|| "… Jupiter represents education, wisdom, wealth, and knowledge…" ||

Vato Falman

December 21st, 1914

If there was, indeed, a Supreme Being, and if, indeed, Vato Falman met his end in the very near future –– which was looking more and more likely with each passing day –– then the Second Lieutenant decided that the first thing he was going to do in the Hereafter was apologize to Him –– or Her, or It, or Them –– profusely, reverently, in all four languages he spoke.

Because although Falman did not know what, exactly, he'd done to warrant his exile at Fort Briggs, he knew in his heart of hearts it must have been an act truly abhorrent.

Did he accidentally tread on Black Hayate's tail? Was he the one who gave Kain salmonella during the infamous Grumman potluck dinner of 1912? Good lord, did he file something incorrectly?

Jean Havoc had been in the habit of nattering on about bad "karma" wherever his abysmal dating life was concerned; besides the fact that people consistently found Jean's flirtations distinctly unpalatable, Falman had dismissed the superstitions out of hand as psuedo-scientific nonsense.

Now, as he crouched in his bunk, shivering, his teeth chattering, the slitted window freezing against his cheek, Vato wasn't so sure.

The only redeeming factor of the entire rotten situation, he supposed, was the view.

Fort Briggs rested between two upward slopes of folded granite –– through Vato's window, tendrils of iridescent cloud crept over the white-fanged mountains, which rose starkly, enormously, across Falman's line of sight. The cliffs and crevasses each held an authority that made their solid, separate impressions in his mind –– each one with their own unduplicated shape. The wastes of snow were ghostly under the moon. The sky was dark –– an oily midnight blue, the stars piercingly bright. If Falman looked past the ramparts of the Fort, he could distinguish the furtherest ranges, the Drachman peaks, pellucid under the moon, row after row of them. Endless columns glimmering in their silvery livery.

Absently, Vato held a small, blue book, one of his only personal effects, up to the window... the title's reflective typeface glinted in the moonlight, as though the words were pressed chrome. The book was shabby and quite literally falling apart at the seams, the pages yellow with age and curling from damp. Strings tentacled from both ends of the spine. The image embossed on the cover was faded and faint.

Bereft of anything better to do and wary of more maudlin thoughts lurking in the back of his mind, Vato opened the book to the first page. He began to read in a low, fumbling murmur...

"One day in the long ago, Tāima," recited Vato, "and her twin sister, Tuarangi, were laying on the grass outside the kōihi on a warm summer evening. They were looking up into the sky, describing star-pictures formed by their imaginations. Tāima said to Tuarangi, My eyes are dazzled by all the stars in outer space. For that is where your name comes from, Tuarangi. The love that moves the moon and all the stars..."

On the page was a picture of the waning moon, hanging like a hunter's horn high over the sisters' heads. The stars, rendered in ink dots, resembled sacred geometry in their convolutions of filigree work, but with such a luxury of forms that of a hundred constellations which at first appeared exactly the same, no two seemed alike upon a closer examination.

Falman flipped the page.

"Tuarangi asked Tāima, With what star would you like to play, my sister, the blue one or the red one? The other girl answered, I'd like to play with the red star.

"Oh, that suits me well, said Tuarangi, I would like to play with the blue star. She is younger, and fairer, and full of laughter; the red is the older, and too tired to play."

Vato sighed, closing the book.

It had been a goodbye gift from Sciezka. Falman wasn't entirely sure why the girl had given him a children's book as a going-away present, but her generosity had been so genuine and her insistence, so earnest, that the newly-promoted Second Lieutenant hadn't been able to find it within himself to refuse her.

Vato rested his head against the cool, smooth surface of the wall. In the moonlight, the rock shadows on the snow were sharp. Vato couldn't help but think there was something of a common miracle in the tension between light and dark, something the alchemists probably had a name for, but Falman, for all his knowledge, did not.

The unforgiving brutality of the mountain bound them together, the Major-General's Bears, and after many paths and many years, perhaps many deaths, too, they became aware of a certain sacredness in their suffering. It was all very dignified and noble, Falman supposed, if one were inclined to admire that sort of fool thing.

Needless to say, the arrangement was not to Vato Falman's fancy. Survival of the fittest was all very well and good for wild animals, Briggsmen, or particularly strict political theorists, but the Second Lieutenant preferred not to scrape and claw his way through life if he could best avoid it. His was a constitution made for humbler, more ordinary ventures... organizing case files, perhaps. Or stapling things.

