AN: Trying to come up with what Lust would look like as a giant monster was a little difficult, but I decided that she'd probably look something like Rei when she fuses with Lilith in End of Eva. For reference: /anime/files/2010/11/46113-800px_m26_c130_zomgrei_
Also apparently Batman is a thing in this AU? Idk the reference came out before I could stop it.
Chapter title is from "Self Esteem," by Andrew Jackson Jihad, which you can listen to here: watch?v=MlthVn0jeoI
Disclaimer: I own nothing except the pain that exams are causing me and the entire bag of crisps I ate while revising this.
Chapter Seven- "I hope you all can forgive me."
Riza remembers moving to Central every so often. It was such an odd, dreamlike time, such that if she doesn't remember it often, she could convince herself it never happened at all.
Her father had always been vaguely ill, for as long as she could remember. It was easier to hide that piece of knowledge under the rug of a childhood that she could talk herself into believing was more halcyon that it really was, but after the death of her mother, it was hard to ignore. When asked, he would always say that the arctic hadn't sat well with him, but Riza wasn't stupid. She was always an overly-observant child, and she remembered her father excusing himself occasionally to go and hide his coughs somewhere. But when they returned to the West and settled, finally, like a pair of exhausted birds, Riza knew that her father's worsening condition wasn't accidental. It would be something she would become much more acquainted with once she joined the military: it was the sight of a man who had lost the will to live. He was hanging on by the slimmest of threads, and as much as she wished this were the case, this thread wasn't Riza. It was his research.
Once that had been completed, it made sense that he died. Riza had been anticipating it, and had become familiar with the peculiar absence that grief left in your life. She wasn't a crier, and made no particular show of mourning, and this made Mr. Mustang clumsy around her. It seemed some days that Mr. Mustang was all feeling, something that made more sense when he told her bits and pieces of his childhood. (He wouldn't tell her the full thing until they were both older, and Riza could legally drink; she wasn't nearly as shocked to find out that he had been raised in a brothel as he would have liked.) She could practically smell the perfume and hairspray wafting out of his memories, almost feel the sticky-lipped kisses of his "sisters" on her own cheeks. It sounded nice, but strange, like hearing a beautiful song in a language you didn't understand.
And so he tried his best to comfort her using all the tactics at his disposal: hugs, chocolate, words of acknowledgment or commiseration, but they all fell flat and awkward at her feet. Riza Hawkeye had always been a sphinx whose riddle he couldn't quite suss out, a girl who-despite the hips and breasts that seemed to have sprouted with the spring flowers-was carved out of stone. Not knowing what else to do, he decided to meet her on her own turf, to try on a bit of the pragmatism and practicality that always sat so regally on her thin shoulders, but which fit him like a pair of too-large shoes. Roy Mustang was no prince by any means, but Chris Mustang was a canny businesswoman, and he was raised in the lap of a particularly bawdy brand of luxury. She made him pull his weight when he was younger, but never any more, and generally the housekeepers and his sisters were more than happy to dote on the pretty little boy with the charming eyes.
They buried Dr. Berthold Hawkeye with as little fuss and ceremony as possible. They didn't bother inviting anyone to the funeral, as Riza assured him that no one would come anyway. In the last five years, Berthold had alienated anyone whom he could have called "friend" or "colleague," which is to say nothing of his actual family. Riza hadn't seen her paternal grandparents in years.
Roy half expected her facade to crack on the day of her father's funeral to reveal a small, quivering girl, full of sadness and pain, but it didn't. He realized on that day that Riza Hawkeye, unlike himself, was not a person of surfaces, layered upon each other like papier mache. If you picked away at her you would only find more Riza, not different versions of herself. There was not a kernel of truth, buried beneath that hard, stoic exterior. She was all truth, quiet and steady, and you only had to wait for it to be revealed to you.
When asked about her father's house, Riza said to sell it. "It's just a house," she said, gold eyes as unreadable as ever.
They spent several days quietly packing everything into boxes that were either to be taken with Riza wherever she was going or donated to charity. Roy talked more than he normally did in order to fill the even more daunting deficit of conversation that Riza left. He told stories, mostly, about his childhood, about Central (which Riza had never been to), and eventually about plans for the future. He asked, surprisingly timid, if he could have the rest of her father's research. Her reply shocked him.
"Of course. What would I do with it?"
Riza would come to shock him a lot in the coming weeks.
After everything was packed, they slept in the empty house for over a week before Roy finally worked up the nerve to tell Riza what he wanted to do. After the death of his wife, Berthold Hawkeye grew a healthy distaste and distrust for the military. Understandably, Roy agreed, but he had always made sure to keep his private plans to himself for fear of being thrown out of the house after already working so hard to get there. He had always assumed it was something he had instilled in his daughter as well, but now there was no point in lying to her, not when she had already trusted him with so much.
