There was a woman with ink stains on her fingers. It was because she was always writing and her pen had a tendency to drip. It was one of Tim's earliest memories. He sat on her lap and watched the flow of words from her pen and played with the ends of her dark hair that fell over her shoulder and tickled the top of his head. She was focused on her work and barely noticed.
It was Tim's job to let her know when it was time to take a break- to go out and play a game or to bring in the laundry or stop to eat. "I'm hungry, Mama," he would say and she would put down her pen and look in surprise at the clock and make some quiet remark about how much time had passed followed by some kind word about how wonderfully patience he was.
His mother. The first person he loved.
She taught him to cook (he had inherited her sweet tooth). She taught him good manners (but he inherited her tendency to lose himself in his work to the point of distraction). She said that his kindness was like his father's, but Tim always saw it as another reflection of her.
She wrote magazine articles for the money, but her true love was fiction. There was nothing Tim thought she couldn't imagine up. There was a story she wrote about an alchemist. He forgot about it for years until he became one.
"The truth that you find may destroy you."
His mother had loved him. In a way she had almost indirectly warned him.
The part of him that would set aside kindness in search of knowledge hadn't come from her. It was all his (or, well, he couldn't say for sure about his father).
There was a playful black and brown puppy who grew into a calm and loyal dog. She was a birthday present from his mother. They named her "Sammy" together. She slept at the foot of his bed and waited for him each day to come home from school. For ten years she was his closest friend.
There were many times Tim loved someone who he could understand might be difficult for others to understand his feelings for, but this wasn't one of those times. Who wouldn't have loved that dog?
There was a medical school classmate, a fellow alchemist. Tim hadn't fit in that well in the local school, but he hadn't let that stop him from focusing wholeheartedly on his studies. With top grades and several letters of recommendation, he was accepted into the university of his choice. In an anatomy class, he met Roger Lovelace. Roger was a bit on the short side, with a round face. He was not particularly conventionally handsome, but he was fastidious in his habits and knew how to charm the girls with his brains and dancing ability.
In their second year of medical school they became roommates. In this capacity, many of their classmates observed that they were a good match. Their apartment was neat as a pin, but filled to the ceiling with books. They studied together and worked together in the school library, but only Tim tutored other students (Roger didn't have the patience for it).
"I don't have any knack for languages and, even if I did, I probably couldn't handle the long trip across the desert, otherwise I would visit Xing," Roger grasped at wisps of half-baked dreams over a late night cup of earl grey.
"You could hire someone as a guide and translator," Tim suggested, although he was well aware that Roger probably only meant the trip in theory and would never think of actually going. He had a tendency to talk big. "I'll become a State Alchemist," he said, or, "Someday I'll own a house with a big enough yard to indulge all my craziest gardening fantasies!" It was always something like that. Roger preferred the company of superlative people and the discussion of superlative things (including those he only imagined). He would include his friends in his daydreamed world as well. "You're going to be famous, Tim! Way more famous than I am!" he would insist, which was partly flattering and partly embarrassing.
"…You're good with languages. Codes and ciphers and all that too. Maybe you should study Xingese and cross the desert."
"You know I'm not going to do that, Roger."
His blue eyes gazed off into the distance, to some fantastic future far away, "Well, maybe not, but I bet you could. …Do many people in Xing speak Ishvalan? Maybe you could go on that."
"I have no idea, Roger." He wanted to focus on the crystallization of substances to create new medications- he was operating in a slightly different area than the handful of Xingophilic students and faculty.
"You have such a nice temperament. You'd make your way over there somehow."
When Roger said so, Tim believed it. If Roger had said the things that ran through Tim's mind when they sat up at night talking like this, they could have come true. They wouldn't have sounded crazy coming from Roger, they way he imagined they would if he actually voiced them.
Later on, Tim supposed many of those things Roger dreamed of did materialize. Roger became "Dr. Lovelace," he was dubbed the Cold-Cutting Alchemist, pioneered several unique surgical techniques drawing on his alchemic prowess, held a prominent position at South City's hospital, and bought a large house where he grew roses.
…And if the general public could be granted the knowledge that he had successfully created a Philosopher's Stone, Tim would have been the more famous between them (not that it bothered him any).
Eventually Roger married a significantly younger woman, but he never completely lost touch with his old school friend. They shared correspondence concerning their work and their colleagues in both the medical field and that of alchemy and the tone of the letters was always friendly (it was other people and their "crackpot theories" Roger complained about).
Until the letters stopped. Tim wasn't sure what to think as he read the buried obituary. What was initially described as a sudden illness was later corrected to murder. …That woman hadn't been right for him after all.
