AN: Alright friends, although there are many different varieties of kaiju/giant robot universes in existence, this one in particular is based off of Neon Genesis Evangelion. As this is a fusion of NGE and FMA, I have taken some pretty significant liberties with both. As a disclaimer, the things I'm drawing from NGE are from the anime and End of Eva specifically, and don't take into account the movies. On that note, this is also based in the FMA continuity of Brotherhood and, to a lesser extent, the manga. While a prior knowledge of NGE would be cool so you can pick up on some of the references and tweaks to the universe, I don't think it's necessary for an understanding of the fic.
The title is bastardized from Henry David Thoreau's "Walking": "We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk."
Chapter title is from "I Am Not Afraid," by Owen Pallett, which you can listen to here: watch?v=7KNDXQUJ9BI
And, finally, Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa, and Neon Genesis Evangelion belongs to Hideaki Anno. If either of them belonged to me, this is approximately what it would look like.
Chapter One- "The truth doesn't terrify us."
Riza Hawkeye is cold. In the two months that she has been aboard the A.M.S. Flamel, this has been her most consistent thought. She knows in the kind of offhand way that all children know things about their parents that her family is well-off. After all, the Hawkeyes are both military-funded researchers, working on something important and secretive. Her childhood (which she is still in, but won't be for long) was comfortable, if a little lonely due to the nature of her parents' work, and their home back in the West is spacious and warm. And yet, despite this, the parka they had provided her for the trip is several sizes too big, and the air in the space between her skin and the fur makes her shiver. She wants to go back inside the ship, but her parents very rarely let her sit with them and observe while they work, so she doesn't want to squander this precious opportunity.
She's not entirely sure what it is that they're researching, exactly, only that it is of importance to the military and it makes everyone speak in very vague, hazy terms. Her parents only let her come along on the condition that she not interfere with their work, and so she's too afraid to ask. Whatever it is has brought them to the sea north of Drachma, which, at this time of year, is dark even during the day, and so Riza spends most of her days in a sleepy fog, as if she had always woken up too early or too late. She tries her best to keep up with her studies on the ship, since she has nothing but free time, but she has to do it alone in her bunk, otherwise the research assistants give her funny looks.
She never really thought much about her upbringing, because it was the only one she had ever known. Her parents never communicated much with their extended family, and so she had no cousins to speak of who she could compare her life with. She never got out much as a child, and if she did she generally stayed on her family's property, and so she very rarely had to even consider the local children who walked to and from school every day. And so her parents taught her stitched together bits and pieces of what they knew and what books they had on hand or could get from the library. She never thought anything of it until she was in the galley working one day and a couple of research assistants happened to come in to brew a pot of coffee.
Most of the research assistants are young, and these two in particular are two pretty young women from Central. For the first few weeks on the ship they had tried to talk with her, probably out of a desire for female companionship amidst all of their male colleagues. But they quickly realized that Riza is not the most talkative and also that she-the twelve-year-old daughter of military researchers, the only child on a ship full of adults and very far away from home-has very little in common with them and their desire for frivolous conversation. She wonders what that's like: her parents abhor frivolous anything, and most of their conversations consist of science and math and politics. Important things. She doesn't know how it feels to have a conversation that, once you leave it, meant nothing.
"So what are you working on?" asked one of the women, the one who still wears lipstick, despite her current environment.
Rather than trying to explain, Riza moves the book she had been taking notes from and her notebook so that they can see.
"My!" exclaimed the second, followed by a quick titter of nervous laughter from her companion. "You're quite advanced, aren't you?"
She heard them talking about her that night as she had crawled out of her bunk to get a glass of water. They were in the galley, the lights dim, a bottle of whiskey (one of the crew's many desperate attempts to keep warm) between them.
"I mean, God," said one, the one with lipstick, taking an exasperated pull from the bottle. "I didn't learn that shit until I was at the university. How old is she?"
"Ten, twelve, I don't know," replied the second. "She should be watching cartoons at home, not freezing her ass off up here and doing linear algebra."
"That probably explains why she's so weird."
Riza felt her cheeks flush.
"How do you mean?"
"It's like she..." The first took a swig from the bottle in contemplation. "She doesn't blink enough, or something. I feel like she's always watching us. She never talks to anyone, she just watches."
"I mean, I doubt you'd be a socialite either if the Hawkeyes were your parents."
"Good point."
In her short life, Riza had very rarely felt embarrassed, but at that moment she felt like a freak. Her life looked so strange through the eyes of others, and now she found that she couldn't get her own sight back.
Shivering on the boat in the middle of the strange day-night, watching her parents look into the depths of the frigid water as if it held answers to something, Riza wonders what life would be like if she had grown up like the research assistants, in a city, surrounded by other children, other girls. Would that have balanced out her parents' strangeness? Would she have grown up to be a normal girl? Would she even have liked it if she had?
