Fanfic: Facilis Decensus (Fullmetal Alchemist)

[nebroadwe]

Title: Facilis Decensus
Fandom: FMA (anime version, in the Balance of Power post-series AU)
Character(s): Heist, The Gate
Pairing: None
Rating: PG (for language)
Warnings: Spoilers for Balance of Power chapter 20.
A/N: I don't usually play much with the OCs in Balance of Power, but this sketch occurred to me after I saw that one of the Crackbunnies had recently passed a significant milestone. Crossposted from nebroadwe to Höllenbeck (i.e. cbs_crackfic, fm_alchemist, fullservicefma, fma_gen, fma_writers, and fma_fiction).
Dedication: For aliasheist. Happy Birthday!

---

Heist considered herself an intelligent, open-minded person to whom nothing human, as the playwright said, was alien, but that didn't prevent her from slamming head-first on occasion into the self-defeating foibles of her own species. At five, it was name-calling; at nine, the Holocaust; at thirteen, the deleterious effects of the libido on the rational faculties. At her college convocation, she dutifully looked to her right and to her left as instructed, but instead of seeing two potential failures, she saw hundreds of libidinous, status-obsessed egos freed for the first time from the parental panopticon and braced herself for the worst.

She was pleasantly surprised to discover that the worst was, for the most part, nothing she hadn't already seen in high school. The stakes were higher, but the games were the same. She took up her accustomed position on the sidelines, scribbling notes and waving a distracted hand when addressed, as if too focused on analyzing the play to have time for idle chitchat. As long as she held her notional clipboard in exactly the right position, no one need know she was only doodling.

Less metaphorically, she quickly grew bored with the preoccupations of most of her classmates -- not just the manic-depressive cycles of romance, but also the endless discussions of What It All Means and How We Should Deal With It. "Live and let live" seemed a sufficient answer to the latter question; as for the former, ground over in classes and cafés seriously, cynically or drunkenly according to the hour and the company ... well, Heist had long since dismissed the idea of the universe meaning anything. It simply was. Those who found something staring back at them when they looked into the abyss had obviously, in the glare of their own self-consciousness, mistaken a window for a mirror. Draw the drapes, kids, she thought, but did not say.

Besides, what was the use of wasting time on unanswerable philosophical problems when so many unanswered scientific ones were begging for attention, traveling salesmen hawking well-organized knapsacks? A TOE would have more impact on human development than all the metaphysical maunderings of the past millennium; a conceptual framework that brought the so-called supernatural within the purview of Nature would revolutionize science and philosophy together. No legitimate scholars, she was given to understand by those to whom she hesitantly suggested the idea, conducted "psychical research" anymore, so Heist shrugged and struck out on her own, gathering evidence, hypothesizing structures, designing experiments -- settling at length on one experiment, the only one she could conduct with the resources at hand. And those, it must be said, were supplied in the main by donors subsequently astonished at their own generosity. As far as Heist was concerned, however, "permission" wasn't an issue. College was for learning, right? Independent study was encouraged, wasn't it? Nobody was using that lab, were they?

So she felt dreadfully betrayed when, after the explosion, she opened her eyes on a featureless plain interrupted only by a pair of massive stone doors. Bad enough that her last conscious thought had been damn, how did I screw that up? -- worse still to discover that both consciousness and the conviction of having screwed up continued afterward. After death. After my death. She was too frustrated to be properly frightened by the experience. I'm too young for this -- and I was so fucking CLOSE! She mentally reexamined what she remembered of the schematic, wishing for her laptop, wondering if she had misplaced a decimal point or something equally idiotic. No way to tell now. Maybe Ducky could figure it out from her notes, if any of them survived this disaster. She probably should have told him what she was planning. Not that she wished he were here, too, exactly, but the silence grated on her nerves and she would have liked to have someone to complain to. The afterlife, she thought as she scrambled upright, shouldn't be so quiet. And it certainly shouldn't smell of coffee grounds and burnt insulation ... or was that her hair?