There was a miniature succulent in a pot- this, he was relatively sure, was the beginning of his active love of plants. It was a graduation gift from the green-thumbed Roger Lovelace. "An echeveria. "The black prince," they call this variety," he explained, "It's Ishvalan; I know how you're sort of into that."
"Th-thank you! That's so kind of you, Roger."
"Tim, it is my pleasure!" he had bowed like the gallant fool he was. "And you don't have to worry about being too busy. Succulents are very easily to take care of."
In Central and Tyrik and, much later, in Ishval- whether he had a full yard to himself or little more than a window box- after this he always had flowers.
There were the men and some he was allowed to handpick to staff his very own lab. It was thrilling to find that the state believed so fervently in his ability to achieve something based on the research he had shown them- and not just the low key medicinal compound crystallization work, but the esoteric stuff- the deciphered documents leading him down the path to an actual, viable bypass of the Law of Equivalent Exchange. Even as Tim had presented the research he had been unsure of how they would react to it. He was, after all, pursuing a subject widely believed to exist only within the domain of rumor and myth.
He chose his allies carefully. They had to be capable, hardworking, and able to keep a secret. They had to believe it was possible to create a Philosopher's Stone.
Ms. Rousseau, Mr. Pachuco, Mr. Walsh, Mr. Logan, Ms. Campbell, Mr. Germaine. They spent so much time together in and out of the laboratory and libraries together they might as well have become his second family.
There was the Ductile Alchemist, Henry Percy, a pale-eyed man who'd started his work with textiles and branched out into experimenting with all sorts of useful materials under the watchful eye and generous hand of the state. They met amidst the stacks of the First Branch of the National Central Library, although Percy's home was miles away to the northeast in Pallet. He had been in the capitol on military business.
"Actually, do you know Major General Hirsch? He suggested that you and I might get something out of working together," the balding alchemist had chuckled, though his laugh was mixed with something of a pained cough. "I wasn't that interested because I thought you were some young military-tracked upstart. There seem to be a lot of them these days. If he had been more detailed in his description and let me know that you were an older, more laboratory-focused sort like me I would've been much keener on the idea. The last one he brought up was this little, dandy of a pet of his."
"Hirsh is a bit…pragmatic, shall we say?" Tim considered the major general in question.
They laughed nervously and the other alchemist shifted the conversation to more positive topics- their academic histories, their personal projects, their hobbies aside from alchemy.
Tim was quick to agree to the idea of a friendly correspondence. Ductile asked to be called "Hal."
Hal had a large workshop with assistants and apprentices in Liddle, two towns away from Pallet. "I like to keep my work and home life separate," he explained.
It was a sensible decision, Tim agreed, though he barely had any home life to keep apart from his days of work. There was no family waiting up for him at his apartment when he worked. There weren't even any pets. His plants could handle his long hours and lengthy absences.
Hal invited him not to Liddle, but to Pallet. He had a ridiculous old house, easily picked out at a distance as the only building in town with three stories. There was plenty of room for the guests that he never had, he joked, but he did share the place with his little daughter Aubrey. She was pale and blind and strawberry blond. Hal kept her existence from even his longest-serving research assistants he was so protective of her. He had some notions about keeping the fact that he had any family from the government, which Tim found strange, but didn't press too much about. Aubrey didn't have an official birth certificate; Hal had kept her so off record. But he trusted Tim to meet her.
The house was quieter when it didn't have to be just the two of them.
There was no Mrs. Percy.
Tim became a regular visitor until the demands of his work and the pressure of the war mounted. Aubrey called him "Uncle Tim." Hal had more to do as well with the war raging. When he wrote he remarked on how his usual cough had worsened to something that plagued him. Tim paused at this, considering potential causes, but the feeling that the Philosopher's Stone lay just beyond his grasp kept him in the lab. When he had that, he could move about again. Surely the stone could end the war… And it would be a far simpler thing to help Hal…
There were those within the government who subsidized and supported his research. Some of them were not the public faces of the government. Those were the ones he could never have predicted. The one they called "Envy" could play all parts for all people. But they were just roles. They didn't mean a thing. He should have realized it sooner. He was always learning things far too late.
Once he cracked the formula and performed a successful experiment, with the Philosopher's Stone seeming to pulse like a beating heart in the palm of his hand (though no one else felt that- he must have hallucinated it in his awe and horror), what could he do but love it and despair?
There was a village so small it was rarely named on any maps- they had to be quite detailed. There weren't any doctors in either that village or the general vicinity. There had been two and they had died during the war. That was how Tim knew about the village in the first place. One of those doctors had been Victor Monahan.