Her introspection is interrupted by the sight of the ocean having a fit, suddenly churning and bubbling where before it had been calm and smooth as glass. She, and several others, are tossed to the floor while others cling to the railing in an attempt to keep from being tossed overboard. She thinks that maybe this is a sudden storm, but there's no rain or wind, just water. The ship rights itself only for the whole crew to see what had caused the upset.
Rising out of the sea is a huge, black creature, with giant red eyes and a mouth full of horrifying teeth that fall over its lips, even with its mouth closed. It raises an arm, and Riza sees that it has claws the size of automobiles. In a sudden burst of childish need, she calls out for her mother. Her mother turns to face Riza and so does not see the creature reaching for her.
Riza watches in horror as the creature crushes her mother in its palm.
She bolts upright, hand instinctively reaching for the handgun under her pillow, but of course there's nothing there save Black Hayate-Amestris's most useless guard dog-snoozing peacefully at the foot of her bed and the sticky blackness of another night in Central. She surveys the room anyway (old habit) before heaving off a sigh, heavy as a bulletproof vest, and lowering her gun. She places the gun carefully back under her pillow and sneaks a look at the clock on her bedside table. It's a little after five in the morning. She has to be up by six anyway, so she decides to go ahead and get up for the day. She scratches Black Hayate's head as she passes out of her room and hears him whine contentedly in his sleep as she closes the door.
The nightmares don't come as often as they used to anymore. In the months directly following the incident on the A.M.S Flamel, she rarely got a full night's sleep. The nightmare was always the same: she would be sitting, chilly but fine, on the ship, and then the next moment she would be watching as the monster killed her mother. The many military psychologists she was shuffled between in the year after she returned to Amestris all told her the same thing: her consciousness had been so strained under the weight of her mother's death that it concocted a sea monster to explain it away. All the reports, they said, pointed to a meteorite colliding with the sea north of Drachma, which explained both the sinking of the A.M.S. Flamel and the melting of the Drachman ice caps. After all, she was still a child when it happened, and children think in fairytales.
Although she was never a fan of fairytales and the Hawkeyes never read them to her, she accepted their explanation without much fuss. A meteorite-some unconsciousness piece of space rock-is much less scary than a monster. Though consciously she had accepted this to be fact, she still had the nightmares anyway. And though Berthold Hawkeye told all of them that she was never a child known for having a particularly vivacious imagination, everyone agreed that her dreams were incredibly vivid and detailed. A couple psychologists wanted to write a paper about it, but Berthold told them no.
She wouldn't find out the truth until four years later.
The years following her mother's death were quiet and lonely. The Hawkeyes' research required them to do quite a bit of travel, but after returning to Amestris, Berthold very rarely left the house. In the same way that she knew unconsciously that her family was well-off when she was a child, as a teenager she began to see that now they were not. Things started breaking and stopped being fixed. At a point the electricity bill stopped being paid, and they began to use candles and oil lamps that they kept in the cellar for light. Just as her mother had died, it was as if their house were dying as well. Berthold spent most of every day (and often well into the night) in his study, trying desperately to salvage the research that had been curtailed with his wife's death, and so Riza very rarely saw him after that.
And yet, just when it seemed that, perhaps, this was going to be what the rest of her life was like, her father hired a new research assistant, and everything began to fall into a kind of normalcy again. The lights came back on. The assistant, despite being somewhat thin and wan for his age, was determined to prove his worth and gratitude for Berthold for not just taking him on, but also housing him, and so set to work repairing the bits of the Hawkeye home that had begun to disintegrate.
The house had the noise of three pairs of feet again, and Riza was glad that-while still singleminded and unaffectionate-her father seemed to be somewhat engaged with life again. She still had the nightmares, but it had been four years since the A.M.S. Flamel sank off the coast of Drachma, and the memory was beginning to blur around the edges. The monster was now little more than an ominous black mass, rising out of the sea and taking her mother with it. They were still frightening nonetheless, and so every so often they dragged her out of her bed and into the silent kitchen long after the rest of her little household was fast asleep.
The night that Roy Mustang broke into her father's study was one such night.
She was sitting in the kitchen, reading and drinking a cup of chamomile tea, hoping for exhaustion to untie the knot in her stomach and send her back to sleep. But her nerves were ragged at the edges, and she found herself to be wide awake. She didn't like the quiet of the kitchen at night. It reminded her too much of those ghostly years before Mr. Mustang showed up and brought noise back into their house again. But she didn't want to wake anyone by turning on the radio (the only major piece of electronics their home had; to the day he died, Berthold Hawkeye refused to buy a television or a computer), and so she sat with a book, doing the best she could to keep the silence and darkness at bay.