As Vato sat –– torso bent almost horizontal, elbows balanced on his knees, and thumbs holding up the weight of his head –– he lamented that fate, fortuity, and Führer Bradley had denied him any say in the matter.

And it wasn't as though the stars were likely to spell better fortune anytime in the near future. A wave of saudade swept over Vato, and those maudlin thoughts he'd fought so hard to dam came flooding back, washing against the inside of his skull.

He could pinpoint the exact moment his luck had taken a turn from appalling to apocalyptic... as on many, many former occasions, the arrival of the Elric Brothers had been a portent of trouble. It wasn't enough they made Falman guilty by association when that behemoth Homunculus showed up, oh no... then he'd been manhandled into the underground for four hours and forced to cough up every scrap of information to Major General Armstrong under the threat of a court martial! A court martial! Him!

Then Edward had had Vato list the dates and locations of all major military skirmishes in Amestris's history, beginning with the Riviere incident of 1558 and ending with the recent Reole riots. The map points formed the nodes of a pentamerismic array identical to the Philosopher's Stone transmutation circle Edward and Lieutenant Ross had unearthed in Laboratory 5, soon before its demolition.

It had not taken a major cognitive leap on Edward's part to suggest that the nation of Amestris had been created by the Homunculi, for the sole purpose of acquiring enough land and lives to form a Nationwide Transmutation Circle.

Not longer after, General Raven showed up... the Elrics were tossed in the brig... and Armstrong's arm was twisted until she agreed to put Sloth back into its hole and shore-up the entrance.

All in all, it had not been the most auspicious of starts at Vato Falman's new station.

He supposed he ought to count himself at least somewhat fortunate: Vato had very nearly landed himself in a cell right alongside the Elric Brothers. Buccaneer had insisted that Falman's prior dealing with Edward and Alphonse equated to guilt –– it didn't –– but the Captain mitigated his harsh intentions after he reasoned that standing for hours in the bitter cold scraping icicles off the pipes was punishment enough –– it was.

And in any case, thought Falman gloomily, sitting on his hands in order to warm them, the prospect of a transmutation circle the size of an entire country tended to put most other problems into fresh perspective.

It wasn't as though things could get much worse.

"Lieutenant Falman!" came a booming voice from outside the dormitory door. "You're needed by Major Miles! On the double!"

Then again, Vato had been wrong before.

"C-coming sir!" Falman didn't waste his breath mentioning the fact that he was, technically, off-duty. Somehow, he doubted it would make a damn bit of difference, and the last thing he wanted was one of the senior staff marching down to the barracks and dragging him through the Fort by his earlobe.

Evidently, the Major-General was known to do that sort of thing. Rumor was the latest victim had nearly lost the ear.

Vato was not a fanciful person –– he was sensible, rational, his actions chosen in accordance with logic and prudence. But where Major-General Olivier Mira Armstrong was concerned, Falman found he was more than willing to give hyperbole the benefit of the doubt.

The summoning officer had marched on by the time Falman buttoned his coat and laced his boots. The long, gunmetal-gray corridor was largely empty. The brutally spartan walls were freezing to the touch. The air had a crisp, clean fragrance... not sterile. Just empty, unusual in a military installation, but then again, most military installations didn't need to recycle air through dozens of floors and hundreds of square feet-worth of research and development laboratories. Fort Briggs really was an incredible feat of engineering, though Vato suspected he would find his admiration infinitely more forthcoming from a more objective perspective... hundreds of miles away, perhaps, back home in Central City.

He found the Major standing at the junction of the communications center, his arms crossed, head cocked towards the open doorway. Falman studied Miles's face for some tell, but his ever-present snowblind glasses masked whatever thoughts lay hidden behind his eyes. Miles cut a powerful figure, like so many of the Briggsmen. He was tall and lean but solid, with a ruggedly handsome face framed by a thick crop of snow-white hair, trimmed to two razor-sharp sideburns and pulled back into a severe tail. His mouth pursed as he glowered at Vato, who stood to attention.

"Lieutenant Falman, reporting sir."

"Lieutenant, take over for me here."

Falman's bladed hand faltered at his forehead. "Sir?"

"I've been summoned to the Major-General's ready room, and my charge cannot be left alone in the meanwhile. Since most of the other men are on patrol or shoring up the hole in the engineering section, I expect you to look after him."