"I'm going back to Central next week," he said as they sat in front of a softly crackling fire in the living room. There was no point, necessarily, for there to be a fire, but Roy had felt profoundly useless for the last few days, and needed something to do with his hands. That and Riza's generally pale complexion had looked particularly sallow recently. Perhaps a fire would bring the roses back to her cheeks.
Riza said nothing to this.
"I've already applied to attend Central University, and-" He picked at a hangnail. "I've also applied for the military training program." He wasn't like Riza; he was no still pool of truth, one that, if disturbed, would occasionally yield revelations. He was a tightly constructed dam, and when one crack emerged, suddenly the whole thing flooded out in a torrent, drowning all in its path. With this one admission out, he was powerless to stop the rest. "Your father's research, Riza, about the homunculi...I've been in contact with some higher-ups that my aunt has an in with, and I've found out that they're trying to get something together, a kind of defense team to protect Amestris from another homunculus attack." It went unsaid that it wasn't "Amestris" that was attacked by the homunculus, it was "Amestrians," but he didn't mention that. "With this research, I could help people. I could make sure that what happened to your mother and the researchers on the A.M.S. Flamel never happens again. But I wanted to tell you first, before I did anything, because you have as much say about this research as I do, and you trusted it to me. I wouldn't want to do something that you think wouldn't sit well with your father's memory." Roy wasn't accustomed to this much honesty, and he could feel his cheeks flaming, so he stared pointedly at the fire, and not at Riza, where she sat, curled in on herself on the couch.
For the second time that night, Riza surprised him. "My father's dead, Roy. He doesn't care about anything anymore."
He wasn't sure what surprised him more, her flippancy, or the fact that this was the first time she'd ever called him by his first name. He had also never pegged her as such a materialist. Up in the mountains, as in the other more rural areas of Amestris, people tended to be more religious. The topic had never come up in conversation, but something about her always seemed so otherworldly, transcendental in a way he couldn't put his finger on, like she had her pulse attuned to something outside the realm of empirical knowledge.
He nodded, finding that, surprisingly, her metaphysics aligned with his. "What about you, then? You were the only person in his will, after all. Technically his research belongs to you."
Roy always spoke quickly, giving himself little time to compose his thoughts and his interlocutors little time to digest what he had said to them. It unnerved him the diligence with which Riza collected her thoughts, as if carefully lining them up on a table in front of her for inventory. When she finally spoke, Roy let out a shaky breath he hadn't been aware had been caught in his chest.
"My father didn't like the military. Then again, he didn't like much, and that included you and me." Roy's grief for his beloved teacher-"beloved" may be a bit strong of a term, but definitely "admired," and perhaps even "idolized"-was still fresh, and so Riza's words stung. He liked to delude himself that there was no reason for anyone to dislike him, and he had been an incredibly devoted student and, he thought, a conscientious houseguest. His dreams were dashed, but he found himself not particularly surprised at the news. "He loved my mother, and he loved his research. When my mother died, half of him went with her, and when he finished his research, the other half went with it. He was paranoid and mean and ungenerous and didn't care one jot for the future of Amestris or anything else."
Roy wasn't sure what he expected from her. She never spoke about her father, always drifted around him like a shade, but he always assumed that she still loved him, in the same obligatory way that people with parents were supposed to love them. (He wouldn't know.) He hadn't anticipated that she would harbor so much resentment, so much bitterness, toward the man, and felt a latent bit of superstition rub around his ankles like a needy cat at speaking ill of the dead. He realized that he didn't know much about her, and knew essentially nothing about her before he arrived in her home. How have I been around someone for so long but still know nothing about them?
"In all likelihood," she continued, "he never planned to do anything with that research once he finished it. I think he knew he was dying, and that he wouldn't outlive his work by much. And as it was in his will to me, that means that-for whatever reason-he trusted me enough to do with it what I see fit." She weighed her next words carefully in front of her, as if testing their purity on a scale. In the firelight, she looked much older than the last time he looked at her. The shadows threw her newly-sharp cheekbones and the hollows her eye sockets into sharp relief. She looked a bit like a ghost.
"I like the idea of something my father wasted his life on being used to help people." Roy could feel his pulse throbbing wildly behind his cheekbones. "And if it, in some way, was used to give my mother's death a little dignity, I think he would like that."
At that moment, just a few months shy of seventeen, Riza Hawkeye truly thought that Roy Mustang's hands-long-fingered and delicate as a girl's, although bearing a few new calluses from clumsy attempts at manual labor-were the most suitable in the world to hold her father's work. That word, "dignity," would stick with them both as they grew and joined up with the State Alchemist Program. It seemed, at the time, to be a perfectly reasonable aspiration, nothing nearly as idealistic or utopian as Roy's "protecting the people of Amestris." Just give a dead woman a little peace and dignity.
