Author's Note: This fic is set in my little AU where Ed and Mustang get sent off to the Drachma War shortly after Ed turns sixteen. This happens after they get Al's body back, but Ed still has automail, so it doesn't really fit either of the canon storylines. For a long time, I've wanted to explore an OC that I created years ago. She's never been particularly important to the plot of any of my fics, but there was just something about her that seemed really kick-but...in a very unconventional way. FMA is a story full of kick-butt women who are strong physically as well as emotionally. Women who are loyal and know exactly what they value and what they want to protect, and will lay down their lives for what (and whom) they believe in. But they all have some immediately recognizable skill that makes them indispensable: Olivier is an awesome leader, Hawkeye is amazing with a gun, Mei is a master of rentanjutsu, Winry is the best automail mechanic anyone's ever seen, Izumi terrifies even the Elric brothers...etc. etc. I've always wanted to make an OC who is very quietly awesome, in a way that is harder to see at first glance. I never really had the incentive to flesh her out until the DeviantART Rismebool Rangers put on a Fan Character contest. I hope you'll come to love Parker as much as I have while writing this!
The cover art is the prize artwork I got for winning the contest, and can be found at: windrider01 dot deviantart dot com / art / Jenny-Parker-519349944
Brigadier General Edward Elric liked most of his subordinates. He'd fought with them in the Drachma War, so he was used to them and knew each man's strengths and weaknesses. He'd saved their lives countless times, and they'd saved his. They'd all watched comrades fall into the snow, never to rise again. They'd all killed for each other's sake and the sake of their country. They knew what it meant to be a soldier, and they relied on each other as only soldiers can.
It was an adjustment to go from the front lines to sitting behind desks in an office. There hadn't been much time between getting Al's body back and being sent off to war, so Ed didn't really know what he was doing. He was a little surprised that he'd been given another promotion once he got home, but apparently someone thought being the lone survivor of a Drachman war prison was worth something. He suspected Mustang's hand in it.
As soon as he was allowed to pick the team that would work under him in the office and delegate his orders, Ed immediately picked his squad from Drachma. They already worked so well together, and respected him implicitly. It would take a long time to build up that level of trust with anyone else, especially since he was still just a teenager. And he knew he wouldn't find another group of soldiers like this no matter how long he looked.
There was Hector Rushgard, huge and imposing but so fiercely loyal he took offense at comments on Ed's height before Ed did. Frances Brodie was a staunch, square-jawed woman who flatly refused to put up with any sort of nonsense, though she was maybe a little too defensive about her gender. Ricky Collins was barely older than Ed, and swung wildly between moments of astounding skill and days when it seemed he knocked over everything he touched. (Ed didn't like to admit it, but he saw a little of himself in Collins and was determined to draw out that potential.) Jeremy Fisk was fluent in three languages and proficient in two more, and though he wasn't the fiercest fighter, he was better than any of the others at office work and was the only one who actually half-understood Ed's attempts at explaining alchemy. And Leroy Burdon was the glue that held them together. His quick smile and deep, smooth chuckle smoothed over the rough spots in their wildly different personalities. When Rushgard and Brodie butted heads, Burdon could make them both laugh. And when Fisk grew impatient or Collins couldn't seem to do anything right, Burdon's sturdy presence somehow made everything okay.
The only one Ed wasn't quite sure about was Jenny Parker.
The first time he stepped into his shiny new office after returning to Central, Parker was standing there waiting for him. She wore the military uniform with the formal skirt, which Ed had only seen on noncombatant female workers, like the receptionist at the front desk who always gave him a cheery wave on the way in. Parker's greying hair pulled into a tight bun and her horn-rimmed glasses perched delicately on her nose put him in mind of the librarian in East City.
"I didn't ask for a secretary," Ed said bluntly, too surprised to care about being rude.
"Nevertheless, you have one, sir," Parker said, primly pushing her glasses a little further up her nose. "Perhaps you would like to look over these forms first. I've taken the liberty of requisitioning more desks and chairs for your men, but it requires your signature."
And so Parker suddenly became part of their group. Apparently she'd been working in this office the entire time she'd been in the military, and when Ed took over the office, she came with it. Ed wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Her presence unsettled the easy balance of camaraderie in his team like a stranger suddenly claiming to be part of the family.
