Work Text:
If the Heart was a Hive
It was supposed to be hard. Letting him go like that, seeing his tears clouding up his glasses, chin wobbling with everything left unsaid. Johann was supposed to feel some sort of a way that made him rethink things through.
But he really wasn't much for deep thinking.
Here his long time friend and partner was, begging for Johann to be torn about this.
It was easy as anything else. It was simple as breathing.
As long as Hohenheim lived, Johann knew there would be a reason to smile. That was good enough, in the end. Every day, through the worst of the pain, you just got to find one thing to smile about.
[INITIATING SITE BURIAL IN 100 SECONDS.]
They had faced one another only briefly, once standing side by side.
[ANY REMAINING EMPLOYEES MUST IMMEDIATELY EVACUATE THE STRUCTURE.]
Goodbye kisses weren't something Johann usually had the luxury of. Mister Hohenheim, in the long while they'd known each other, had never been much for open displays of affection, either.
[COUNTING DOWN. 95… 94…]
“But you, Johann… what about you…?”
He sure wished he could have met gazes more clearly with his partner in those last moments before the doors closed, and the rubble came down between them. He wished he could have given a goodbye kiss of the mind, as they were so apt to do instead, these days.
A pucker of the lips so contagious, it might have wiped the grief right off his partner’s tired face. One last time.
He guessed if he'd had the guts to lean over and nuzzle into Hohenheim’s swirly, unkempt hair, he'd taste more stress than comfort. It would have killed him inside to keep him there like that. All of this, and none of this, ran through Johann’s head in a silent flicker of emotion.
He didn't need to think about any of it anyway, because none of it changed the fact that he'd quickly placed his hand on Hohenheim’s chest, feeling one last time the beat of his heart, and smiled.
Even if Hohenheim’s eyes were fogged up with tears, he hoped that smile was enough to last him a lifetime.
“Well, maybe next time… some other time.” And with that, Johann had pushed him. It was just enough to get him going. Maybe that silly little emotion called hope finally squirmed its way into their hearts.
[3… 2… 1.]
For hope was beyond anything Johann could have dreamed up for himself, not too long ago.
[DETONATION COMMENCED.]
The escape pods were all gone. Johann left the exit far behind him as he took off, E.G.O rifle already primed at the erupting corridor ahead. He knew better than to expect the facility to be quiet for long. And he didn’t even have to wait for it. An agent who had been getting a chunk of their leg ripped from an unholy maw of glistening teeth screamed as the shot rang out.
Bullseye. Literally. The squelch of fluids burst out of the creature's face as the Abnormality reared back, and by the time Johann had prepared the second shot, a makeshift team of other agents had already swung their weapons, crushing the beast into the shape of a large egg and leaving destruction and half-mangled bodies in its wake.
Johann beamed. “Yeah, that's what I'm talkin’ abo—!”
Five indescribable cries, no ten, no, more than that — all echoed from every direction as if the entirety of the facility decided all at once to breach containment. Wordlessly, Johann rolled quickly to the side, hissing as a metallic, sharp beam whizzed past, impaling itself into the furthest wall with an overwhelming screech. A spray of mist, carrying a repugnant odor and the underlying tang of blood splattered across his cheek. Behind him, an Abnormality’s tentacle lashed out and suctioned itself to the agent who'd lost their leg, and Johann’s barrage of bullets barely put a dent in the mass of flesh as he shot from his position on the ground: bang, bang, bang…!
Sweat rolled from his temples, and if it weren't so overwhelmingly loud in here, he would almost have thought that the sound of an explosion had stopped, replaced by the distant drumming of thousands of pebbles raining many stories above his head.
His ears screamed with the buzz of his rattling skull. Each shot felt like a part of himself was physically getting torn away, flying straight into the target. He could do this forever, so long as he didn't succumb to death. The hive within him feasted on his life energy, and the better host he could be, the more strength he'd have.
As soon as one Abnormality “died”, it seemed like three more would take its place. They had exactly forty-five… or was it fifty? At least forty Abnormalities contained within their facility! And some of them would immediately revive upon death due to the chaos, and then there were those still raging, the ones that took ahold of their bodies for a time, and… he was pretty sure some of them would begin tearing them apart from the inside out.
Johann felt his vision trembling with fear, for once in his life. Hohenheim wasn't here to berate him if he died. Or remind him of the observation logs, many of which Johann hadn’t bothered to study until the connection to their servers had long been severed.
That part was fine. He just had to keep shooting, keep moving. Don’t look the bad ones in the eye, unless they were the special type. Look, it didn’t make much sense to explain it, especially not while his throat was tightening up, bile churning in his swarming stomach.
