Waiting: Mother Arc: Chapter 25

Yu watched from the kitchen as Breda threw an arm around Ed’s shoulders with some affectionate roughhousing. “Congratulations on pissing off the hospital,” he said. “Sounds like you really outdid yourself.”

Ed grumbled and gave the soldier an elbow to the gut. “Geddoff. Shit.” After extracting himself he added with a small smile, “I didn’t even do anything. Just locked the door.”

She scoffed to herself at the understatement.

“Well, it was enough to make you persona non grata with the staff.”

“Probably because they can’t get mad at visiting Xingian royalty,” Ed muttered. Yu had to agree. “But are you saying I can’t go in to see Roy?”

“It wouldn’t be the best idea right now. Sorry Boss.” Breda gave him a sympathetic smile. “The only reason they let any of us in is they can’t interfere with military business.”

Ed scowled and scratched through his hair. “Fuck. Do I even get to know when they’re gonna release him?”

“All I know is ‘not yet’. No one was feeling very talkative.”

“Fuck,” Ed reiterated. “What about the rest of it? Find anything yet?”

“Give us a break, it’s barely been half a day and we’ve all been up all night. I promise I’ll keep you in the loop.”

Ed’s eyes narrowed.

“I promise! . . . As much as I can.”

“Hmph.”

Breda punched his shoulder. “Hey. I know you. It’s not worth trying to keep you in the dark. I just have to convince Radcliff. So don’t go making that harder, all right?”

“Fine, I’ll fucking behave.”

“That’s all I ask.”

Yu retreated back int the kitchen.

It was early afternoon and they had been up for little more than an hour. Mei had left to deal with matters regarding the embassy—and also, Yu suspected, to get some space. Yu had briefly considered going with her, but wasn’t sure she was ready to deal with the princess just yet.

Instead, she was puttering around cleaning her son’s kitchen, trying to work up the nerve to talk to her son’s lover.

Her son who had nearly died.

Her son who had recently confessed to being a murderer.

Breda had left with a small set of keys Ed had fetched for him. Now Ed seemed unable to settle, drifting between the library and the study. Yu filled the kettle and set it on the stove, listening to him move about.

Ed’s odd, uneven footsteps retreated upstairs, and when he came back down a moment later he finally settled on the couch. She glanced through the doorway and saw him set a shoebox down on the coffee table and open it, pawing through the contents with a frown.

Yu switched off the burner and poured water over the teabag. If this was going to be a regular occurrence, she was going to have to get her son some proper tea.

Regular occurrence.

How many times was she going to be here, trying to work up the nerve to discuss some dark part of Roy’s life?

Once the tea had steeped she joined Ed in the living room sitting down in one of the armchairs. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

Ed was frowning at a piece of white fabric. She watched him jab a needle in, poking it around several times before pulling through a line of red thread. “Roy’s glove was ruined,” he muttered.

Her mug hovered.

She raised it, ashamed that such a simple display of affection would startle her.

“Roy told you about Bradley, didn’t he.”

Yu froze again, then very deliberately took a sip. “. . . Yes. He did.”

“It’s funny, in a way,” Ed said with a smile that held very little humor. “That’s not one he hates himself over. He’s not proud of it—it was just something that needed to be done—but that’s not what he hates himself over.”

Not what he hates himself over. “You—you’re referring to Ishval. Right? But he was under orders—”

“He agreed to those orders the moment he accepted that uniform and that watch. He agrees to them every day he puts the uniform on.”

That stopped her.

“It’d be easy to fob off the responsibility.” Ed picked at a knot in the thread. “A lot of people do. But Roy doesn’t see it like that. He made the choices that put him there. He made the choice to stay.”

The thread snapped and Ed scowled at the broken end.

“But if it had just been the battlefield, that’d be one thing,” he continued. “That’s bad enough, but—there was more. Something else that happened.” Ed paused to knot the two tails of the thread together.