Major Miles frowned with a solemnity to suggest the arrangement was not up for discussion. Vato's lips parted to release a small sigh; he had hoped that some of his unease would escape with it. "Sir, forgive me... who exactly––"

But the Major was already halfway down the corridor. "He ought to be finishing up his conversation," called Miles, over his shoulder. If Falman didn't know any better, he'd say the officer sounded distinctly short on patience. "Keep an eye on him, Lieutenant, and don't let him wander."

Let who wander? thought Falman furiously. Wetting a suddenly dry mouth, he padded around the corner and regarded the row of phone booths.

The illumination in the communications center changed subtly, as though the light were glancing off a bright surface, the color of snow. Vato craned his neck and saw someone standing in one of the middle booths, a man dressed in an immaculately tailored-suit, bone-white save for the violet necktie. The individual talked lowly, quietly, his head bent low to receiver, but straightening as his conversation dragged on. A slow, sedate unfolding.

Vato was struck with a sudden sense of wrongness, of fraught, almost atavistic unease, like long nails scraping the surface of his scalp, raising the hackles of his soul. He felt as though he had stumbled across a forgotten god or a sleeping devil, a creature without name from the days before the world settled down and declared itself sane.

Even at a distance, and even though his words were hardly more than a whisper, Major Miles's charge had a voice like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, a bone-rattling, reverberant snap. There was something soft and slight and slenderly surreal about him. Heymans had always been the one to talk about art and poetry and the like, most of it flying well over Vato's sensible head, but looking at the white-suited man, Falman understood in an instant why sculptors were so often challenged to attempt effete thinkers and philosophers on white marble plinths, and why they so seldom succeeded. Vato suspected the undertaking must regularly exceed the scope of the base and the reach of the chisel –– the implausibility of rendering kinetics within stillness, motion within rest.

Madness within composure.

Major Solf J. Kimblee, the Crimson Alchemist, reminded Vato of a particularly languid, self-possessed cat. Falman was fond of cats as a matter of principle, and he lamented Kimblee having soured the affection, perhaps irreversibly. Like a cat, he was long-limbed and limber, with a finely-boned face and an inquisitive glint in his gaze that suggested he knew more than he let on. In his white suit, with his dark hair pulled back into a tail, he presented a slim, sleek figure. But for all his refinement, there was something of the string-bean scrappers Vato remembered from the dingy alleys around his childhood home, as well –– the dangerous set of his jaw, the tightness of his brow as he considered the telephone at his ear. Falman couldn't determine with absolute certainty what color Kimblee's eyes were. They were wet and dark and shining, a purple-hued blue, like pools of still salt water. Deep enough to drown in.

He moved the telephone to the other ear, and Vato watched the mesmerizing ripple of muscle and tendon on the backs of his hands as he turned his palms up, flashing briefly an indigo transmutation circle.

Falman gulped.

Vato knew Kimblee well enough by reputation, of course. Possessed of an eidetic memory and, more often than not, ample opportunity to peruse the military case files at his leisure, Vato could hardly fail to remember the infamous ill-esteem the Crimson's Alchemist had cultivated during his military tenure –– insofar as the official word was concerned, Kimblee had been imprisoned in Central City after the détente of the Ishvalan Civil War for having turned his combustion-based combat alchemy on his own superior officers. Colonel Mustang had spoken of the incident sparingly. Lieutenant Hawkeye had not mentioned it at all. It had taken Falman's reorganization of the court martial office's case files to bring the true extent of Solf Kimblee's violence and madness to light.

Falman frowned; the Crimson Alchemist had not yet taken notice of the Second Lieutenant's presence, engrossed in his conversation. It was all ostensibly ordinary. According to word on the grape vine, Kimblee had sustained severe injuries on the journey to North City. The former State Alchemist had been placed in charge of apprehending a dangerous fugitive –– the same fugitive Colonel Mustang had failed to capture back in East City. It made sense for the man to be making frequent phone-calls, coordinating his search efforts with his constituents and keeping his superiors updated on the status of his health. All very routine...

And it was that normality that aroused in Falman a queasy gut feeling, communicated the vaguest sense of something being the matter. Vato Falman was not by nature a suspicious person, but after a month's worth of surprise transfers, homunculi, and Nationwide Transmutation Circles, fair-mindedness was a luxury he could no longer afford himself. Cynicism was so contagious.

