Somewhat annoyed with how hard Maria and Denny are to write w/ following the Elrics around, but I think I did alright? I love having Selim here for this, but there's so many people in a scene now, I'm not used to it!
You'll probably have noticed in the summary by now, but I caved and added some ship tags. They're all like… the RAREST ships possible, but I still felt weird leaving it ship-less when there's still definitely shipping. I didn't tag any of the big ones that show up because that just felt a little misleading – but Royai, EdWin and LingFan show up to some degree or another, although really, REALLY not in the ways you'd expect or – honestly – what most shippers of those would prefer. I'm sorry! They're evil in this! It's just like that!
Song is by Jimmy Eat World.
TW for gaslighting/emotional manipulation, ghosting (accidental and treated humorously), smoking, and… the best way I can think to tag this one is cultural appropriation, but made fun of, called out and Did Not Get Far? Idk man this is hard as hell sometimes but this is a relatively fluffier chapter thank god
~40~
I'm doing the things that I'm told every day (every day, every day)
Then why does it feel like I'm moving in place (in place, in place)
-555
"Well, hey there, Fullmetal," cheered Maes as a familiar figure strode onto the scene. "I was warned you'd be showing your beautiful face around here."
"You mean the Colonel actually told you something?" Will shot back. "Good to see you, Hughes. Miss me?"
"Surprisingly, yes," he drawled. "Apparently that shot of teen angst in the morning does wonders for my comple- Kidding, kidding," he laughed as Will shot daggers at him. "Oh, and Selim, too!" He grabbed Selim's hand and shook it, causing an embarrassed grin to spread over the boy's face. "God, you got tall. Taller than he has."
"Oy!"
"Hey, it's true."
He had missed the kid. His occasional visits to Central were usually short, but it was nice seeing somebody else in the military who flaunted the usual stodgy requirements. Plenty of the rank-and-file were interesting enough behind closed doors, without the courage Will had to wear it into the open.
Of course, there was every chance he was just fifteen and stupid, rather than particularly brave. Gracia had once asked him what he'd do if Elysia ever brought a boy like Will home, and he'd replied with a barely suppressed smile that a boy 'like Will' was far safer for Elysia's virtue than any other might be. She'd appreciated that more than she'd let on.
"Okay, give me a few moments and I'll have this sorted out." Will grinned, clapping his hands together-
"Woah, woah. Hold your horses, chief." Maes grabbed his shoulder. "I can see a couple problems with that plan."
"Only a couple?" came Alex's quiet grumble from Selim's chest pocket, and Maes suppressed the urge to laugh. The automail packed a punch when you weren't expecting it.
"Feel that wind? That's been blowing since last night."
"So?"
"So I know enough about alchemy to know that causes a slight issue of calculation."
The wind – so to speak – went out of Will's sails. One of the soldiers behind him stuck his hand in the air.
Maes sighed. "Yes, Sergeant?"
"Also, wouldn't Fullmetal have to have read every book in there?"
Will rolled his eyes and growled, "Thank you, Brosh. I really needed that extra kick in the pants. Fine. Fine. What's your clever idea, then?"
"We're currently attempting to find clues to who did it and a possible motive. Luckily, most of the open case files were within individual offices, and a few of the older ones that hadn't been scheduled for movement to the 2nd Branch were circulating in the Academy as training simulations. Which, for the record, I didn't approve of at the time, but it's proving useful now."
"What about the research notes?"
"Same thing. Some were in active use in labs, some were checked out and being read. Luckily most of the living State Alchemists make a point of keeping their own copies, but with all the deaths lately… I mean, you could ask some of their families, if it's really important."
Maes noted, however, that this wasn't making me Will any less agitated. In fact, it seemed to be making it worse. "Alright, kid, what were you after?"
Will leaned in slightly, away from the two bodyguards who seemed to be trying to listen anyway. Maes fixed them both with a glare until they politely turned their backs. "Anything by Doctor Marcoh. Any chance it got put in the 2nd Branch?"