“Johann…!” An agent who he didn’t recognize anymore called out to him, body lacerated to shreds, but brought back to life just enough to speak from the waft of Enkephalin periodically releasing into the air. Their jaw was hanging at an angle that made it hard to understand their speech. “The Qlipho... De…e…e is …eak…ing…! Y-you ha… to …o…!”
He was usually so good with names. But seeing this, knowing there was no going back for any of them…
Should I kill you? Johann didn’t have to bother to line up the shot, knew that even if he aimed for the path to the elevators, towards any of the open containment units, that if he willed it, the bullets would change trajectory and pierce his colleague’s heart. Or brain. It might be more merciful to go for the head, in this case.
In the Backstreets, that would have been the kind thing to do.
But here, where people could be traumatized, restored, disappeared, reappeared, destroyed, recovered, maybe even more…?
Those Department of the Year awards hadn’t earned themselves.
“Sorry, old pal,” Johann said, mostly to himself as he could see the clotting raw fleshy holes where his coworker’s ears used to be. It was a normal thing to see here. Didn’t make it any easier. “I ain’t gonna just leave you to suffer like that.”
He wasn’t sure what happened first: the bullet splattering what remained of his colleague’s brain onto the wall, or the bursting of their throat as a massive wasp the size of two people put together emerged from their internals.
Johann’s beating heart matched the frenzy in his stomach.
Oh yeah. That’s gotta be Sergey. Kid always watched my back when I needed someone to pick up my shifts. Johann made sure to lock in. The next two bullets were enough to take the wasp down, just as it was spreading its wings, its pierced abdomen gushing a billowing cloud of spores. The shell of the oversized insect collapsed over Sergey’s mangled body underneath, practically burying him. If any clerks survived this, Johann wondered if they’d have to drag both of them away like protocol demanded each night.
Both of them, because Johann was definitely, undeniably feeling something wriggling around inside his chest. He coughed through the sickening haze as blood welled on his tongue.
After the next release of Enkephalin gas into the air, Johann could almost pretend he was just biting it too hard.
Why did he decide to work with the Abnormality that birthed deadly parasites from the guts of people who had the gall to die on the job? Well. One, he’d be dead once any of that pain even mattered. And two…?
The truth was, he didn’t plan on dying.
Or, as Mister Hohenheim once pointed out with such a lovely, near bothered expression, he hadn’t at all thought his choices through.
But he was good at what he committed to, wasn’t he? And that was fine enough.
Another flash of red light and the endless commotion in the halls brought Johann to his senses. He picked himself off the ground and sprinted through the passage much quicker than he would have had he been using a real gun rather than E.G.O Gear. In truth, the rifle he held was the first ranged weapon he’d ever used in his life (if silly rubberband slingshots didn’t count). He’d never be able to afford the real deal, nor was he the type to have wanted to. Regardless, he thought it was pretty cool that the gun he did get to use could be shot at such breakneck speed without missing a single time, and he still looked awesome while doing it.
As awesome as one could look in the wavering pitch black darkness, red warning sirens blaring with the Third Trumpet.
Endless bullets, endless targets, endless pools of blood becoming so slick that he had to change his gait not to slip on it. How many employees were left alive?
They’d fought like this countless times by now, and even the Enkephalin dosages left for them were beginning to feel weaker in strength. Johann knew that was just the paranoia talking; one too many agents having lost their minds and seeding Johann’s brain with worries. But was anyone actually doing works right now to produce more? There weren’t any managers left in the facility. Senior team leaders, sure, but if Johann was any example of it, they all should be busy suppressing the monstrous horde if not already dead.
Plus. If he was being honest with himself…
He could see the way his black tailcoat had turned red from the torso down. Part of it was from getting on the floor, that was obvious. But some of it?
The sensation of a chitinous, jagged appendage clawing at the back of his throat made him gag. Johann spewed a trail of blood and eggy white pus from his lips as if he were casually spitting out some dirt, and ignored it until the next pulse of Enkephalin made the violating feeling temporarily fade away.
Yet he couldn’t deny it was getting harder to run.
A part of him, too, began to wonder if it was worth it.
How many of them could go on like this? Even if the facility had been able to stay quiet, everything safely contained, how long could they have continued things by themselves before running out of supplies or making a mistake? When he’d insisted on letting Hohenheim go, Johann hadn’t had a single doubt left in his mind. Because even if he died, he’d do it with a smile, knowing that the person he’d come to adore made it out alive. But he really, really didn’t think it through.
