So it's time for some insight into Roy's head, so this chapter is rather dark...


Chapter forty-seven

Roy was lying in bed while hugging Ed who hugged Heather, the two kids both asleep. Roy had been prescribed pills for dreamless sleep for both him and Ed, and so Edward had swallowed his spoonful of yoghurt with the pill in the middle dutifully because he liked the taste of the yoghurt and that was enough for him.

Roy, however, was awake and hadn't taken his own pills. He didn't want to sleep just yet. He needed time to think. To mull the day's events over in his mind. Because he didn't want Heather to know just how much pain she brought him. It wasn't that he couldn't stand to be around her, because she was just an innocent little girl. A likeable, fierce one that reminded him strongly of Ed and who filled that enormous void that Ed left just slightly.

No, the pain came from the fact that Roy had been asleep as the kid he had sworn to protect had been raped. It came from the way that Heather's purpose had been to show Roy just how much he had failed her Dad and then her. And it was all because of Roy. Melanie had raped Ed and not Roy because she had once again tortured Ed instead of him so as to punish Roy further for what he did in Ishbal.

And the worst part was that Roy was in a way grateful for it. Because Edward was happier now than he had been ever since he became this way. Because now he had a purpose. He had someone whose existence he could place and who didn't bring him confusion and a certain level of frustration and stress because he didn't have memories that he needed to remember. She gave him something that none of them could: a child of his own. And with Edward's highly instinctive mind, that gave him what seemed to be a sort of fulfilment. He had reached puberty, and without the emotional part of it present, Edward was basically ready for mating, no matter how twisted and sickening the thought was. He had fulfilled the biological goal of the changes to his body, and now he had his Dud that he could take care of without any other attachments. And so she gave him a break in all his confusion and frustration.

Roy was just lying there, his eyes open, staring at the window. Al had been there as Edward fell asleep, but now he was in the library and letting the day's events sink in too.

There were suddenly knocks on the front door, and Roy froze. It was half past eleven, so what could be wrong? What could warrant a house call like this? He felt his stomach clench as one horrible scenario after another formed in his mind. Dead subordinates, other inhabitants of Maehle coming to attack them, someone who had discovered Heather and wanted to take her away, someone who had found out about Ed, or Al, or someone having decided that Roy wasn't suited to look after the Elrics and so they would be taken away from him...

Roy found himself needing to focus on steadying his breathing. Things that weren't something that he could control and that he didn't expect and could pose a threat to their wellbeing made his chest constrict. It made sense. The cage had been filled with uncertainty about the things that would be coming, and abrupt changes brought unexpected torture. No control, no safety, no prepared schedule.

It was a form of psychological torture that Melanie had loved more than anything.

He found himself disentangling himself from Ed's sleeping form and standing up so as to get to the bookshelf on the wall above his bed. He heard Riza move downstairs to open the front door for their unexpected guest. Roy, in the meantime, was grabbing the ignition gloves on the bookshelf. They had been placed there so that they were well out of Edward's reach.

Roy had quickly pulled his gloves on and moved out of the room silently, carefully making his way through the hallway to the staircase.

Then he froze as he heard who Riza was opening the door for.

Aunt Chris?

Roy listened to the ongoing conversation and how his foster mother was told to come right in and that Riza would fetch Roy for her.

Roy strode down the hallway and jogged downstairs to meet her, finding her to be looking up at him, dressed in a large, black suit instead of the usual dress that she wore at the bar. It was most likely so as not to draw as much attention. Riza was holding her thick, black coat for her. "Hello, Roy," Aunt Chris said.

Roy paused midway downstairs for half a second, but then he began running down the last steps and soon found himself to be hugging her for the first time in years. "What... What are you doing here, Aunt Chris?" he asked, dumbfounded. He loved the comfort of suddenly feeling like a kid again after everything that had happened as she hugged him back. The smell of decades of cigarettes hanging around her was a highly welcome thing. After all those scenarios he had been imagining, to find his aunt in his hallway was an immense relief and he closed his eyes, soaking in the embrace.