Maes sucked air through his teeth. "You're playing with fire, kid. Marcoh? You're serious?"
"Deadly."
"From you, I believe it." Maes rubbed his temples. Why was nothing ever simple? "Officially, he's a deserter. All of his research would have been destroyed long before this."
"And unofficially?"
That had come from Selim, of all people, his dark eyes sharp behind his reading glasses. Maes imagined it would be inappropriate to recruit a veteran's kid to Investigations at the best of times, let alone when Major Bradley had been insufferably Armed Forces, but it was… tempting. "Unofficially, Lieutenant Valjean is taking the day off today. 350 Palmier Road."
"What? What does that mean?" Will asked – but Selim seemed to have caught on, pulling at Will's arm. "Uh – okay!"
Bless them, honestly. Maes just hoped they didn't find too many skeletons.
"Okay, I don't know how you understood that and I didn't," Will grumbled, rubbing his arm.
Selim just rolled his eyes. "You're the one who's actually part of the military."
"You're assuming I pay attention."
"You… you really probably should. What branch do you work for?"
"Uh, all my uniforms I never wear have the National Security insignia on them. Just the fancy ones, though."
Selim tried not to roll his eyes again at the fact that Will got away with not wearing the uniform, but then again, State Alchemists probably had a lot more leeway, and there was something terrifying about the idea of a teenager in those uniforms anyway. "You work for National Security. Hughes works for Investigations."
"So?"
"So, unless the library becomes a national security issue, Solaris and Valjean – and technically, you – can't actively work on it."
Will raised an eyebrow. "That's never stopped me before."
"Actually, it has," Alex added.
"Oh, what? Since when?"
"Hughes doesn't let you work on investigations with him unless he can make a good case for it being relevant to national security."
"Of course he-" Will stopped and thought for a moment. "Oh drat. He just tells me about them. And then distracts me. Dammit!"
Selim wondered, not for the first time and with more than a little love, how Will had survived in the military this long.
Will scratched his cheek. "So what's Valjean doing at…"
"350 Palmier Road."
"Yeah. There."
"Probably following a clue off the books. That's what I'd do."
Will blinked owlishly at Selim as if seeing a whole new side of him – and, Selim supposed, he kind of was. He shrugged, lowering his voice so their tail wouldn't hear. "I- I mean, isn't it obvious? The library that would have had Marcoh's research in it burned down mysteriously, and completely. The Stones get stolen. Marcoh himself vanishes without a trace. Somebody is trying to suppress that research, and given what the research is, that's definitely a threat to national security."
"But the research was destroyed."
"Officially. Unofficially, who knows? The Stones were supposed to be destroyed too, according to Armstrong."
Will chewed on the inside of his cheek, and Selim could see the thoughts working behind his eyes. I thought I was just paranoid. But that actually makes sense.
…Selim was just imagining the words. It'd never been words before. He'd just put words to the feeling on his own.
"What I'm trying to figure out," mused Alex, hanging half out of Selim's shirt-pocket and plucking idly at a stray thread, "is who cares enough to go to that much effort."
"Covering up Ishval?" Selim suggested. "I-I mean, that… that sounded horrible."
"The Beast is Ishvalan," Alex said darkly. "Revenge might be closer."
"There's no way he could travel that fast, though. Or know any of that."
"I-" Will started, then came to a stop. "Huh. Okay, I don't see that every day."
Lieutenant Colonel Hughes had apparently not been joking when he'd said Valjean was taking a day off. In fact, Selim wasn't sure he'd ever seen the man out of uniform, although in all fairness, it wasn't like he had met him more than a handful of times. It was still a jarring sight, like seeing your teacher at a bar, or hearing a children's radio show host swearing.
Probably Selim wouldn't have been so surprised if Valjean didn't look like a melancholic biker. Apparently his off-duty outfit was made up of a black leather vest ringed with- was that fur?- an ungodly amount of leather bracelets, and trousers that Selim desperately hoped were something other than leather. That was a lot of leather.
