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Hohenheim is aging.
It’s not a novelty, really. The Dwarf knows that all humans age. It is an unfortunate tragedy of theirs, being too soft and fragile to withstand the endurance of eternity—not like the stone buildings they construct for their cities, or the metal from which they craft their instruments, or even the glass flask that acts as a torturous prison to it now. No, humans are not so adamantine and immutable. Instead, they sag pitifully beneath time’s influence.
(Which, if it thinks about it, is to be expected. When man first emerged from the vestiges of evolution, they were designed with much shorter lifespans in mind. The leaps in medicine are what allows them to live long enough for their bodies to reach this deterioration point.)
Old humans are nothing the Dwarf has not seen before, especially old men. Zosimos, the court alchemist responsible for the homunculus’s creation, lost his hair long before it came into the world, and has since gained crow’s feet to pinch at his eyes and stiff lines that mark where he frowns constantly. The beloved King of Xerxes, Cyrus III, has gnarled, skeletal hands dotted with bulging veins and liver spots, and his great golden beard has started to blanch as his body weakens. The many slaves whom Zosimos employs to attend his estate bow beneath the strain of tireless labor on their able bodies, until their spines become permanent curves and they simply collapse from the weight of their own work.
To some degree, it is relieved that it was able to save Hohenheim from this fate. He is older now, not the scrappy adolescent he was when they first met, but he still stands upright without a crick in his back or pain in his shoulders.
(At least, none that he has complained of, or that the Dwarf has seen... yet, anyway)
He is not a child anymore, that much the Dwarf knows. He is no youth with dirty hair and an awkward height to him and a ribcage visible through his skin. He’s gotten even taller, his shoulders broadened, his profile become firm and strong, and he’s become an adult in the way all children are destined to. That is simply the way of the world. The rind of innocence must fall away as minds and hearts ripen with maturity.
That is not the case with slaves, of course, who are crushed from childhood and are forcibly cobbled into an adult’s grim mindset in spite of their soft, pudgy bodies. Slave Twenty-Three could not count, and did not care to learn, because there was no pleasure to be taken in counting down the years of a life-sentence served to you by simple vice of who your parents are. Many were like that, born into their toil with numbers for names and no understanding of their own ignorance and lacking.
It is amazing, really, that humans can be so callous as to enslave members of their own species for profit. But Hohenheim was lucky to have escaped before he reached adulthood and this reality became cemented into his being, as it has with his peers.
In the dim light of the study, the Dwarf notices its blood-kin turn another page of the volume, the lamplight yellow across the pages. The Dwarf does not sleep, so it watches with a contented lethargy as Hohenheim burns the midnight oil on nights like this. Thanks to it, Hohenheim is no longer content with ignorance, and never will be again. Now he pours over alchemy and feeds the frenzied thirst for knowledge that exists in him, and in this, the Dwarf takes pride. It is an accomplishment to turn a slave into a scholar.
And yet... it cannot help but notice. The shadow of a saffron beard grows thick on Hohenheim’s jaw. Faint lines crease beneath his eyes that are not from too little sleep. A decade or so has passed since Zosimos officially appointed Hohenheim his assistant, even longer since Slave Twenty-Three became a slave no longer and even longer since he began learning under the Dwarf in those early days of youth. He is still a man, because time does not go backwards, but he is not quite young anymore.
Despite all its disdain for the human race, the Dwarf cannot help but lament the tragedy of aging. After all, it itself has lived maybe a few decades now, and it has not altered in any physical way. Oh, it knows more, for knowledge is like time and it too does not go backwards. Through Hohenheim it now knows more about human habits and behaviors, about things that eluded or puzzled it when it was first born. But knowledge does not translate into aging, and one can be an old soul in a young body, and young souls in old bodies, for the mind and the body are unfortunately separate in this way. Physically, the Dwarf is as unchanging as the glass which encapsulates it.
There is no way of knowing if it will age, ever. It is the first of its kind, or at least the first of its kind that has been known to Xerxes. No other documentation exists. And the homunculus knows what it is, from where it came and how it was made, but not what comes after. Will it deteriorate too, as humans do? No way to know. It hasn’t, yet, so maybe it won’t, or maybe that process will just take longer.
Humans have such short, simple existences. Time is of the essence, for them. And as such, they are urgent in their desire to make life fulfilling, and suffer from that powerful, crippling urge to procreate.
(Years have passed since the Dwarf and Hohenheim discussed how humans take joy from the bonds between family—as though mating pairs existed for more than just gratification of biological urges, as though offspring are produced for more than just an evolutionary imperative to continue the species. What a curious thought, but it was just rationalization, in the end, if the Dwarf had to guess. Friendships, too. Humans evolved from social ancestors who survived through packs and herds. Whatever pleasure and enjoyment found in companionship, as the Dwarf has found in Hohenheim, is merely the fulfillment of a biological prerogative. Nothing more, nothing less. It is a shame to think that humans have not evolved to the point where they are no longer victims to their primordial programming.
It was a tragedy to find that Hohenheim was no exception to the rule. The Dwarf remembers when its blood-kin was dreamy and giddy over some girl who seemed to return his affection to a degree. She was a young maid that the Dwarf never met, but it heard enough of her through Hohenheim’s ramblings—at least, until she got engaged to some other poor fellow who also desired her. And when Hohenheim placed his bid in to have her hand, her father, presiding over her arranged matrimony, laughed in his face. Apparently, none want a slave-born for a son-in-law.