Slinking towards the row of call stations, Falman avoided Kimblee's eye, the Second Lieutenant's heart hammering so wildly against the confines of his chest that he feared he might pass out. He made a beeline for one of the phones. He recalled in an instant a conversation he'd had with Kain Fuery some years previously, during an undercover mission at Eastern Polytechnic. In older ringer telephones, it was possible to eavesdrop on other conversations in the room... since the ringer mechanism consisted of a magnet, a coil, and a hammer, and being as the coil was hooked directly to the phone line, the coil and hammer could be used as a microphone. When someone in the room talked, the hammer vibrated, inducing a current in the coil. Probably not high fidelity, figured Falman, but if he slunk into one of the adjacent booths and lifted the headset, he might be able to listen in...

"You're not Major Miles."

Falman near about leapt out of his skin. He slammed the phone receiver back on its cradle and bit his tongue to keep his surprise from leaving his mouth as a squeal.

Kimblee had his arms crossed over the top of one of the dividers, his chin resting on his folded hands, two thin strands of hair falling over his eyes. He gazed at Falman with his terrifying, enigmatic eyes, their abominable and delusive charm, and grinned, toothy and open-mouthed. Vato swallowed again, the motion moving against a stone in the pit of his throat, but the prickles tidaling along his shoulders did not subside.

Kimblee turned his head to one side and swept one palm in a wide arc. "You mustn't let me interrupt your call. Please..."

"I..." Vato fought for some stone-faced inscrutability when, even at the best of times, there wasn't much to be found. But he could hardly admit that he'd been intending to eavesdrop on the Crimson Alchemist's phone-call, so Falman improvised: "I... forgot the number."

"Indeed?"

"Yes. Happens to everyone, I suppose, sir. I'll call again later."

The corner of Kimblee's mouth pulled skyward in a sneer. "I take it you're to be my new minder, then."

"Major Miles was indisposed, sir."

Rising from the phone booth, Kimblee propelled himself towards Falman, contorting his face into a kind of macabre grimace which Vato supposed was the closest the Alchemist could manage to a smile. "Evidently." He strolled along the hallway and, throwing Falman a deliberate glance, let his hand hinge out and fiddle with one of the free receivers with exaggerated movements, a performance which worked to underline his awareness of Vato's previous actions. Satisfied his cruel mimicry had made his point, Kimblee queried affably: "Was there something you wanted of me, Second Lieutenant Falman?"

Falman thought he had recovered his composure –– somewhat –– but Kimblee's question threatened to disassemble the facade all over again. Kimblee knew Vato's name... Falman could safely assume the man also knew his station, his military history, the contents of his personnel file... his eidetic memory...

It occurred to Vato, then, that Kimblee was well aware of Falman's lie concerning the phone number. Though he had suspected as much, Falman's fear flared at the utter potency of Kimblee's intuition, so much so that his mind, for a time, could not form a coherent response.

Kimblee, however, appeared not to notice Vato's agitation. "What's that you have there, Lieutenant?"

Kimblee's intense and velvety gaze fastened itself to Falman's hands –– the fixation was so adhesive, so corrosive, that an irrational part of Vato worried that if the Crimson Alchemist were to withdraw, he would tear the Second Lieutenant's skin away. Vato followed the other man's line of sight...

And found, to his astonishment, that he was still carrying the blue children's book.

Distracted by Major Miles's summons and unsettled by Kimblee's poisonous charisma, Falman had forgotten to leave the book in the dormitories. He remembered, abruptly, how often Colonel Mustang would lament Vato's absent-mindedness, his tendency to live distracted, rarely fully present.

There was a strange paradox to it, Falman supposed. His rational, logical mind was invariably concomitant with his propensity for disappearing inside his own head. He was not proud of his tendency to favor realism –– it was like being proud of lacking in imagination. But for Falman, realism and imagination were natural accompaniments, subsumed into his photographic memory. His powers of recall stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon he saw was capable of evoking a memory.

"May I?" queried Kimblee, inclining his head towards the book, straightening his arm in a curiously unassuming gesture –– in full defiance of the array inked in indigo on his palm.

Perplexed, but damned if he was going to raise a point of protest, Vato silently and demurely handed the Crimson Alchemist the story.