She didn't lie to him, not in so many words at least, but she didn't tell him the whole truth either. Her reason for entrusting Roy Mustang with her father's research had much less to do with abstract ideals and much more to do with something more personal, something she kept tucked inside herself, safe, where nothing could harm it. She allowed Roy Mustang to take her father's research because she trusted him. At that point in her life, he was the only person she trusted, and she wasn't entirely sure why, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She realizes now, as her first view of the homunculus that wants to destroy her fragile new home comes into view, that there is very little dignity in what they do. There is death, and fear, and mistakes and mistakes and mistakes. But, as she watches the pilots-her pilots-move into battle, she thinks that there is also trust, and perhaps that is the most dangerous of all.
Alphonse had expected Central City, upon hearing that there was a homunculus poised to attack, to be in a state of pandemonium. But although he should have known better, he had underestimated the efficacy with which the State Alchemist Program would be able to evacuate the city's denizens. In their scramble to evade the watchful eyes of teachers and administrators who wanted to take them somewhere safe, Alphonse and Winry had managed to miss the mad dash out of the city center, and the congestion on the Tunnel and the buses. When they finally surfaced from Garfiel's into the blinding midday sunlight, what they found instead was perhaps more frightening than sheer chaos.
In the wake of the evacuation, Central City is a ghost town. In comparison with how the city had looked that morning, teeming with people, a constant hum of machines and cars and energy and heat, the contrast is particularly eerie, and Alphonse says as much.
"It's like we're the last people alive," Winry says dreamily. Al tries not to pick at her observation too much, but the impending doom of the monster at the edges of the city looms over his head like a cloud about to burst. Winry is lost in post-apocalyptic reverie for only a moment before she shifts back to her usual pragmatism like well-oiled gears slotting together. "The subway should still be running, let's hurry."
As if to counteract the strange stillness in the air around them, they run to the subway station. The city feels unreal, like a nightmare or a soundstage. They could be ants scrabbling over a model city and would have no way of knowing until a giant foot came down and crushed them where they stood. The screech of the cicadas-a disturbing, ever-present fixture in Central's environment-resounds in their ears like ringing, and, combined with the heat, their running feels dizzy and almost drunk.
What they see when they get there chills the blood in their veins.
"It's closed," Winry says numbly.
"What do we do now?" Alphonse asks, staring at the very definitely closed means of them getting out of the city center and to HQ. There is anxiety coiling in his stomach, slick and oily. When faced with the apocalypse, Al hadn't quite expected everything to be so quiet, so anticlimactic. He hadn't expected his doom to be sealed by a subway station, either.
"What do you mean 'what do we do?'" Winry asks, hands on her hips in a fairly good imitation of Ed, if Al has to be honest. Living in the same apartment has made them adopt even more of each other's mannerisms. Were it not for Winry's shrewd blue eyes and their horribly bumbling attempts at denying they liked each other, she and Ed could be siblings. "We walk."
It's not a good idea, but it may, in fact, be the only idea that they have, given the situation. Central's usual bloodstream of buses and taxis is nowhere to be seen, and without the Tunnel, a car, or a bike, they're effectively stranded, and the longer they stand out in the open, the more likely it is that they'll come face-to-foot with the homunculus.
"How far away is HQ?" It can't be close, that's for sure.
"It doesn't matter, Al, we need to get moving." She re-shoulders her school bag, the tightness around her eyes the only indication that she was feeling unsettled. "We can stand here and die or start walking and possibly not die."
There's no choice. There's never been a choice, not for Al, not since his mother died. Winry had the possibility of choice still, but when she packed up and moved out to Central with them, she gave that up too. It's just them, and they weren't going to be shipped off to some evacuation center where every other kid would have their family and they'd only have each other. It only makes sense that if Ed has to risk his life for them, they should risk theirs for him too. Winry and Al both know that Ed would disagree with them, vehemently, but Winry knows exactly what she would say as she looked down the several inches into Ed's eyes.
"It's only equivalent exchange."
She's not sure where he found it, but somewhere along the line Ed had come across a book on alchemy. Obviously the science was bunk now, but something about the tales of philosopher-chemists caught his interest, and in particular the idea of "equivalent exchange." Even when he had returned the book back to the Eastern University library, that phrase stuck in his mind, and he adopted it as a kind of mantra or personal philosophy. It irritated the hell out of Winry, but she couldn't deny the satisfaction that would come from taking his stupid slogan and throwing it back at his face.
More than the fear of what could possibly be their impending deaths, there's a fire burning in Winry's belly, and it's what unsticks her feet from the scorched pavement and sets her in motion, with Alphonse following at her heels.
