firstborn son
[drabble challenge for Pellaz and Kuragari]
The sins of the father, passed on to the son.
She is, he thinks, like the flowers she loves--delicate and beautiful and far too short-lived. The baby that Rockbell's son puts into his arms barely weighs anything. He has books that are heavier than this strange creature, him and her, created by something alchemy still cannot even begin to approach.
Rockbell's daughter-in-law says something about the baby having his father's eyes, even as she carefully redirect his hands to hold the baby properly--"He's not a book or a letter, Hoenheim, you have to be gentle"--before she steps back.
It regards him with perfect calm, something almost thoughtful on its pudgy smooth face. The eyes are a milky strange blue. He doesn't see how they're like his at all.
And she herself, resplendent in the mounds of pillows, gives him a tired smile. He thinks again of flowers, with their simple beauty and brief lives. When she opens her arms, he is only too glad to transfer that nonexistent weight; his hands tingle even after they are empty.
"He's beautiful," she murmurs, the smile on her tired face radiant. The baby seems more natural in her arms, more an extension a her than a part of himself, and now it watches her instead, still weighing and assessing. When she draws her fingers down the side of its face, and its eyes narrow, like a cat in pleasure, his fingers itch. He wants to decompose this thing, deconstruct it into its component parts, and return the pieces to whence they came.
He finds he cannot look at her face for very long. Something about that radiance blinds him, and the child is such a small, undeserving thing.
She looks at him, inquisitive, when he gets off the bed. A flush still stains her face, high on her cheeks, and if he strains, he can hear how her breathing rasps at its end, just a little. Borrowed time no longer seems like such a cliché or a metaphor, not when she has just given away so much of herself.
He takes a piece of chalk from his pocket, palming it so she cannot see. On the bedside table are a few dried, withered remains of herbs--fragments of the home remedies that are as much a part of the practice Rockbell's son and daughter-in-law follow. Some of them lie with their stems partially submerged in water: so much the better, then.
With quick, sure strokes, he draws the array and touches his fingers to them. She sits up a little, an entirely new glow coming into her eyes, and this is his alone, completely unshared between any third party. But the child watches, too, and he feels its gaze on his skin like pinching fingers.
He tucks the newly-transmuted flowers into her hair, and then cups her cheek; she leans into that touch, and smiles at him, and for a moment, he does not see that milky gaze under her chin.
--"How does 'Edward' sound? He'll be successful in life, if he's anything like his father--"
After he notices it once, he cannot stop. Even later that night, with her body curled between himself and those eyes, they followed him.
Six months later, Edward's eyes have turned solidly gold, and he now sees where Rockbell's daughter-in-law found the association. This disturbs him further. He should not have to look into his eyes, in a face molded by her softness, and find himself wanting.
Her cough has grown worse, and sometimes, when she doesn't know he's watching, he sees her pause and sway, and in her droop he sees her flowers wilting. He's dusted off the top of his suitcase, just in case.
Edward is the "guardian of prosperity." But all he ever sees, in his son's knowing eyes, is the knowledge that names are the first lies a parent ever tells their child.
--end--