Izumi starts smoking in the hospital, and none of the doctors can stop her. "Do you know what you're doing to your poor body-" "Of course I fucking know, I'm a fucking alchemist. I know all the chemicals in the human body and what shouldn't get included." She inhales around a thin cigarette, lets the smoke curl over her upper lip and trail to heaven. "If you know, then please, for your own sake-" "Fuck off."

They don't even taste very good, but they are a comforting weight in her fingers and she is already addicted to morphine, why not something else? God doesn't want her dead anyway.

The doctors have said it was a miracle she was alive at all, and made the faces modern doctors make when confronted with the dangers of dangerous alchemy. There has always been war between the sciences.

A miracle, they've said, and she inhales smoke to keep from laughing. A fucking miracle. "Your body shouldn't have been able to do that," they insist with medical sternness. "It's impossible for your remaining organs to take over the functions of your missing ones, but here they are clearly in the process of interweaving and stretching out of shape to-"

She had tuned them out halfway through and they left. She's alone now. She knows what it is and it isn't a miracle. God doesn't want her dead. That wasn't part of the trade.

There is no trade, she knows, and sucks at her cigarette. Her child died before he could be born. She had tried to bring him back, lost half her internal organs, and got what? A misshapen unborn thing that couldn't see or breathe or - anything. Her baby. How could that smiling monster offer it to her in return for all that? She couldn't keep it, it had to go. It was going to die anyway, it was mercy to send it back through the gate. She got nothing back.

She knows the truth, Izumi reminds herself, at least she's got that. She knows the Truth of human transmutation and it's bitter, ashes in her mouth. She doesn't like to sleep anymore, because all she sees is darkness and all she hears is an unborn baby's cry.

Her cigarette is down to the filter and she flicks it out the hospital window, into the garden, and fumbles for another one. The effort leaves her sweating with pain and exhaustion, blood bubbling on her lips, and the doctors have told her to call them when that happens. There's no point, she's not going to die yet. It wants her alive for something. And if it's just pain, it's just pain. She's fucking used to pain.

Izumi claps her hands to light the cigarette, and reclines in bed again, staring up at the ceiling where the smoke curls, letting the taste of ash override the blood.