Yu set down her tea, folding her hands together to stop the shaking. “Please. I—want to understand. I need to understand.”

The young man sighed. “There were . . . two doctors. A married couple. They—they were treating the Ishvalans. The military . . . the military didn’t like that.”

Yu twisted her fingers.

“He . . . they . . . the order got passed down to Roy.”

She desperately wanted to tell him to stop. To tell him that she didn’t want to hear any more. But she couldn’t.

“If you ask me, Roy had no good choices left. Following that order and—” he made a sharp, aborted gesture. “Doing what he did. That was the least shit option out of a pile of shit. Because either way, they—military wanted them dead.” He finally glanced up at her with a bitter smile. “But Roy’s the one who chose to sign on with a military that would give those orders.”

“I . . . see.”

She’s never thought of it like that. It didn’t sit well. It seemed to her that the most Roy was guilty of was idealism and naïveté.

She picked up her mug and gave herself the span of a few sips to consider.

“And . . . Bradley?”

“Well . . . to really get this, you have to understand that after Ishval Roy was determined to get to a place where he’d never have to follow an order like that again. Where he could make sure orders like that would never be given. He was working his way up through the ranks to do it all through the system, but—four years ago it became clear that that wasn’t fast enough. He couldn’t wait that long. The country couldn’t wait that long. Too many people had died already. Things were heating up, and . . . we had to act.”

“‘We’?”

“Bradley was just a puppet, really,” Ed continued. “He was an inhuman monster who was running this country into the ground and he needed to be stopped, but he wasn’t the brains or the push behind everything.” Ed snorted as he pulled off another length of thread. “That was all that one fucking bitch who didn’t want to die.”

She waited while he worked the thread into the eye of the needle.

“So then Roy. . . .”

“Dealt with Bradley. Yep. Again, not anything he’s proud of. But not something that weighs on him, either. It just needed to be done.”

“And this . . . woman? Did he—deal with—her as well?”

“Nah, that was me.”

“But you must have been a child!”

Ed snorted again and glanced up. “Sixteen. Just. I hear that made me old enough to be handed a gun and sent into battle. If everything hadn’t gone to shit when it did I probably would have been.” He shook his head. “Yeah. I was a kid. A kid who was considered a human weapon, but I was a kid. A kid who had been facing down assholes and lunatics for years already but still wasn’t ready to face the harsh truth of the world.”

Yu lowered her eyes, for the first time wondering just how twisted Amestris’ State Alchemist program must have been.

“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re worried about. I was going after Dante because she had Al, and I would have . . . I dunno.” He glanced up. “I dunno what I would have done if it had come to . . . that.”

“But . . . Roy. . . .”

“Roy did what he had to do.”

“I . . . see.”

She sat and sipped her tea, watching as he picked out another knot. “When—when you say he was harming the country. Do you mean . . . wars such as Ishval. . . .”

“Deliberate.” Ed snapped the thread and pulled out another length. “Deliberately started. Deliberately escalated. Deliberately designed to create misery and despair.”

“But why?”

“Because desperate people do desperate things. You get someone—or a group of someones—desperate enough—”

“The Stone.”

“Yep.”

Ed finished anchoring the newest thread and then started a new line on the fabric.

“All that fighting—all those lives lost—all because she didn’t want to die. One person. And the tragedy of it was, She wasn’t going to last much longer anyway. You can’t cheat the Gate, and you can only bargain with it for so long before there’s nothing left. It catches up with you eventually.”

“In other words—immortality—”

“Doesn’t exist.”

“Oh.”

She wondered what the Emperor would do if he learned this.

But one set of life-altering revelations at a time.

“Bradley . . . Fuhrer Bradley had been participating in that? Destroying his own country to create the Stone.”

“On the chance someone would create the Stone,” Ed corrected. “He was Dante’s main puppet. One of them.”

She sipped her cooling tea.

Yu watched in silence while Ed placed one painstaking stitch after another into the white fabric. “This—something that reckless—that can’t have been Roy’s original plan.”