She scared Collins into dropping things even more often than usual, and Fisk said he felt like she was judging every word he said. At first Brodie liked her as a fellow woman in the office, but soon she took on an attitude of disdain when she realized how little Parker seemed to care about standing up for her rights—or whatever it was that Brodie thought they should stand up for; Ed wasn't particularly interested. Rushgard seemed to shrink several sizes whenever Parker looked his direction, and she even managed to take Burdon's smile away if she looked at him a certain way.
At first, Ed thought it would be grand to have a secretary who could do all his work for him. But he soon realized that there was enough paperwork he had to see to personally that he wasn't completely off the hook. She was relentless in demanding his signature for everything that could possibly need his approval. Whenever he tried to distract her with tales of woe from his past or complaints about the various officials he had to work with, she would just respond with, "Yes, sir. No, sir. That must have been very hard for you, sir."
In a way, Parker reminded him of Hawkeye. She performed many of the same tasks that Hawkeye had always carried out for Mustang. But Parker wasn't a friend. She wasn't someone he could trust with his life. She hadn't been through the trials they'd faced on the Briggs Mountains. She didn't know the things they'd seen.
After a while, he realized that he could easily get rid of her. He was a Brigadier General, after all—a click of his fingers, and she would be gone before you could say good riddance. But it didn't feel right to make her leave the post she'd held for so long just because nobody particularly liked her. She hadn't done anything wrong—in fact, Ed was sure that her presence made them all more efficient.
The day that everything changed was an innocuous day in the late spring, sunny and warm enough that they opened the office windows and had to hold their papers in place with staplers and coffee cups. It was only when Rushgard lumbered through the door and took his place that they realized something was amiss. "Hey," he said, cutting across the others' chatter. "Where's Parker?"
They all looked around, and realized that her desk in the corner next to Ed's was unoccupied. Usually, by nine in the morning she was practically part of the furnishings, tapping away on her typewriter or preparing documents for Ed's perusal. Today, the typewriter sat silent in one corner of the desk and her pens and pads of paper sat rigidly aligned at right angles. Her chair was empty.
"Maybe she's sick?" Collins suggested.
"She'd have called in, though," Fisk pointed out.
Ed frowned at Parker's annoyingly neat desk. Fisk was right; it just wasn't like Parker to do something so unprofessional. He thought for a minute while chatter rose in the room again, as Burdon made some kind of joke and got everyone chuckling. Tapping a finger on his desk, Ed wondered why this was bothering him so much. Normally he'd revel in this opportunity to kick back and relax without having to worry about his secretary breathing down his neck all day.
But he had a feeling that something wasn't right. And after many years' experience, he knew his feelings were usually right.
He stood up, pushing his chair back with a screech. The others looked up in surprise as he announced, "I'm going to drop by her house, make sure everything's okay."
"Problem, sir?" Brodie asked, standing up as well. "Do you need one of us to accompany you?"
"Nah." Ed waved away her suggestion. "I just wanna make sure she didn't die in her sleep or something. Won't be long."
But when he drove up to the address he'd found in her file and walked up the stairs to the second floor of her apartment building, he realized it was going to take longer than he'd thought. The door to her apartment stood wide open, and a practiced glance at the latch showed that it had been forced. Ed immediately fell into a fighting stance, hands poised to clap at a moment's notice, and he quietly crept into the apartment.
A quick, quiet search showed that the apartment was empty. There was no sign of where Parker had gone, but he could tell she had left in a hurry. The apartment was immaculate, of course, with all tables and chairs perfectly aligned and not a single dirty dish left in the sink. But the covers on her bed were all askew, he could only find one of her slippers, and she'd even left her glasses on her bedside table.
And then he stepped into the bathroom and saw the message scrawled across the mirror. For one heart-stopping moment he thought the words were written in blood, but then he noticed the broken lump of lipstick sitting in the drain of the sink and he could breathe again. He frowned at the message: Hand over Edward Elric or she dies. Come alone. Then it gave the address of a building in the industrial district.
Ed was usually the one getting kidnapped, so he wasn't used to calling for backup. He used Parker's phone, giving his orders to surround the building in question but stay out of sight until he gave the sign. Then he jumped back into his car and drove as fast as he dared to the warehouses on the outskirts of Central City.