I'm not going to be a burden. I'm tired of sitting at home and waiting around while Ed does all the work. I am strong and I am capable and I can do this.
She believes every word of it.
Edward Elric has done enough simulations to make his eyes want to roll back into his head. He is what a polite teacher would call "a hands-on learner," and what a less charitable person (also known as "Dr. Izumi Curtis, who heads their training department and sufficiently kicked enough sense into Ed that, for once in his life, he was honest-to-God scared of someone") would call "a hyperactive little shit."
Ed has problems sitting still, always has, and it's only been exacerbated by the stiffness in his automail leg if he sits in one place for too long. He has to have his hands on everything and his nose in everyone's business. He's smart enough to know that this isn't an admirable trait to most people, but he's also smart enough to know that he's smarter than just about everyone he knows, and that he's good enough at what he does that he can have a little leeway with decorum.
Ed had told Dr. Curtis, Captain Hawkeye, Roy "lazy bastard" Mustang, and pretty much anybody else who would listen to him that the simulations were pointless. A homunculus isn't something you can distill down into a handful (or several thousand handfuls, as the case may be) of pixels and what looks like the setup for an arcade shoot-'em-up. As is not an uncommon experience in his young life, Ed was right.
He desperately, desperately wishes he wasn't.
The simulations had been based off of Greed and Gluttony, the only two documented homunculi to date. (Although if you asked that crazy dude on the History Channel, there had been homunculi forever, but humanity was "too deluded by its faux-rationalism and the Enlightenment to notice." Ed turned off the TV after that, grumbling something about the History Channel's name being a misnomer.) But, at that point, they knew next to nothing about what homunculi were, and so had no idea what a new one would look like.
Ed wagers that they probably didn't guess it would look like this.
"Is this monster one of your scorned girlfriends, Mustang?" Ed smirks into the comm in order to mask his anxiety.
"Now is not the time, Fullmetal," Mustang snarls.
"Oh, shit, I forgot we had snazzy codenames. Sorry about that, Flame." Ed holds his tongue and avoids making the joke about how "you can't spell 'flame' without 'lame,'" which is an astounding feat of restraint that Mustang doesn't even know to appreciate. But what else is there to do in this situation aside from make bad jokes?
It doesn't take a particularly creative feat of imagination for Ed to imagine what they're going to name this homunculus once the dust settles and a new ream of paperwork makes its way to Captain Hawkeye's desk. They're going to call it Lust.
It's about the same size as they are, and with that deceptive lack of scale, it looks like a woman, albeit a naked one, with a strange symbol nestled in between her massive breasts. It's a snake eating its own tail, and something about it itches at the back of Ed's mind, quickly followed by a thought that is, annoyingly, narrated by Mustang's stupid baritone: Now is not the time. They have much bigger issues to deal with than Ed's semiotic musings.
The homunculus is just standing there, grinning horribly, and it's creeping Ed the fuck out. She has a torrent of dark curls that fall into her eyes and over her breasts, and upturned, bloody-tinged eyes. If you ignored her terrifying size, her unnerving grin, and the marking on her chest, she could almost be beautiful.
"It isn't doing anything," Ed says pointlessly.
"Clearly it was your skills of observation that got you through the university," Mustang comments. Cocky bastard. "Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. It hasn't caused any harm now, so let's get rid of it now before it decides to get angry." Mustang's eyes dart to the camera in his entry plug, symbolically locking eyes Hawkeye. "Is that okay with you, Captain?"
It takes a moment, but Ed can see Hawkeye nod on the video link between his Alchemist and HQ. "Destroy it," she says sharply, and before the words have even left her lips completely, the Flame Alchemist is raising one massive, metal hand and aiming it at the still-grinning, motionless homunculus.
But something about it doesn't sit well with Ed. This isn't anything like any of those simulations, or like his previous experience with homunculi. It's not charging or knocking over buildings or anything. It's just standing there smiling. When Ed looks into its eyes he sees what looks almost like intelligence. Like it knows what it's doing. Like it knows what they're doing.
Not knowing what else to do, Ed asks an almost nervous "Hey, Mustang-"
"Shut up, Fullmetal," he says before a sharp jet of flame rushes toward, and then engulfs, the homunculus.
Ed has heard plenty of stories of the State Alchemists. He was practically raised on them, like any child in the world who grew up in the wake of Gluttony and the destruction of Ishval and parts of the Eastern Quadrant. He had heard tell of how the Strong Arm Alchemist could punch through rock or steel, of how the Crimson Lotus Alchemist (before its pilot mysteriously disappeared) had a massive arsenal of bombs that could rival entire armies, and how the Flame Alchemist could incinerate whole swaths of land in less than a second.
But he has to admit, being told about the Flame Alchemist did little to prime his mind for what he saw. It isn't impressive, like he had been told. It's terrifying.