“Nah. He was working up through the ranks and planning to take over the country legally.”

“But that was taking too long.”

“Yeah. And everything just . . . sort came to a head.”

“I never knew. All this time . . . and I never knew.”

Ed looked up. “Well—you’re his mom.”

Yu stared at him.

Ed sighed and made a vague gesture. “I mean—you’re his mom. He doesn’t want you to think badly of him.”

She didn’t know what she could say to that.

Abruptly she set her mug down as something struck her. “There was no body.”

“Oh, that.” Ed frowned as his thread knotted up once more. “Bradley wouldn’t have left one.”

She reached over and plucked the fabric out of his hands. “You would have fewer knots if you used shorter pieces of thread. And what can you mean, he ‘wouldn’t have left one’? If he had a body, he would have left a body.”

“Yes and no.” Ed wrinkled his nose. “When I said he was an inhuman monster, I wasn’t being poetic. You know what a homunculus is?”

She froze with the knot half undone. “Homuncu. . . .” She had come across the term in her studies, of course. But— “Those are—a myth—”

Ed scoffed. “They’re as real as the Stone. Back then we had seven of them running around.”

She carefully pulled the ends of the thread until the knot slid free. “I . . . see.”

“Homunculi are identical to humans, compositionally, but they aren’t . . . their bodies aren’t held together the same way. When the energy sustaining them runs out they just . . . break apart.” He waved his hands. “Dissolve into their component parts. Water, carbon, ammonia, lime, phosphorous . . . all the rest.”

“You would get . . . a puddle. A puddle of organic compounds.”

“Yeah.”

“Roy was fighting a monster.”

Ed shrugged as he took the embroidery back. “Human or monster, Bradley needed to be taken down.”

“But—”

The phone rang and she jumped. Ed got up to answer it with nothing more than a grumble. As if everything was normal.

Perhaps the atrocities he was describing had become mundane to him.

“H’lo—oh, hi Al. What’re—what? How did you know ’bout—he what? That shitty—okay, okay. He’s—he’s fine. Now. Roy’s gonna be fine.” Ed dropped into the nearby chair. “Okay. Hold on—lemme start at the beginning.”

Yu picked up the embroidery again, looking at the penciled on salamander array that Ed was carefully (if artlessly) tracing in red thread.

She didn’t want to admit it, but a not insignificant part of her had been relieved when she heard Bradley hadn’t been human.

Perhaps such a thing shouldn’t make a difference.

But she couldn’t quiet the little voice that said it did.

* * *

Breda looked up from the desk drawer he was trying to open as Lieutenant Marcus hung up the phone. “That was Alphonse, wasn’t it? You know he’s just going to call his brother and get the whole scoop anyway.”

Marcus scowled. “That doesn’t mean I should break protocol.”

Breda grunted as one of the keys finally turned in the lock and the drawer popped open. “But now you’ve got two Elrics pissed at you.”

Marcus’ scowl darkened.

“Your funeral, buddy.”

The folder on top of the pile in the drawer stood out, not the least because of the label that read Liore in bold type. Breda flipped it open. “Is this the same folder you’d brought to Mustang?”

“It is.” Marcus picked it up and started paging through the contents. “I had noticed some changes in the reports.”

“When had you last read them?”

“About eight months ago”

Breda raised an eyebrow.

Marcus added with a grumble. “When we were informed that Mustang would be taking over command here. Brigadier General Mustang was prominently involved in this. . . .” He waved a hand over the papers. “This. He and Elric both.”

“I know. I was there, too. Is that your big beef with them?”

Marcus’ expression tightened.

“I know I haven’t been here long, but it’s pretty clear you’ve got no love for Mustang and even less for Ed,” Breda pressed. “Is it over this? Liore? Or is there something else about those two that rubs you the wrong way?”

Marcus slapped the folder down onto the desk. “He thinks the rules don’t apply to him!”

“Which rules?”