"I figured that I wanted to pay you a visit after what you went through. And it seems like you don't exactly object, Roy..." his aunt answered, gently placing her hand at the back of his head.

Next thing he knew, he was sobbing quietly into her shoulder, feeling like he was bursting as he was hugged by the woman who raised him and who didn't come here as the Madame, but as his Aunt Chris. And dammit if it didn't feel good to not be the one in charge and not to be the one who had to stay strong and be the protector. He didn't care that it was fourteen years since he last cried into her shoulder, and that it had been because he'd broken his leg and had needed to be carried to the car. "Th-thank you for coming..." he whispered shakily.

"How about we go and sit down, Roy?" she said unusually kindly.

Roy nodded into her shoulder and pulled out of the hug, wiping away his tears, briefly noticing that Riza had left, obviously to keep an eye on Edward and Heather for him. He sniffed loudly. "Yeah, sorry... That was... I guess I just really needed that hug," Roy told her, only to have her shove a tissue at him.

"Don't worry, Roy... I heard that you went through quite a bit."

Roy blew his nose. He didn't know what to think or say right now. He'd broken down completely and he just felt overwhelmed and like his chest was calming down from bursting. "It... It was hell... Twenty-four days of hell..." he felt his stomach clench at the thought as he balled up the used tissue in his right hand.

It was only now that he registered that he had run at her in only his boxers and his ignition gloves. He hadn't even thought about dressing himself.

...Because he wasn't bothered by only wearing his underwear and nothing else.

"Dammit..." he whispered, looking down at his bare feet. "I really am a mess..."

"That may be, Roy, but if you want my honest opinion, I think I'd be more worried if you weren't... Now how about you and me sit down in the kitchen with a drink?"

Roy felt a bitter smile on his face as he snorted humourlessly, still looking down. "No can do, Aunt Chris, alcohol is off limits... I'll lose the Elrics if I do."

There was rustling from her handbag and suddenly Roy had a large plastic bottle shoved under his nose, revealing it to be an apple fizzy drink. It wasn't even labelled as an alternative to cider. It wasn't even a non-alcoholic cider option. It was just fizzy drink with apple flavour. "It's all the rage at children's birthday parties, apparently." There was a small smile in her voice as she said it. "Should fit the rules well enough, shouldn't it?"

Roy couldn't help the weak chuckle that escaped his lips. "Sounds like a very good plan, Aunt Chris... I'll go get dressed and then join you in the kitchen."

"Roy, there's really no need. It's obvious that you're uncomfortable with wearing most clothes. Besides, your house is already heated to the point that it feels like late spring here at the very least."

Roy looked back up at her at that, sighing heavily. "You can read me that well, huh?"

She just looked at him, a hint of angered sadness in her eyes. "Partially. I also picked up a few things through what my girls were told, and apparently you spent twenty whole days wearing nothing but boxers and blankets... Knowing you, I would think that you very much enjoy the constant reminder of freedom caused by the warm air on your bare skin compared to the cold of the cage. You don't need to worry, Roy. It's only your third day back in your home, you deserve a break, not a marathon. That's why they gave you a year and not a month."

Roy shook his head with a hollow chuckle. "They gave me a year because they don't want to risk losing one of their most powerful and dangerous human weapons."

"That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use the opportunity that you've been given. If you want to keep those boys, then running yourself to the ground won't work. When you get back from major surgery, you're told to get plenty of rest, not to go mountain climbing."

Roy couldn't help the hollow, bitter chuckle escaping him again. "I guess I had a pretty lousy surgeon, then..."

There was a faint flash of alarm in her eyes for half a second, before her angry frown deepened. "What happened, Roy?"

