Living Mind, Unliving Flesh | Fictionkin | Forums

For those who have known me a while, and recall that I ran new-awakenings over on tumblr, it should hopefully not come as too big of a surprise that one of the fictionalized lives I remember was as Wrath from the first Full Metal Alchemist anime.  But, on the other hand, it may still come as a shock.  No matter how many times I tell people that I’m fictionkin, they seem to forget that fact.  No idea why, it just happens.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been pretty sparse with details in the past.  So, let’s see if this changes things.

First, some points of clarification: yes, the Wrath from the first FMA anime, not the Wrath/King Bradley from the manga or from FMA: Brotherhood.  Despite the icon I chose for new-awakenings, my memories do not include anything from the Conqueror of Shamballa movie.  I did not have automail.  I just liked that particular icon.

For those who are not familiar with the series, I was a creature called a homunculus.  They were viewed as “artificial humans”, created through alchemy, but more than that they were attempts to bring the dead back to life.  Unfortunately, what came back wasn’t human anymore.

I know my character was portrayed somewhat sympathetically in the anime, but make no mistake: all of the homunculi were monsters, myself included.  What was done to us – we were mobile, but we were cold and dead inside.  Emotion, feeling, it was all muted.  We sought out the extremes of sensation, pain and pleasure, in a desperate attempt to feel something – anything – again.  Perhaps that’s one reason why the fiction associates us with the seven deadly sins, though each of us would have been lustful, wrathful, gluttonous, etc.  In some ways it makes me think of the Cenobites from Hellraiser or the Trioxin zombies from the Return of the Living Dead series.  Perhaps we too would have been festooned with a myriad of piercings and painful body modifications for the pure sensation of it if our flesh had not simply rejected it, healing with unnatural speed.

We killed and we drank human blood to sustain ourselves (not pretty colored rocks shown in the anime) and the feeling of warm living blood sliding down our throat was the furthest we ever managed to get from the feelings of cold and emotional and physical numbness we lived with.  It wasn’t just the blood we needed, though, but the life force. All of it.  We needed to kill.

I was, however, somewhat unique.  I had, due to another alchemist’s folly, a human arm and leg.  An arm and leg still capable of feeling warm, alive, feeling human sensation.  You’d think that would have mellowed me some, but if anything it made me desire simple sensation even more.

Of the nonhuman lives I’ve remembered, this is one of the worst.  It’s not at all comfortable, or something I enjoy remembering.  Which is one of the reasons I haven’t been all that public about it, and don’t talk about it much save with others who remember the same world.