Challenge 10: Voodoo Doll
Elysia Hughes thrust her new toy into the Brigadier General's face, practically glowing with pride. The General blinked his one good eye at it.
"What's this?" Roy Mustang asked, taking it from her.
The six-year-old deflated, and Roy groaned mentally, picturing how his best friend would punish him for this when he joined him…wherever he was.
"It's you, Uncle Roy," she told him, clearly disappointed. "Can't you tell?"
General Mustang surveyed the doll's floppy black hair, navy blue bead-eye, eye-patch, and blue jacket, which he assumed was supposed to be his military uniform. "Of course," he murmured at last. "How could I have missed that?"
It seemed that his inadequate comment was all that really needed to be said, because she immediately brightened and hurried to show him the rest of her new dolls. "Mommy helped me make them," she explained excitedly. "See, I have one of Mommy, and Teacher, and Big Sister, and Daddy" –Roy had a hard time ripping his eye away from that one— "and I have Big Big Brother—here, you can hold that one while I get Little Big Brother…." Elysia ran to get her 'Little Big Brother' doll while the Brigadier General glanced warily at the Big Big Brother. It was made entirely out of a silvery sort of cloth, with a spike at the top that had a tuft of string poking out of it.
Wait a minute, Mustang realized suddenly. If this is Big Big Brother then Little Big Brother must be—
"Here's Little Big Brother!" the little girl cried, and smacked it into his hand.
Congratulations, Maes. Your daughter is only six and already as pushy as you were. AndRoy just stared at the miniature boy that had been so forcefully given to him; at the red coat and yarn-braid and yellow buttons that were sewn in where his eyes would be. Roy's brain suggested cracking a joke at how Ed would respond to being called 'Little Big Brother' but his body refused to obey, and so he just continued staring.
The girl seemed to take his silence as a compliment. She beamed at him and pointed to the back of his coat, where she had scribbled in black marker. "I couldn't remember what sign was there, so I just made a smiley-face," Elysia told him, as if this was a brilliant improvisation on her part. "His hair was really hard to make, too…I wonder how Ed does it every day without even looking…"
'Does,' in present tense. Roy kept staring.
She was quiet for a few seconds, probably expecting a response, but none came, so she continued, "There's been a lot of rumors about him, hasn't there? I wonder which ones are true." Elysia looked up at him with her wide, olive eyes that Hughes called 'irresistible' and Mustang called 'creepy-because-they're-exactly-like-Maes's'. "The one about Ed being gone forever…" Roy could almost feel the pleading edge in her voice, the voice of a child that didn't want to be abandoned again, and suddenly he understood why his friend had thought her eyes irresistible. "That's not true, is it?"
General Mustang held the doll up, studying it for a moment. "Of course it's not true," he said, more to it than her. "Right, Fullmetal?"
The doll stared back at him like the useless lump of stuffing and yarn that it was. Roy frowned, and flicked it in the face. Then he flicked it again. And then he flicked it again and again and again and again and again and again and again until Elysia had to intervene, snatching it away before he could take the doll's head off.
She shot him a glare so similar to her mother's that he nearly burst out laughing, and handed the Brigadier General his own doll instead.
"If you have a problem with Little Big Brother," she said loudly, her hands on her hips, "then you should take it up with the real thing!"
This time Roy didn't bother trying to hold back his laughter.