After what Mustang determines to be a sufficient amount of time to torch a homunculus, the flames stop, and the Alchemist lowers its hand. The silence following the assault is ambivalent: Should they be celebratory? Relieved? Worried? As they wait for the smoke to clear, the silence is mostly tense, and Ed's hands grip around his controls.
What follows probably takes less than thirty seconds, but for Ed, it's as if the entire exchange takes hours, years even. The smoke clears and instead of a pile of ash the size of a skyscraper, there stands the homunculus, perfectly fine, and through the smoke they can hear her laughing. The sound has the time to send chills up Ed's spine, but not much more than that.
"Mustang, get out of there!" Captain Hawkeye shouts over the comm, but the Flame Alchemist is now as eerily still as the homunculus, as if its otherworldly laughter has hypnotized him. "Mustang!" she repeats, sounding slightly more frantic. "Frantic" and "Hawkeye" were not two words that Ed thought would ever be in the same sentence together, and it has him frightened. The Captain only gets out the first syllable of another "Mustang!" before, in one catlike motion, they see the homunculus raise a lithe arm. In the next instant, two long, black spears extend from its index and middle fingers, and they skewer the Flame Alchemist through its metal heart.
The ceilings in Central HQ's main observation deck are high by necessity. They have to be at least as tall as the Alchemists, in order to accommodate them, and gives the entire underground building the feelings of a cavern. Breda liked to joke that it was the Bat Cave and that Mustang-dark-haired, brooding, parentless, and womanizing as he was-was their own personal Bruce Wayne. Mustang had been suitably offended: "Batman? Really? You think I'm the most boring superhero in existence?" This sparked a lively debate with Falman who, it turned out, was a big Batman fan and was incredibly defensive about it. Riza, who had been sitting with Rebecca drinking coffee, rolled her eyes as Rebecca let out a long-suffering sigh.
"The fate of the world is in the hands of these massive nerds," Rebecca moaned. "They could at least be sexy nerds."
This offended Mustang even more than being compared to Batman.
Generally, the feel of Central HQ was secure, even stately. But today, Riza curses the damned high ceilings for creating a near-perfect acoustical space, so that Roy Mustang's screams can reverberate off the walls as if rattling around inside of her own skull.
For a moment, maybe half of a moment, Riza is frozen still in her seat as she listens to the agony of the boy who fell off of her roof, who had pretty, un-callused hands, who wanted to protect people. It only occurs to her after that that this isn't that boy, this is Roy Mustang, pilot of the Flame Alchemist, who scorched an entire country and half of another one in pursuit of a monster, who was in the dedicated process of drinking and smoking and fucking himself into an early grave, and who let her sleep on his couch. When those two seemingly contradictory sets of knowledge collide in her mind, the force of their collision is enough to send her upright, to Havoc's desk.
"His vitals are going crazy, Captain," Havoc says, voice strained as he listens to the screams of the man who is his friend, too, and in much more uncomplicated terms than he is Riza's. "His respiration is stuttering and his brain is losing oxygen quickly."
It didn't matter that the claws of the homunculus had gotten nowhere near Mustang's entry plug. The PSL, the same substance that allowed pilots to synchronize with their Alchemists, also allowed them to feel any injury that the Alchemists got. While Mustang may physically be uninjured, he felt as if he had just had his heart gouged out.
"Raise the oxygenation level as much as you can. The last thing we need is him passing out on us."
"I think we have more to worry about with him passing out from the pain, not the lack of oxygen, ma'am."
Even with her hair pinned up, Riza can feel the sweat beginning to bead on the back of her neck. "Do what you can to keep him lucid; I'll try and get him out of there."
"Armstrong, get Mustang back to headquarters now," Riza commands, gripping her microphone harder than it requires.
"But the homunculus-" Armstrong protests.
"I don't care about the homunculus, get Mustang out of there. He's in no condition to fight."
Ultimately, Armstrong nods, and his Alchemist scoops up the Flame Alchemist-which had crumpled to its knees like a grieving widow-as easily as if it were a doll.
At the sight of this, the homunculus's laugh-which had been a low, husky rumble-erupts into a series of high, howling peals. The sound of it causes Riza's face to burn with something like shame. They're getting laughed at by a monster.
"Congratulations, Ed," Riza says into the microphone. "Looks like we need backup."
She expects him to have a snarky response at the ready, but instead she is greeted with radio silence. Fuery, in his infinite mercy, had silenced Mustang's comm line.
"Ed?"
The Fullmetal Alchemist, glistening in the afternoon sunlight, is standing stock-still.
Riza shoots a nervous glance at Havoc. He's lighting a cigarette with shaking fingers and typing frantically into his computer with his other hand. "His sync rate is dropping quickly, Captain. It's...Fuck, I can't believe this, it's nearing zero."