“OPEN UP! How dare you go in there alone?” Desperate pounding against a containment wall. This wasn’t the main department Johann was used to. He’d just kept running, shooting, running, sustaining injuries, picking himself back up, and running some more, that he hadn’t even realized the color of the walls had changed in the red-flashing darkness. “OPEN this door!”
When Johann glanced over, he noticed the classification code briefly flickered underneath the siren’s light. T-09-8—
Johann didn’t have time to figure out what that meant, or even read the whole thing. The agent who had bloodied their fists slamming against the closed unit now turned to him with the swollen eyes of someone who had long since lost it.
“A-aren’t you… uh… Knox, was it? From Welfare?” Johann attempted, squinting at the trippy way the faces on her E.G.O Suit contorted with unfiltered rage. “Is your — uh, your partner…?”
“He’s nothing to me!” Knox screeched, kicking the reinforced door so hard that he heard the bones in her foot crack. She didn’t budge. The faces on her Suit seemed to grimace, not a trace of sympathy. “He left me, he LEFT ME, out HERE, all ALONE, to die! He promised! He promised he’d take me with him! Let me in! Let me in, you —!”
The bullet twisted in the air as if it were screwing itself right through Knox’s temples, one side of her head to the other. He had to damage the nervous system without messing up her face, in case anyone cared enough to retrieve her body. Johann did all this with the gun still pointed down at the floor, his arm having long gone slack.
It was getting so heavy.
Johann felt his knees collapse, but the red of the floor matched the red of the walls, the darkness in his heart the same as the flickering shadows outside. Outside.
That’s right. Hohenheim was still outside.
At least Johann made sure one good thing still bloomed in the world.
Six legs tore at his belly from the inside out. Crawling. Johann swallowed his own saliva, his blood, the uncannily nutty-sweet phlegm with a sour, metallic aftertaste. Sweat beaded on his neck, staining the inside of his collar.
Enkephalin mist released from the chamber above his head. Johann’s finger rested on the trigger of the rifle now pointed behind him, half-painted in blood where it lay partially on the ground. He opened his mouth.
Maybe this is where our experiment reaches its conclusion, Mister Hohenheim.
“Good luck… on your next project,” Johann whispered, mostly to himself.
“Knox…?”
Johann’s gaze refocused. That containment door had opened, unlocked from the inside.
Delilah stood there from the entrance of an opened bunker, his usually carefree expression dissolving into an ugly sob. He once asked Johann how he took care of his hair so well when they were working here, and Knox had offered to braid it for him. But it was just his natural style, parted with a thin comb he’d been given from those complimentary-type packets. And the Enkephalin was good for making it shine, he guessed. They would never have had that conversation with him had they known him before he joined this company.
And Delilah wouldn’t have been crying over Knox’s body like this, had he not joined this company.
Johann knew it wasn’t his fault.
“K-knox, no, no, I promised — I promised I’d let you in… but the door — I couldn’t reach the door, I was so… so…” Delilah’s next words were inaudible, and he seized Knox’s form in a crumpling bear-hug. He cried into her dark mahogany hair, blood on his cheek from her leaking bullet wounds. The humanlike faces on her E.G.O Gear had gone eerily still, mouths agape. “O-only one person can go in at a time, it should have been you! It should have been, I don’t care that I was injured, I should’ve… W-we could have taken turns. We could have…!”
Her mind was gone. There wasn’t time to save her. She would have wanted you to go in, anyway. Before she could take it back.
Even if… she wanted to save herself.
He was “projecting such emotionally-driven thoughts” as Hohenheim would have scolded him. Johann wasn’t an idiot.
But he wasn’t about to ask Delilah not to mourn his partner, either.
He’d heard about what this particular Tool Abnormality was used for. One of P Corp’s mishaps, made eternal. A place where one’s sins could be hidden from but never forgotten. Canned food, restorative healing items, walls that could blot out the world until the world became a nightmare one could one day brush aside like a fantasy.
Delilah might have been a fellow airhead, but even he knew that within that space, anyone would be tempted to keep the door shut an extra while longer. But that… unlike anyone, an earnest heart sometimes made impulsive decisions.
It just depended on where their potential led them.
Johann heard music begin to play, a curtain intent on rising. Soon, every gaze would be captured, forced to watch this unfold.
Knox’s belly was twitching, a familiar cloud of yellow escaping her lips as Delilah squeezed her.
Johann was infecting them, slowly. The buzz of wings started to fill his intestines. It made no sense, but nothing did.
Nothing except that there was an open door, waiting above the bodies of his colleagues.
His finger, still on the trigger.
The memory of Hohenheim’s smile, looking back at him with a reason to live.
One moment, endless possibilities.