These criminals were obviously amateurs; Ed had been at the mercy of enough kidnappers to tell where they had been clumsy. If they'd really wanted to get at him, they would have kidnapped one of his more valuable subordinates. But then, he supposed it would be much harder for them to catch Rushgard or Burdon off guard, and he apparently had a reputation for sticking his neck out for his subordinates. These hotshot kidnappers were just lucky enough that he would go so far for someone he didn't even like.
By the time he pulled up inside the circle of hidden soldiers surrounding the abandoned warehouse, Ed was thoroughly annoyed by the entire situation. Why did everyone always try to manipulate him? Why did he have to rush around and save a liability like Parker, when he hadn't even asked for her in the first place?
He didn't want to bother with sneaking in, so he just clapped and transmuted a giant iron door in the side of the warehouse, taking a moment to embellish it with enough horns and gaping demonic maws to make it look like the entrance to hell itself. Then he kicked it open and yelled, "Okay, who's first? C'mon, I haven't got all day!"
To his astonishment, the handful of dirty-faced criminals in the room threw down their guns and ran out the main door, screaming bloody murder. Ed blinked after them, his anger momentarily forgotten. "Was it something I said?"
"D-Don't move!" a nervous voice cried.
Ed looked over and saw that one of the kidnappers had remained behind, though his knees were knocking together. He looked like he was trying to grow a beard to look fierce, but the way he held his knife proved he had no idea what he was doing. Unfortunately, he was holding that knife right under Parker's chin. She was tied to a chair, dressed in nothing but a faded floral nightgown, her greying hair straggling down around her face in a very un-Parkerish way. But even though she looked more disheveled than Ed had thought was possible, she sat straight and rigid like always, and her face was smooth and emotionless other than a squint as she tried to focus on her surroundings without her glasses.
Slowly, Ed advanced on the two, holding out his hands to show he wasn't armed. The kidnapper trembled, but held his ground. Then Ed's gaze flicked down to Parker's bare feet and the ropes digging viciously into her ankles. He glanced at her wrists, and saw the raw, red flesh around the ropes. There was a trickle of blood running down her hand and dripping slowly on the floor.
He looked back up at the kidnapper. "That's my subordinate you've got there," he said quietly.
The man gulped audibly.
"Don't you lay a finger on her!" Before the man could react, Ed lunged forward, grabbed the knife with his automail hand, and punched him on the nose with his other fist. As the man reeled back, Ed grabbed his wrist with the knife and twisted it just enough to make the man drop it. Then he hurled the man over his shoulder, slamming him onto the ground with a resounding thud.
As his men rushed into the building, restraining the kidnapper and leading his handcuffed friends off to the military truck, Ed quickly turned his attention to Parker. "Sorry about this," he said, using the kidnapper's knife to cut through her ropes. "I guess I should have warned you this might happen."
"But why did they go for Parker?" Collins asked as he and Ed helped Parker to her feet. "Just because she's an easy target?"
"They said to tell them everything I knew about you, sir," Parker said, somehow managing to hold to her military poise even in bare, bruised feet and a frumpy nightgown. "Apparently they had some sort of elaborate plan to overthrow the entire military by luring you here and using me to discover your weaknesses."
"Did you tell them anything?" Ed tried to keep the accusation out of his voice. Parker hadn't had any sort of training for withstanding interrogation, and none of this was her fault...
"Oh, I told them everything," Parker said calmly, shifting from one foot to the other as blood rushed back into them. "Starting with the horrifying tales of what has happened to the criminals you've faced, and the damage sustained to any people or property in your general vicinity when you lose your temper. Sir."
Ed let out a surprised bark of laughter while the whole team stared at Parker. She was smiling slightly, looking quite pleased with herself and peering around myopically at them all. Rushgard was the first to break out of the spell, stepping forward and sweeping her up into his brawny arms. "Let's get you home so you can rest, ma'am."
They all crowded around Ed's car as Rushgard deposited her in the passenger seat. Collins was still gaping at her as Ed drove off, headed for her apartment again. For a moment, silence fell over the inside of the car. Then he glanced over at his secretary and let a small smirk lift one corner of his mouth.
"Parker...you're all right."