"Tyrik, it's called," he had said.
"And why did you practice there, Vic? Out of the good of your heart?" his coworker in the field, Dr. Detto Bosco, had inquired.
"I was born and raised there! Sure, I went away to medical school, but I always planned on going back some day. Tyrik's my home- the people are my people! Good people!"
"All people are good people, aren't they?" Tim had asked himself, sitting alongside Bosco, silently sipping his coffee. Before the war, the answer had come easily, during and after things became complicated.
No one knew he had ever overheard that exchange, did they? No one would expect when he fled that Tim Marcoh would hide behind an assumed name, lie low, and move to Dr. Monahan's old village. The places he had left behind connections were out of the question. Not Hal and the men and women from his lab. He could not even speak up to say he was not dead.
He called himself "Mauro" and Tyrik innocently (naively) took him in. Even if he lived every day wading through an undercurrent of fear, looking back over his shoulder for a servant of the state sent to reclaim him (Envy in some unforeseen disguise lurking around any corner? Solf Kimblee having escaped the firing squad through his utility as high command's dark detective?), he was glad to be there. He was a weak man. He would have been frightened everywhere. With the stone and his alchemy, in any bigger or more gossip-prone town, word of his deeds would likely have spread. All tiny villages were equally dangerous (and he could not bear complete solitude). Being need brought his only measure of security.
"Ductile Alchemist Fourth Victim of State Alchemist Killer," Tim read, crunching the paper between his trembling hands, "Hunt Continues for Scarred Suspect." The official file photograph pictured along with the article depicted Hal a good twenty years younger and healthier than he'd been when he died. An obituary further back in the paper did a better job of showing Hal as the man that Tim had known. In that picture, he was giving instructions in his lab- thin, pale, and completely bald on top, but with a wistful smile still framing his face. The obituary made no mention of Aubrey Percy. Tim was undecided as to whether this should leave him relieved or worried.
Educing, Electric, White Heat, and Ductile - they had all lived outside Amestris' largest cities. That very same serial killer might be headed next toward him. If it came down to him or the grasp of the state, Tim knew which fate he would pick.
Tyrik and its people were far better for him than he ever was for them. He wondered what they would have thought had they ever known the danger he had foolishly brought into their midst- though if he had ever thought his love for them would bring threats of death down on them, he would never have been so unkind as to put down those roots and nearly doom them. Hal had been right, he saw too late, about hiding from the state the ones that you loved, though Hal hardly knew how easily they could peer beyond his fences and shrubbery and walls and into the most secret corners of your life and your heart.
He went from Tyrik in hopes it would not be destroyed. When next he walked free, he could only hope he had not set that fuse to burning.
There was a man who should have delivered his death. A nameless man, an angel of vengeance, who deserved to take his life. He was wrapped up in a rightful rage, which served to make him wild, when underneath he was full of discipline and compassion.
That did not mean everything he did was just, but who was Tim, of all people, to judge?
Tim spilled the tales that tortured his soul to him, and despite the flood or anger that broke forth from the other man at their telling, even with the knowledge of his part in the horrors that had bent and twisted him into the monster he had become it was not enough for the State Alchemist serial killer (yes, they had come face to face at last!), the one called "Scar," to take his life. Not yet. Not there.
They left the confines of his prison together. The Ishvalan watched him, and Tim watched in return.
In those months they spent together, Tim wondered if Scar was filled with as much wonder and awe as he was at the things he saw and felt and learned.
He marveled at the depths of strength within the human spirit and the capacity of a person to change. Any person. Even him.
Scar was no longer "Scar" when the met again several days after the Promised Day though no other name had securely settled upon him.
Major Miles had sought the doctor out at Scar's request and promptly retrieved him. Tim had hardly imagined that one day he would sit in the Armstrong family's parlor having tea, let alone that he would be doing it with someone like Scar.
The tea was reddish in tone, strong and spiced. "It's Ishvalan." Scar looked very tired when he smiled.
Suddenly Tim felt shy at his gaze. "This is hardly the end of things," he spoke down into his cup.
"You mean that you want to come with me?"
"There's nowhere else I'd dream of going," Tim took a deep breath and summoned up the courage to look back up. The calm on Scar's usually troubled face was like a benediction ("I judged him right from the very beginning," Tim thought).
The cycle of hate must have completely run its course by the time they followed Major Miles down out of the truck into the crater-pocked dust of the land of Ishval. Tim Marcoh shuddered at this sight from his nightmares, the beautiful land he had hoped to defile and destroy, but his reborn and renamed comrade (with nightmares enough of his own, but hopes to combat them) reached out and took his hand.