Propping the book on the crook of his arm, with his free hand Kimblee turned back the worn cover. For a few moments, the fluttering of the thin paper was the only sound, continuing on and on until finally his hand came to rest on a random page... flickering with backlight, the print on both sides visible, the intricate nodes of constellations like cinders blown thin across the dry, curling paper.

Kimblee read aloud: "'The sisters fell asleep. When they woke, they found themselves in another world... the twelfth heaven, te toi o ngā rangi. There were four of them there, Tuarangi and Tāima and the two stars who had become girls. The blue star was very, very old and was gray-headed, while the younger, the red star, was red-headed. The sisters stayed a long time in this star world, and Tuarangi, who had chosen the blue star, was very sorry, for she was so old.'"

The texture of the Crimson Alchemist's voice was so plush, so deep and dulcet, that it became easy to overlook how much power and control he wielded masterfully through his words. Therein lay the danger, Vato supposed.

Major Kimblee blinked his violet eyes slowly, like a goanna lizard. Hair wisps threw shadow splinters across his face. His face took on a scowling, deeply troubled expression. Vato noticed for the first time a peculiar smell rising from the Alchemist... the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless roiling of ozone.

No breath, no sound, except at times the muffled grinding of teeth, disturbed the sudden solitude that surrounded Kimblee. It seemed to Falman as though the Crimson Alchemist had forgotten the Second Lieutenant's presence entirely, fixated as he was on the book. A kind of slow gyration swept the light behind his eyes, his thoughts turning turbid and muddy in his ardent contemplation.

Curiously, Vato saw something of Heymans Breda in Kimblee's reverie, an almost monastic rumination. Both men possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outlines and anatomies. Kimblee and Breda both seemed atuned to the odd synchronicities that traced the way disparate details veered to touch one another, change direction, and then come close until they connected and circumstance rendered their correspondence significant. Though that significance heretofore escaped Falman's own recknoning, he didn't doubt that Kimblee intuited something from the book... though what intrigue a children's story held for a man of his intelligence –– and, admittedly, his psychoses –– Vato couldn't say. Nor was he entirely sure he wanted to know...

"Lieutenant Falman," said Kimblee suddenly, gaze bolting Falman to the floor. "Define the word chrysopoeia, if you would be so kind."

"It... it refers to the transmutation of common metals into gold, sir."

"Top marks, Lieutenant. And when was the alembic invented?"

"The Third Century."

"And who wrote De Materia Medica?"

"Dioscorides, sir."

"Then tell me... according to Dioscorides's work, how does one produce an emetic syrup from troches of alhandal?"

Falman screwed up his eyes and racked the recesses of his memory. He found, to his dismay, that he had never actually read Dioscorides, and though he remembered the filing information from the Main Branch of the Central Library, the contents of the medical text remained stubbornly elusive. "I... I don't know, sir."

Kimblee's mouth pursed in a bloodless line, his eyes holding Falman pinioned where he stood, before querying: "How would one go about collecting condensed mercury using an alembic still?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Translate ἕν τὸ πᾶν."

Vato Falman spoke four languages fluently. Ancient Xerxian was not one of them.

"I... can't, sir."

Staring at Vato with impenetrable purple-blue eyes, Kimblee studied him, not moving, not speaking. Falman's courage disintegrated, and a violent tremor swept up the length of him. Kimblee took note of the shudder, as well as the humiliation that scorched Vato's cheeks.

There hovered in the air a charged expectancy, turbulent, tingling along Falman's nerve endings.

"A pity," said Kimblee softly. "I find I'm almost disappointed."

"I... I am no alchemist, sir."

Falman imagined his crestfallen expression must have been quite comical, for Kimblee threw back his head and laughed: a hard, spiteful cackle which stoked a resentful shame in Vato. He was almost grateful for it. It overcame the fear and indignity.

"I will grant you this, Lieutenant: you have a truly prodigious handle on the understatement."

The Crimson Alchemist, in the meanwhile, began to turn the book between his hands, the embossed title glinting in the Fort's harsh industral lighting. There was a horrible, erratic thumping in Falman's chest, as though a large bird was trapped inside his ribcage and beating itself to death.

"Forgive my asking, Major..." he mouthed, the words tailing off, his voice little more than a murmur.

Kimblee's expression softened; he looked almost charmed. "I no longer hold that rank, Lieutenant. My title or my honorific –– or my name, if you're so inclined –– will suffice."