"Oh man, I love his outfit."
"He looks like a gigolo," Selim muttered.
"Hey, I don't ask what he does in his spare time."
Honestly, that explained a lot about how much Will got away with.
They approached the Lieutenant who – second odd sight of the day – seemed to be about four cigarettes into a pack, the butts burning out on the ground below the bench he was seated on. He was grumbling something quietly to himself, then the moment he caught sight of them, dropped the cigarette with a quiet "oh shit" and stomped it out beneath his boot.
"Oh for fuck's sake, Valjean. You know I smoke."
"Yes, and you shouldn't, and I know exactly where you picked it up," Valjean growled back. "Don't think I didn't notice those missing packs."
"You should have kept a closer eye on them." Will raised an eyebrow, glancing over his shoulder at the rowhouse behind him. "…What are you doing here? You don't live here. I think."
"The day you find out where I live, Fullmetal, is the day I move," he grumbled. "For your information, I was working."
"With a face like thunder and dressed like that? Yeah, right."
Valjean shot a thorny look at Will, who just smiled innocently – and then his jaw dropped. "Oh my god. Wait. Is this the librarian?"
"Shut up," Valjean groaned. "How do you even know about that?"
"Librarian?" Selim asked. He'd expected to feel out of the loop, but he was curious.
Will snickered, half-hiding his cattish grin behind his gloved hand. "Okay, so, we got transferred from Central to East three years ago, right? Just after I joined."
"Yeah?"
"Valjean here left his girlfriend behind."
"I can't believe you were paying attention. You don't pay attention to anything!"
"Correction, I don't pay attention to boring shit. You being an idiot is funny as fuck."
"I am going to wring your scrawny little neck one day."
Will snickered again. "He was dating this cute dorky librarian and then the transfer happened so fast he didn't have time to tell her. And he spent so long agonizing on what to say when he called her that he forgot."
"You forgot?!" Selim hadn't meant to sound so shocked, but it was a sympathetic shock, genuinely. Mostly.
"I didn't forget," Valjean complained, reaching into his pocket for another cigarette and lighting it without even recognizing it was there. "I just never got around to it. I had-" he shot a glare at Will- "a preschooler to keep out of danger."
"Call me a preschooler again and I'll choke you with one of those cigarettes."
"You're welcome to try, palm tree."
Now Will looked ready to kill somebody. "Palm tree?" Selim asked, actually quite enjoying the catch-up.
"About a year into being on our command," Valjean said, mood visibly lifting at the chance to roast Will in return, "Will started experimenting more with his hair. The green thing stuck around, but before the braids, he tried to-"
"No, god, please," Will groaned.
"He tried to give himself dreadlocks. With alchemy."
"The long way takes so long!"
"It's also for Black hair, Will. You know, Ishvalans, Liorans, anybody with more melanin than you…"
Will crossed his hair, face bright red. "I will not be shamed for trying."
"No, but I will shame you for the result. He looked like a palm tree for a solid week, before half his hair fell out."
"I was thirteen!"
"Yeah, and you're fifteen now and still have green hair. Don't mock me for my relationship troubles."
"So it is the librarian," Will retorted with joy.
"Fuck. Yes, fine. I thought maybe she'd know something. She wasn't on the original list because apparently she got fired about a month ago."
Selim winced. "So not only did you not call to check up on your ex, who you never actually broke up with, but you showed up only to ask her about the job she got fired from, which you would have known about if you'd stayed in contact?"
"Not my finest moment." Valjean apparently hadn't even noticed he'd started smoking again.
Selim glanced at Will, who seemed too busy gloating over the Lieutenant's misfortune for the problem-solving to kick in. Then he stepped forward and gave the Lieutenant a – gentle – kick in the shins.
"Ow! The fuck?"