"That can't be right, it was fine just a minute ago."
Havoc laughs his nervous, raspy laugh. "You know how these things go, Cap. The sync rate is only as stable as the pilot's mind."
She knows. She knows this far too well. And bad things happen when the sync rate is too unstable in either direction. It could leave them catatonic and ultimately useless if it swings too low, or decomposed like Kimblee if it swings too high.
"So what are you saying?"
Havoc laughs again. "I'm not sure if the kid can pilot like this."
Riza grits her teeth. "Well that's not an option." She grips the microphone again. "Ed, I need you to fight the homunculus." There's no response. She turns to Fuery. "Is his line on?"
Fuery's large eyes look sheepish and sad as he nods.
She tries again. "Ed-"
"I can't."
The voice she hears on the other end of the comm line is small, nothing at all like the normal bravado she associates with Edward Elric. "You have to."
"I can't," he repeats, now sounding, bizarrely, on the verge of tears. Checking the screen, she sees that he's right. He's grasping at the controls and nothing is happening. The Fullmetal Alchemist won't move.
"Yes you can, Edward, just breathe." She's not sure anymore if she's talking to him or herself. "It's not moving; it's not going anywhere. Just take a step forward. That's all you have to do."
"A step forward..." Ed repeats, dazed.
"Yes, that's it, that's all you have to do."
It feels like ages, but the Fullmetal Alchemist does manage to take one shaky step forward, like a baby fawn.
"Good," Riza says in what she hopes is a soothing tone. She's never been particularly maternal, and so having to be now feels awkward, like walking in high heels. "Now you just-"
And then, just as quickly as it had speared Mustang, the homunculus sends its two pointed fingers into the Fullmetal Alchemist's stomach.
Riza has heard enough screaming for today. Riza has heard enough screaming for a lifetime. As terrible as it was to hear the agony of her oldest friend, there is something especially perverse in hearing the screams of a child.
She grips Havoc hard by the shoulder. "I thought you said his sync rate was nearly zero! He shouldn't even be able to feel this!"
Havoc grimaces. "It had gone up, Captain."
The blood drains from Riza's face. Greed and Gluttony, as far as she could tell, had just been mindless brutes. Dangerous, violent, and unpredictable, but mindless nonetheless. But this...this was as if the homunculus had something resembling human thought and cognition, as if... "It knows. It knows the sync rates of the pilots. Otherwise it would've attacked when Ed was still frozen. But it wouldn't have been incapacitating." She looks at Havoc with eyes full of fear that she hopes none of the rest of them can see. "How does it know?"
"I don't know," he says. "I don't know."
"Why is this city so goddamn hot?" Winry moans, plucking at the collar of her white uniform shirt.
"Because when Greed attacked it melted the Drachman ice caps and the sea levels and temperature rose. Not to mention that we're in a city, and the amount of concrete coupled with the high concentration of people and motor vehicles-"
"Al, I know why, I just wanted to complain." Being friends with geniuses was occasionally quite taxing. Ed was generally more receptive to her complaints. Well, maybe not receptive, but at least he always had something cathartic to say. Sometimes when you're complaining the best thing to do is have a good argument, and lord knows Ed has those in spades. "Do you have any idea how far we are from HQ?"
Al looks around at the desolate cityscape. "I'm pretty sure we're still in the city center."
Winry groans and plops down gracelessly on the pavement. It stings a bit against her exposed thighs but she doesn't really care. Fuck unifrom skirts. Fuck decorum. And fuck this goddamn heat.
Al crosses his arms across his chest. "What happened to 'We can stand here and die or we can start walking'?"
"I'm just resting," Winry says. She slings her book bag from her shoulder and into her lap, unzipping it and pulling out her water battle. She takes a long swig, not caring when it dribbles a bit down her chin, and hands it to Al, who does the same. "Seriously, since this heat is a homunculus's fault, I'll fight it myself."
Winry watches, confused, as the water bottle falls from Alphonse's hand, rolling and spilling greedily onto the parched pavement.
"What is it, Al?" Winry asks.
"I think you may get your chance."
Winry turns to see what Al can see, and she's glad that she's already sitting down, because she thinks any strength in her legs is gone.
She doesn't remember the homunculus destroying the Elrics' home. She was asleep at the time, and when she woke up the deed had already been done: her best friends had become orphans, and one of them was near-fatally wounded. She woke up to Pinako banging at her door to call an ambulance while Edward nearly bled out on their kitchen table. Al had carried him over a mile to their home, and the front of his t-shirt was stained a rusty brown. But even with those horrors, Winry never saw the homunculus itself.