Falman's gulp tugged uncomfortably at his Adam's apple. "What... what interest do you have in a children's story?"

He smirked. "Even I was a child once, Lieutenant Falman."

Reminiscence, then? wondered Vato. Had Kimblee read the same book as a boy? Somehow, a wistful affection for the past ran counter to the Crimson Alchemist's indomitable fixations on the present moment. Falman must have communicated something of his doubt with his expression, for the Major –– former Major –– bobbed his shoulders in a philosophical shrug.

"Writers, as a species, interest me," confessed Kimblee. "A strange race of people who feel half-cheated of an experience unless it is retold. As though it does not really exist until it is put into words. This book, and others, constitute a paradox: the more unreal an experience becomes –– translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself –– the more vivid it grows." Mired in contemplation, Kimblee fingered the straw-like strings bursting from the spine of the book. "Their stories are hinged to forgetfulness, like doors."

Of course, realized Falman... Kimblee had an eidetic memory, too.

Like him.

The Crimson Alchemist was a man interested in the exact recall of what was said, who said it, to whom. He wanted to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets. And true stories couldn't be told forward, only backward.

Then why not cast the book aside? thought Falman. Why did Kimblee continue to clutch it, to level on it with cold eyes?

"I remember it all, Lieutenant: every word, every breath, every tick of the clock… everything that has ever happened to me is with me forever. I can never forget it… just as you cannot.

It was unnatural... how easily Kimblee read Vato's mind, as though Falman were projecting his thoughts as brazenly as the stars and bars on his epaulettes.

"But if the mere act of bringing facts to mind and rote memorization constitute the scope of your cognitive powers," continued Kimblee, his smirk lengthening to a scowl, eyeing the Second Lieutenant with something not dissimilar to disdain, but with a contempt too mild to suggest Falman was worthy of Kimblee's opinion of him, good or bad; "then the memories are no more real than a children's fairytale. Stories simplify, solidify, codify… mummify. An oft-told story is like a dried-up daisy chain pressed into the family album at the back of a drawer; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

"Your powers of recall, Lieutenant..." murmured Kimblee, Falman shuddering slightly, and the Alchemist with the strange smile upon his face. "They are dead things."

But if not for his memory, thought Falman, then what good was he?

What use?

The hollowness in Vato's chest, the tense yearning for some purpose and significance, the loneliness he braced against and lingered until he could immerse himself in work and forget... it returned with a vengeance. Not despair. Something else, something with a power that endured. Not despair, but a memory of despair.

How ironic.

Falman had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so his optic nerves did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull, where the memories waited for him.

It took Vato a moment more than it ought to have done for him to realize that Kimblee was holding the book out to him, cover up. Falman, not looking the Crimson Alchemist in the eye, took the story back.

"Be glad you're not just a character scrawled in the margins of somebody else's storybook, Vato Falman," said Kimblee, lip curling. "You'd be frightfully dull."

And then the Crimson Alchemist ignored Falman completely.

He rested against the wall, one foot braced adjacent to the knee of the opposite leg, arms crossed. Content to keep his own company until Major Miles's return.

Vato wanted to be angry... angry to be so disregarded, cast aside. For a few long moments, he struggled in his mind with all kinds of defenses. He wanted to say something to counteract Kimblee's callousness, to expiate his anger and to justify himself in the eyes of the Alchemist Concurrently, Falman grappled with rationalizing precisely why he felt the need to give Kimblee grounds for his own validity. The Crimson Alchemist's free, unfettered philosophizing, his cruel caprice, dismissed Falman's character and demanded Falman's self-advocacy in equal measure.

The man was right: it was a paradox. Kimblee was like the storybook –– if what he said was true, and the retroactive nature of memory meant everyone perceived a different reality based on their histories, their needs and desires, then whose reality was accurate?

It was all a contrivance. It was a projection of what each person perceived and believed at any given moment.

What did Kimblee believe? wondered Falman. What truth did he find in a children's storybook that Vato could not see?

Kimblee's possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that was moral within himself... whatever the Crimson Alchemist saw with those eyes, the Second Lieutenant knew it was something he was blind to.

A vision Vato would never share.

Falman's nose grew very red at the tip; his mouth screwed itself by his left ear; gradually, his thin face wrinkled until it resembled a withered crabapple.

And finally, if one listened intently and watched closely, one could hear small sniffs and see two drops of water issue from his pinched eyes...