Alex said exactly what Selim had been thinking. "Stop sulking, go get her some flowers, and work on an actual apology."
"Yes! That. And we will go ask her about the library stuff, because she probably won't slam the door in our face."
"How'd you guess that one?"
"Your nose is bleeding," Selim said innocently. Valjean checked his nose in alarm, and then Selim cracked up. "It's an expression!"
"I knew that," he sighed. "Fine. What kind of flowers?"
"Do I look like a goddamn florist?"
"I wasn't asking you, Will. But fine. I'll get. I don't know. Roses? Pansies? Peonies? I don't know shit about flowers."
Selim patted Valjean's shoulder with a small smile. "The florist will help you. Now shoo."
Valjean strode off with a relenting grunt, although he still looked like he'd rather be anywhere else but there. Will giggled a little more as he left, clearing his throat after a glare from Selim. "Oh come on. Making fun of him is my stress relief."
"He's your commanding officer."
"Solaris is my commanding officer. Technically, he's Solaris's bitch."
"Who still outranks you."
"I mean, I guess. He's more like my annoying big brother than anything else."
"Yeah, who knows what that's like," Alex added, and Will narrowed his eyes at him. "You're not wrong though. I don't know how seriously I can take the guy who literally got coerced into adopting a dog by Fuery doing little whiny puppy noises."
"Did he really? Wow. A lot of my ideals about the military are getting shattered today."
Will bumped Selim's shoulder with his. "Yeah, turns out most of us are dysfunctional freaks. It's kind of fun, actually. Come on, let's go get the dirt on Valjean – er, on the library. Obviously." He flashed his teeth in a very un-innocent smile.
Selim glanced back at the poor lieutenant and sergeant, who – having taken Hughes's implicit threat very seriously – had kept well back from everything. Still, they'd caught enough of it to look very, very alarmed. He wondered if he should tell them that he was the normal one… then decided that might make matters worse.
Alchemy was a science, theoretically. You understood the composition of matter, you took it apart, you put it back together. The arrays that non-alchemists found so mystical were equations, symbols dancing with each other and inscribed with phrases and numbers. When you took stone apart, you got aluminium, carbon, silica, calcium, and traces of whatever other minerals had been threaded through it. When you took apart water, you got hydrogen, oxygen, sometimes salt or sulfur. When you created aluminium out of stone, you had to put the discards somewhere – often back into the ground. Nothing truly wasted, nothing truly created, nothing truly destroyed.
At least, that was what Diana had always believed. The man who'd sparked her interest in alchemy had been very clear on the rule of equivalent exchange, even as he made toys for her in the rain out of scraps of wood. He'd been so kind to her, even leaving her an address she could run to if she ever got locked out or lost again. She'd meant to take him up on at some point, but her mother had died, and Aunt Chris had taken better care of her-
She shook her head to clear the memories away. What Hohenheim the famed alchemist had said to a preteen girl to amuse her wasn't relevant. The Gate was. And the Gate made no sense. Transmutations that tried to ignore the rule of equivalent exchange simply didn't work.
Except…
Her memories drew away from Hohenheim only to go somewhere even less wanted. She'd only used a Red Stone once. Once had been enough. She knew, instinctively, that there was something terrible about them – even before the backlashes had started, even before the horror had cut through her wartime shell and the bodies had finally piled up high enough for her to see. Or perhaps her brain was simply trying to be kind to her, and ascribe some moral gut feeling to her that she'd never had.
Well, in all that she was reading, there was no conscious connection between Red Stones and the Gate. Instead, the Gate came up in fairytales, under a variety of names. The veil, some of the older texts called it. Others used a plural, talked about the aes sidhe, the hidden people who enforced fairness and equal dealings… in their own way. She was too old to believe in fairies and myths, but reality still had a way of surprising her.
She glanced up at the person who'd just slid into the chair across from her. "If you're trying to be inconspicuous, sir, you should lose the bodyguard."
