winding @ 2007-01-24T01:19:00

FMA: Elricest: Whispers