Once news reached Zosimos, he saw fit to remind Hohenheim of his precarious position. The Dwarf remembers when its blood-kin came stumbling into the study, defeated, hair disheveled and bruises forming on his temples from where his skull was bashed into the ground and his eyes dull as they had been the day they first met.
See, Hohenheim may not quite be a slave in the sense that he was before, but he is not quite free either. He exists now as an aberration, in a place where none can touch him and he can touch none. The slaves that were once his peers either have contempt for him or respectfully treat him as their better. The nobles of the king’s court hide derisive smiles behind their fingertips and peer at him down their nose because they were born free while he was not.
The Dwarf remembers a time when they would look out at the sunset from a perch at the window and discuss a brighter future. Hohenheim’s bronze gaze would be always forward, as though he could visualize his hope on the horizon.
They don’t really do that so much, anymore.)
It is a tragedy to find that Hohenheim is no exception to the rule. Despite being the Dwarf’s progenitor and despite the Dwarf itself not aging as a human does, Hohenheim lacks any immunity from the ravages of time. There’s something distinctly unfair about that, being able to create an ageless thing but not being ageless yourself. Even moreso when Hohenheim is the only human to really deserve it, when he treats the Dwarf as something of an equal—which should be insulting, because Hohenheim is still a human, blood-kin or not, and humans are fools.
But only Hohenheim has any speck of good in him, as far as the Dwarf has seen. Zosimos is a greedy fool simpering for the attention of a dying king, who views the Dwarf as a personal toy without a will or intelligent mind. The nation’s king only sees subjects to make demands of, as though a certain lineage justifies owning people so unilaterally. Xerxes itself is built upon the toil of its own people, enslaved for the profit of the wicked. And even the slaves have the vile audacity to spit upon one of their own when he escapes his imprisonment, rather than being glad for his release. They all deserve to grow cracked and wrinkled and grey and broken and fall apart. Hohenheim does not.
No. Hohenheim has the compassion they lack, but he is no freer from this fate than they are. He has mellowed since the youth the Dwarf knew him in, lost the brashness and hot-temper that it found so amusing. Time has sobered him, sombered him, made it so that he bides his silence far more than he once did. He goes from a man who laughs and shouts and growls curses under his breath to one who smiles silently, speaks softly, thinks carefully before he opens his mouth. And he is not quite so amusing anymore.
It’s hard to tell if this is time and accrued maturity at work alone, or if this has been learned in dealings with a royal court who sneers at one born in slavery. Either way, the Dwarf distinctly dislikes the change. It is the same, and Hohenheim is not, and that is not fair.
They are of the same blood, after all! And yes, the Dwarf acknowledges that Hohenheim is human, that he has a head-start in terms of time on this earth, but the Dwarf was born carrying the knowledge of what it was and that is something humans lack. If knowledge dictated age, and the body was brought into synchronicity with the mind, then surely they would have fallen into step with one another by now, and continued at a matching pace.
Yet the mind and the body remain separate. The Dwarf does not change while Hohenheim continues to—and it is not fair.
(The Dwarf can see the distant end result, wrinkles and silver hair and withered man where there was once a proud youth. It does not like that. There may come a time when one goes before the other.
And then the Dwarf will have no one to speak to it as an equal.)
“Hohenheim.”
The former slave raises his eyes from the parchment. The Dwarf cannot help but notice that the lamp is turned on brighter than it usually is, and it wonders if that means Hohenheim’s eyes are weakening. Yet another inevitable symptom of age. “Yes, Homunculus?”
“Have you ever thought about how long you might live for?”
That seems to throw Hohenheim for a loop. He lowers the book. “Not... really. Why?”
Of course not. The Dwarf may have ignited Hohenheim’s curiosity, but he’s still so painfully dense in other areas. Humans are only capable of so much, after all. “How long do you humans usually live for, anyhow?”
“I’m not quite... If I’m not mistaken, His Majesty is approaching is seventieth birthday this autumn, and he’s the oldest man I’ve ever met.” It goes unspoken that most slaves die at a much younger age, overwrought with work until their bodies simply give out on them. “Why do you ask?”
It asks because seventy years is not nearly enough. It asks because King Cyrus III wants an immortality that the Dwarf has no intention of giving to him, when it was demanded as though it were rightfully his and the Dwarf another subject to be ruled. It asks because that immortality will become its own, a guarantee more than anything else, and perhaps freedom from this accursed flask can be gained in conjunction to that. It asks because it is a being born from alchemy, and Equivalent Exchange dictates, in more or less words, that good deeds be rewarded and bad ones be punished.
...because Hohenheim is somewhere in his thirties or his forties now, and seventy years means only a few more decades, and that is not enough.
“Just curious,” the Dwarf says.
Hohenheim arches a brow. There are faint furrows on his forehead that were not there before. The Dwarf does not like them, but can do nothing about them, because age, like time, does not go backwards. “...alright,” he concedes at last, and goes back to his reading.
The Dwarf closes its eye. It may not be able to sleep, but it can dream. It can dream about a reward for good deeds and the day where the country of Xerxes crumbles into the dust it deserves to become, when its foundations of cruelty are dismantled permanently. It dreams of an eternity where death is not something it will ever need to fear, for itself or otherwise. It dreams that age does not go backwards, but that it can be stopped, at least.
For it is a being born from alchemy, and it knows the law of Equivalent Exchange. Something must be given before anything can be gained.
It is content to sacrifice half the Stone, if the reward is companion just as deathless and unaging as itself.