With nothing else to do, Heist laid her hands against the doors. They felt like worked stone always did: cool, smooth, minimally adhesive. The design carved into them -- a cross between a tree and a genealogical table -- reminded her of something, but as she backed up to get a better look, the enormous panels began to swing ponderously toward her, opening to reveal ... to reveal ...

She didn't remember falling down on her butt, only scrabbling for purchase on the glabrate floor with fingers and feet gone numb and slow. Snickers buzzed in her ears like mosquitoes; the pupil of the great eye hanging slantwise behind the doors contracted slightly as the sourceless light of the plain fell upon it. She had time, as the Stygian darkness about the eye reached for her like hands and vines and tentacles, to begin to be afraid, to babble I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry as Freud is my witness I'll never diss Nietzsche again!

The ruthless laughter was all the answer she received until the doors slammed shut behind her.

[Disclaimers: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix); the anime of the same title was directed by Mizushima Seiji and story-edited by Aikawa Sho. Copyright for these properties is held by Arakawa Hiromu, Square Enix, Mainichi Broadcasting System, Aniplex, Bones, and dentsu. All rights reserved.]

Comments

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

For starters: FREAKIN' SWEET!!!!! (Yes, I know it's grammatically incorect, but I felt the situation called for excessive use of exclamation, especially considering I've been periodically breaking into jubilant song for hours.)

Fret not: comments don't receive the same level of scrutiny as formal writing. And songwriting gets away with even more (see Tom Lehrer on folksongs). :-)

So often, we forget that Heist is a true, down-to-her-bones science nerd, and not just the product of oddness and a caffeine addiction.

Hearing the oddness in her dialogues with Ducky and Sidney helps a lot to establish her self-ness and, though not a science geek myself, I've hung out with enough of them to recognize the base traits that produce such oddness. I did elaborate from the science geek thing to the idea that she might not be a believer in the supernatural as such, but more of a Clarke's Third Law type. I wondered whether she ever found herself in conflict with that segment of the ghost-hunting community that does believe in a Great Beyond where consciousness persists -- it seemed like she'd be the type to believe that ghosts are psychic tape-loops, reminders of being rather than beings themselves, and dismiss the idea of an afterlife as raising more problems than it solves. (She's young enough for the personal aspect of noncontinuance not to be a factor.) Does that jibe with your characterization of her?

But! You do not neglect her less-than-traditional-or-legal approach to her science either, which is also much appreciated. You keep her human, and show off her startling lack of clear prioritizing when she's more concerned about the experiment than the apparent fact of her death. She's annoyed at the afterlife because there's no one there to listen to her gripe! Classic!

[grin] That's our Heist. Or at least that's our Heist in idealistic hubris mode: she's not messing with the fundamental forces of nature for power or personal profit; she's looking for the truth for the delight of solving an intellectual problem and the subsequent benefit to humanity by a gain in knowledge. She's totally internalized the credo that the pursuit of truth is self-justifying. To borrow a phrase from Pratchett, she travels in straight lines while the rest of the world is moving on an ellipse ... and that makes her dangerous.

The clincher though? Nietzsche. You took something with no background and squirreled an opinion out of her and ran with it to create an amazingly ironic punchline. You WIN AT LIFE.

I wish! That was one of the first bits to come together. Once you have Arakawa's image of a gigantic eyeball looking at you from out of the darkness, Nietzsche rather springs to mind. And that particular quotation is (or was, when I was there, back in the Pleistocene) favored by undergraduates attempting to sound profound. I spent a lot more time on the science stuff, looking up NP complete problems and theories of everything. Writing technical stuff is always nerve-wracking for me, since it's not my area of expertise. Pontificating college students, on the other hand ...

Thank you. Just, thank you ever so much. This was awesome. It was a fantastic birthday gift. Makes my day and then some!

Well, [blush]. You're welcome. I hoped you'd like it and I'm glad you did.

Peace!