Fuhrer Mustang just stuck his tongue out at her, and she couldn't decide whether to be annoyed or charmed at the immaturity of the gesture. "I tried to tell her to take the day off, but she keeps stalking me."
"Sir," Hawkeye sighed, "I can hear you."
"I know, that's why I said it. Sit down and read a book, at least try to look like you're having fun."
Hawkeye adjusted her tinted glasses and sat down with a grim look like she was facing a firing squad. Diana actually kind of felt for the poor woman. Keeping Will – mildly – out of trouble was hard enough. Remind me to buy those two officers an apology drink. I had to pick somebody.
"So, what brings a beautiful woman like you to a dreary, non-burning library like this?"
"It was burned down long before I got there, sir, and I'm reading."
"That sounds dreadfully dull. What is that, some ancient dusty treatise? Or is it just the secret to all those perfect little circles and triangles you alchemists manage to freehand?"
She hid a small smile. "No dust here. Or triangles, for that matter. Just looking at some old myths."
"Oh, well, that's a little more in my wheelhouse. Although admittedly still not much. I'm a history buff, myself."
"Fuhrer, sir, with all due respect-"
"Normally people say that right before something very disrespectful," he mused with a considering expression, leaning his head on his hand.
"Don't you have something you should be doing?"
Was it her, or did Hawkeye roll her eyes? Mustang pouted slightly. "Well, yes. I just don't want to."
"The buffoon act doesn't suit you. And it doesn't work on me."
He laughed gently. "And yet I keep trying it. Maybe I just go all tongue-tied around you."
Diana closed the book and bopped him on the head with it. "Apologies, Miss Hawkeye. I'm sure his dignity will recover."
"It's been through worse," she said flatly.
"Ow," he complained. "Fine, fine. I promise to stop trying to bamboozle the extremely hot ex-Black Ops soldier."
She froze up at that, then shook it off as quickly as she could, placing the book back down. He was so good at acting like one of her subordinates, goofing off and attempting to charm her. The little jab about Black Ops did plenty to remind her of her place – without disturbing the disguise.
God, she hated him. In large part because she wasn't nearly as good at it as he was, and it pissed her off.
"I'm noticing a lack of toasted toothy monster in my cells or morgue. When I transferred you here from East City, there was a promise attached to it. Remember?"
"That I take care of the threat. I haven't forgotten, sir."
"I would have preferred it was done in East City, to be quite frank, but I was convinced by many people – you included – that an attack like the one in East City would actually be better withstood here, with stronger infrastructure and fewer external dangers."
"You don't have to remind me."
"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice still light but the undercurrent of ice sharp and vivid.
"Crystal clear."
His smile returned. "Great! Glad we could talk. Now, onto more important things-"
She was going to stab him one day, and enjoy it, frankly.
"-our very own illustrious General Phillip Armstrong is making his retirement official. I do so love excuses for fancy events, don't you?"
"Thrilling."
"I hope you're not intending on skipping out. It's very important that our officials new to Central make an appearance at these affairs, you know." Then he laughed. "Well, new back to Central, anyway."
She felt her fingers biting into her palm even through her glove, and hid her hand under the book. "Of course, sir."
"I could always stick you with planning the dratted thing – I enjoy going much more than I enjoy organizing – but that seems like secretary work. Don't you think?"
Diana managed to make herself smile, and eased the muscles in her face enough to make it look genuine. "I'll be happy to attend. Unfortunately catching the Beast takes up too much of my time for planning parties."
"As I expected, as I expected, no worries. Well, I'll leave you to your research, then. Come along, Hawkeye."
She could feel the half-moon marks in her palm long after he was gone. Would it have done any good to explain that she was trying to understand what on earth she was up against?
Probably not, she sighed. As much as she almost liked him – or at least, the borrowed personality he put up and charmed people with – the Fuhrer wasn't a good person. He was a manipulator, stinging her with barbs to remind her of who and what she was. A dog of the military, just like Will, just like everyone else.