Perhaps, in a strange sort of way, her prayers were answered, because she heard a pair of feet descending the creaky wooden stairs. This was unusual, as Mr. Mustang was generally early to bed after a day of hard work, and her father almost always retreated straight to bed after staying up late working. She turned sharply in her chair, sloshing a bit of tea onto the floor.
Descending slowly, shakily, was Mr. Mustang, gripping the railing with white knuckles, as if to keep from falling down the stairs.
"Mr. Mustang?" Riza asked cautiously. When he had shown up on their doorstep six months before, Roy Mustang had been quite small for his age, but now, after several months of working on their house and in their garden, he had started to fill out a bit, and the pallor of his skin began to recede. But at that moment, Roy Mustang's face was as pale as she had ever seen it, and his eyes-which had always looked Xingese to Riza, although she never asked-were hollow.
Mr. Mustang reached the bottom of the stairs and sat heavily on the bottom step. "I just broke into your father's study," he said flatly.
Riza's mouth fell open slightly. This seemed so out of character for him. He practically worshipped her father and the work he did, did jobs around the house that he was definitely not equipped for (when he showed up, Riza could beat him arm wrestling, although that was no longer the case), and even respected Berthold's rule to leave Riza be as much as possible. And yet he would betray that to break into her father's study in the middle of the night? More than just rude, it seemed quite bizarre.
"I've been curious for a while," he continued. "About the incident on the A.M.S. Flamel. He never talks about it." He let out a dry, hollow chuckle. "And he said specifically never to talk to you about it either." This wasn't surprising. Berthold went out of his way to make sure Riza had to relive that day as little as possible. She had always thought it was a strange, sudden flutter of paternal empathy, but the tone of Mr. Mustang's voice was making her think otherwise. "I couldn't sleep, so I figured tonight would be as good a night as any to sneak in there." He ran a hand through his hair. It had been longer, and would occasionally fall rakishly into his eyes, but he had recently gotten it cut. Riza didn't think it suited him; he looked too much like he was trying to be a grownup, but underneath it all he was still a skinny eighteen-year-old who spent his weekends watering the flowers in their garden and flirting with the girls in town.
"Tell me, Riza," he said, eyes suddenly meeting hers, sharp and black as crows. She remembered thinking that this was the first time anyone had ever looked at her as if she were an adult. It both thrilled and terrified her. "How did your mother die?"
"If you broke into my father's study, then you should've seen the records," she said, suddenly brave. "The A.M.S. Flamel was hit by a meteorite in the sea north of Drachma. My father and I were the only survivors."
He smirked in the way he did that made the young girls who worked at the coffeeshops in town-usually students at Western University who needed part-time jobs-giggle. But instead of making her weak in the knees with longing (which, she thought, she had never been before), it made her weak in the knees for a different reason. She was used to being underestimated: by the research assistants on the Flamel, by the psychologists who interviewed her. They looked at her and saw a fragile little girl, isolated, naïve, and now wracked with grief over the death of her mother. But in reality she knew that she was more than people expected of her. She was strong and very rarely cried, she could do complex math and physics, and could hold her own in a fight if she ever had to. It was both liberating and terrifying to be, for once, simply estimated.
"Now Riza," Mr. Mustang continued. "You and I both know that's not true."
She swallowed. Though her throat was dry, she figured her tea was probably cold by now. She thought of monsters rising from the sea, of claws larger than human beings, of giant red eyes that seared themselves into her mind and refused to leave. She thought of adults in military garb, purposely offset with affable-looking reading glasses and conciliatory smiles, waving away her memories as fairytales.
"Riza," he said, grin fading, and suddenly looking much older than eighteen, but much younger at the same time. Riza was struck with their situation: two kids, sitting in a darkened kitchen at night, discussing what sometimes felt like a harbinger of the end of the world. It was almost laughable. "What do you know about Homunculi?"
Of course, now that's common knowledge. Shortly after her father died (which, in itself, was not long after Roy Mustang broke into his study), the military issued a statement about the incident on the A.M.S. Flamel, saying that the "dedicated research of several highly-regarded scholars has finally turned up an answer to this national tragedy." Riza had been right all along. There was no meteorite. Instead, there was what the military was calling a "Homunculus," so-called for its vaguely humanoid shape. It had been code-named "Greed," and it was believed to still be out there, most likely in the arctic, as it hadn't been apprehended. In order to protect Amestrians from future attacks, the military would be opening a new division, known as the State Alchemist Program. They would be developing a way to keep Amestris safe.
And did they ever. Many have hailed the Alchemists as mankind's greatest achievement: humanoid robots the size of skyscrapers with the ability to stave off any kind of danger you can imagine, and only the best and brightest can pilot them.
In this case, "the best and brightest" happens to include Roy Mustang. And Riza needs to get dressed, because Roy Mustang, State Alchemist pilot, needs to be picked up for work.