What she never could have anticipated was the sheer size of it. She's tall for a girl her age, and so she's used to being taller than her female classmates and taller than Ed, but she's not exceptionally tall by any means. She knows how it feels to stand in people's shadows. But this is completely different. This is like standing next to a god. This is finally realizing how tiny and insignificant and fragile human beings are.
But then, almost just as terrifying, is the sight of the Alchemist. From behind a pane of glass, she could only see its head, with its slightly menacing jaw and teeth. But here, in the open, standing amongst buildings smaller than itself, it's an entirely different experience. Especially with its red and black color scheme, the Fullmetal Alchemist looks positively demonic standing on the other end of the scene. But Ed's in there, she has to remind herself. It's odd to think that inside of that massive metal behemoth is the tiny Edward Elric. It seems almost unbelievable.
The Fullmetal Alchemist is walking slowly, almost mechanically, toward the homunculus. And then, as if sensing that it now had an audience to impress, the homunculus-who looks like an impossibly tall Aerugan Renaissance sculpture-raises an arm, and then two spear-like appendages jut out like bullets and pierce the Alchemist in its middle.
"Ed!" Winry calls out instinctively, and then covers her mouth.
"I doubt the homunculus can hear us," Alphonse says. The scale is deceiving, and Winry knows that. Because they're so huge the Alchemist and the homunculus look much closer than they are.
"We have to get closer," Winry says.
"What? Are you crazy? We could get killed!"
"I need to make sure Ed is okay."
"You remember what Riza said; the Alchemist gets hurt so that he doesn't have to."
"Then why isn't he moving?"
Al looks up at his brother's Alchemist, and sure enough, Winry was right. The Alchemist stands, its giant hand placed over its stomach. Completely stationary.
"Ed!" Winry shouts again, but she isn't sure why. He can't hear her. And even if he could, what good would it do? "What do we do, Al?"
"I don't know," Alphonse says. "I don't know."
If you got Colonel Olivier Mira Armstrong exceptionally drunk, she would tell you war stories.
After the melting of the Drachman ice caps, the northern border of Amestris was inundated with refugees. This would become a common occurrence in the next few years with the decimation of Ishval, but at the time, Amestris wasn't nearly equipped for this sudden influx of Drachmans. And so, to put it simply, they panicked. Amestris already had a nasty history of xenophobia, and it reared its ugly head then, to keep any unwanted people out of its borders. A fort was established within a year, a fort situated on a massive wall separating Drachma from Amestris, called Briggs. Olivier used to serve there.
She isn't one to rest on her laurels or to look back at her successes fondly. Unlike Mustang, though, she isn't one to look too far into the future either. She lives firmly in the now. But occasionally she will dredge up the murkier parts of her military history, which, even for an officer as accomplished and talented as she is, do exist.
Once Riza asked her what her worst experience had been at Briggs. Olivier told her that once, under her watch, a subordinate of hers named Buccaneer was killed. Soldiers die every day, even in what are relatively tame border disputes like the one with Drachma, but this hit Olivier particularly hard. She felt that she was personally responsible for Buccaneer's death and that she should have prevented it.
"So what did you do?" Riza asked.
"At a certain point you sit back and realize that the worst thing that could have happened to you has happened to you. There's a certain kind of comfort in that."
Riza thinks, looking at Ed standing lead-footed in front of the homunculus, that Olivier is full of shit. There is no comfort in this. There is only fear and, steeping in her stomach like a particularly bitter bag of tea, guilt. These are her pilots. She had scouted Ed herself, had argued with the General about taking on a child, and he had told her point-blank that any harm that came to Edward Elric would be, directly or indirectly, her fault. She is the one who had gotten Armstrong out of Ishval when it became clear that if he participated it would be at the cost of his own sanity. And Mustang...she's always felt responsible for Mustang, in one way or another. He carries the only piece of her father worth carrying in this world. He has the only bits of her childhood that matter. If she loses them, any of them, it wouldn't just be a loss of equipment, like what you would see on the books. It would be a loss of parts of herself, parts she would never get back.
"Uh, Captain?" Fuery asks, hands shaking as he lowers his headset form his ears. "I think you should have a look at this."
Fuery gestures to his console which, for some reason, has an innocuous view of a street a couple blocks over from the fight.
"Why are you showing me this, Fuery?"
"Because of this." He points at two yellow specks on the road. Riza is confused, and is about to ask what's so important about two random specks, when Fuery zooms in and it becomes abundantly clear why they're so important.
"You have got to be fucking kidding me." All of the civilians were supposed to be out of the city. Riza thought that Alphonse and Winry were the only two things she didn't have to worry about right now. Her mind races. This was not something she had figured into any of her contingency plans. The complete evacuation of all of Central City's civilians population was taken as a given. Never, never, did she think that two children would have somehow managed to slip past the evacuation orders. And for what? Why?