“Any. All. Look, you won’t find me defending Archer and what he did. I lost a cousin at Liore thanks to him. But that doesn’t excuse Mustang’s actions. No one may be able to prove it but it’s pretty clear he’d gone rogue. And Elric—Elric’s never had respect for the system or for protocols.”

“Hmph.” Breda slid the folder toward himself. “And here I thought you just didn’t like gay men.”

Judging by the sour expression he wasn’t wrong.

“I don’t see how any of that is relevant.” Marcus indicated the file. “You’ll see my notes there on the . . . ‘errors’.”

Breda skimmed the page, then the next, and the one after that. “Clever. It’s almost believable. If it weren’t completely fiction. Do you think they switched the pages?”

“Probably. I don’t have any way to prove or disprove it.”

“What do you think they were after last night? This one was already tampered with.”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Whoever they are they’re clearly trying to make the general look bad.”

“What, you don’t approve?” Breda probably should have tried harder to keep the incredulity out of his voice but it had been a long day.

Marcus glared. “If Brigadier General Mustang is going to fall it’ll be his own doing. Not some fabricated conspiracy that disrespects the men and women who died that day.”

Breda tapped the papers back into a neat pile and closed the folder. “My apologies. I didn’t realize you had standards.”

“Funny. Look, Lieutenant. I know you’re one of Mustang’s, no matter who you report to now. I’ve heard all about the kind of loyalty he seemed to inspire. You’re right, I don’t like him. I don’t like Elric. But I like dirty tactics and shady maneuvers even less.”

Breda grunted. “Noted, Second Lieutenant Marcus. Anything else you’d like to add before I take this to Radcliff?”

“Only that I’m well aware that there was plenty of both going on in the upper ranks under Bradley. One would have had to be an idiot not to suspect something.”

“The ranks must have been populated by idiots.”

“Or maybe most of us aren’t so comfortable working so far outside the rules.”

“You’re probably right about that.”

* * *

“You haven’t even been here a year, Mustang,” Radcliff ribbed. “Is this what I have to look forward to?”

Roy grimaced. “God, I hope not. I’ll be grey before I’m forty.”

“Careful. If you go grey you might actually look like you belong in that position.”

“Well I can’t have that.”

It was heartening that Radcliff felt comfortable enough to to give him a hard time. Maybe he was starting to settle in here after all.

“I have Lieutenant Breda helping Marcus on this,” Radcliff continued. “Though I’m sure we all have a good guess what your assailant was after.”

“Something tells me he didn’t find what he was looking for.” Not if he was searching the records room. “His demeanor in the hallway wasn’t of a man who had succeeded in his objective.” Roy leaned back against what passed for a headboard. “Has Marcus told you his suspicions?”

“In brief, yes. I’m not making any judgements until I can see for myself.”

“It was on my agenda to show. I needed another set of eyes on this.”

Radcliff nodded.

Roy hated to bring up old wounds, but Radcliff was a soldier. If being reminded of the day he’d lost his son was causing him any pain, it was being kept carefully tucked away.

“As soon as they let me out of here I’ll join you in analyzing them,” Roy continued. “There must be evidence or they wouldn’t have bothered with this song and dance.”

“When are they releasing you?”

Roy huffed. “One more day for ‘observation’. I doubt they’ll be able to justify anything more. I’m tempted to force the issue but the hospital staff is peeved enough.”

“Yes, your family left quite the impression.”

He chuckled. “Well, it had been a while since Ed’s upset the apple cart, as it were. One could say he was overdue.”

“Hmph. No comment.”

Roy took it as a positive that the other man was fighting a smile.

“I will say that this—my being attacked was sloppy and unplanned. Whoever’s behind this wants me discredited somehow, not dead.”

“I agree.” Radcliff frowned for a moment in thought. “You have no shortage of enemies, Mustang. But I wouldn’t have pegged any of them as this careless.”

“I agree.” Roy smirked. “I’ve clearly moved their timetable.”