There are only two choices: tell Ed or not tell Ed. If she didn't, there was a good chance they could possibly get him back to a stable frame of mind and get him synced back up. (But his sync rate was almost back to zero again, and that was probably for the best, seeing as how the homunculus seemed to know when he was or wasn't synced properly, so as to cause him maximum pain.) But if she did, then he could figure out a way to move them to safety, maybe even put them in the entry plug if he had to.
She can see the homunculus waiting and almost looking bored. There is only so much time they can buy, and ultimately playing with your food only yields so much satisfaction before you break and go in for the kill. There's still Armstrong, once he gets back from dropping off Mustang to the medical staff, but she's not sure if they have that kind of time.
Either way, she thinks. We're fucked. We can either sit here and let it kill us, or we can stand up and die fighting. And so she swallows her fear and grabs the microphone tentatively.
"Edward?" she asks as softly as she can manage. There's no response. Looking at the monitor she can see Ed staring dully at nothing. At least he isn't screaming anymore. But is this really better? This dead-eyed stare? This isn't Ed. He'd rather die screaming than silent any day, and Riza knows this. "Edward, I..." She swallows around her heart, which seems to have permanently taken up residence in her throat. HQ is as silent as a tomb. "I don't want to alarm you, but there are two civilians on the street, a couple blocks away from you, who seem to have missed the evacuation." Edward still says nothing. "Edward...it's Alphonse and Winry. It's your brother."
She thinks she sees a flicker of something behind his eyes, but it may have been a trick of the light or a glitch on the monitor.
"Fuery, is there any way you can show Ed what you showed me?"
Fuery nods and types something into his computer before sending it over with a resounding click.
"It's your brother, Ed," Riza says again. "It's your brother and Winry. They're on the street and they could get killed if you don't do anything."
The flicker hadn't been a trick. It's there. As if coming out of an anesthetic fog, Riza watches as life returns to Edward Elric's big, gold eyes. "What...what are they doing there?"
At hearing his voice again, Riza allows herself a bit of relief. "I don't know Ed, but if you don't do something they could get seriously hurt. At this point, the subway has been shut, so they're stuck in the city."
Ed chances a look to his right, where, from his vantage point several hundred feet in the air, he can just distinguish them, two small drops of gold on the ground. As his head turns, the Alchemist's follows, and this sparks the homunculus's interest. It grins and begins sauntering slowly, almost playfully, over to where Alphonse and Winry are hiding.
Riza begins to shout for Edward to notice what is happening, but she doesn't have to. The easiest way to get Edward Elric to do anything is to put the lives of his family on the line. I pray to God no one uses that against you.
"Don't you fucking dare!"
Edward shouts so loud that it sends a crackle through the airwaves and Fuery jumps from under his headphones.
"Captain?" Havoc calls.
"What is it?"
"His sync rate had been at 6% for the last few minutes. But now it's at 98% and climbing."
Anything higher than 50% was exceptional. Higher that 70% was unheard of. This was verging into the territory that Kimblee had been in when he...
"Havoc, you don't think..."
Before either she or Havoc can finish that thought, the thought is finished for them by what Riza could only describe as a howl, like some sort of beast screaming at the moon. Riza looks at the monitor and sees the Fullmetal Alchemist's jaw unhinge, hanging open and monstrous. From its ordinarily erect posture, it had fallen into an almost animalistic crouch, and seemed to be panting.
Riza was right. It had gone berserk.
The Fullmetal Alchemist ran forward so fast that it detached itself from its umbilical cable. Because of their size, Alchemists can only last a few minutes once they've gone wireless before the battery life depletes. It's a risky maneuver, but not an uncommon one. But Alchemists, at their best, tend to lumber about because of their size. Even with Fullmetal's slimmer build, this kind of speed is unimaginable. Before the homunculus has a chance to move, the Fullmetal Alchemist grabs it with a hand, and then-releasing the retractable blade from its other arm-drives its knife with an incomprehensible amount of force into the homunculus's solar plexus, right into the strange symbol. The homunculus splutters, clearly taken off guard, but the Fullmetal Alchemist slices down and neatly cleaves it in half.
The insides of homunculi are up for debate, as very little is known about them. But one feature they do all share is the abundance of a thick, red, blood-like substance. The now-cleft homunculus becomes a fountain of it, covering not only the Fullmetal Alchemist, but also all the surrounding buildings and streets. Riza can see on Fuery's monitor that Winry and Alphonse are covered in it as well, and it makes her stomach turn.
If Ed were in his right mind, he would've stopped there. But something about syncing with an Alchemist that deeply brought out the animal in a person, and Riza watched as Edward Elric-the fifteen-year-old boy with the dirty mouth and the tacky fashion sense and the undeniable, earth-shaking love for his brother-rent it limb from limb.