Roy decided to screw gag orders. Aunt Chris wouldn't tell anyone and she'd might be able to carefully uncover some information on just what sort of facility there was that made Melanie like that in the first place. "Instead of anaesthetics or sedatives, I got a large nail in each palm and each foot while that psychotic chimera woman used her freakish strength to hold my shoulders down as my surgeon kindly opened me up and removed my appendix and one of my kidneys before that bitch ate them," he told her with a kind of hollow nonchalance. "Alkahestry's great for keeping the hypovolemic shock at bay."

"I think we should sit down now, Roy," Aunt Chris said after a couple of seconds, a faint tinge of horror in her eyes.

"I think so too... There's a lot of stuff to bring you up to speed on... A hell of a lot."


"So there you have it..." Roy said, taking another sip from his glass of the apple fizzy drink. It had that overly sweet, faintly poisonous-smelling synthetic scent and flavour. But he had to say that he loved it. Drinking stupid and unhealthy fizzy drinks was pretty great, actually, also because it was such a sharp contrast to the smell and taste he'd had in his mouth for all that time in the cage. The doctors at the hospital had concluded that their teeth too had been kept in order through alkahestry. Roy didn't even care. If it meant that he could drink this stuff without worrying about holes and rotting teeth and plaque, then that was definitely for the better. Roy would like to put off any sort of syringes for as long as necessary. "Our military's even more messed up than we thought, we're hiding a six-year-old girl who's only three days old and whose existence will get me in deep trouble and quite possibly lose me all three Elrics because I'm unsuitable and lied to the military about something like this. Hell, it could probably get all of us executed just to silence us. We're already working on casually looking into the matter of the military facility responsible for making Melanie that way, but we have to be careful. Heather had an address, and General Armstrong is apparently looking into it. We're not exactly sure when we'll receive more intel on the matter, but I'm already assuming that the building was abandoned and cleaned out as soon as Melanie's status as a chimera was known. We can't go in, guns blazing, there's too much at risk."

Aunt Chris grunted. "Well, this is certainly bigger than I thought. We'll keep an ear out for any mentions of alkahestry or chimeras and secret military operations and facilities and let you know if we hear something."

"Thank you." Roy sighed. He was holding his glass in both hands, leaning them on the table, only now realising that he'd been sitting like that for over an hour, practically putting the small, fading purplish needle marks on his arms on display. He pulled his arms back to his sides quickly, trying to hide them.

His aunt sighed. "You think they'll stop bothering you, Roy, just because you're hiding them?"

Roy sighed and shook his head. "No, quite the contrary. What bothers me is how little they bother me in general. I don't want to come off as seeking pity, but I just... This isn't like those other times. I've been tortured before, you know that, but this... This was truly hell, and I just..." He sighed again. His lip twitching in a small, bitter smile. "The whole dog thing wasn't far off, I guess. The collars and the water bowl... The dog food... The cage... Because we kind of learnt how to live that way... We hoped to get out, yes, but the way we began reacting to it all, we were very much like dogs. You know how dogs learn from being reprimanded? Well, we kind of got that after a while... I'd snap sometimes, Ed too, but that too is very dog-like in a way... But the main thing was that we didn't really believe in the future. Yes, we knew it would come, we knew that time was passing and we were making halfhearted plans for when we got out... But we began living very much in the present because our future was so damn unpredictable. One hour at a time. Plans and expectations brought us nowhere... If we had them, then we would only find ourselves with our expectations shattered and we'd lose hope even more. It was better to be living in the present and not daring to hope that each day we'd get saved, because it honestly felt more like psychological self-harm than anything... We reached that phase during day two of the playhouse. We'd keep each other going by talking about what we'd do when we got out, but mostly it was just something we did to remind ourselves not to..." Roy looked down, sighing heavily. "Mostly it was to give us a reason not to give into that steadily growing urge to drown ourselves in the water bowl."

"I'm sorry, Roy," Aunt Chris said.

"Yeah, me too... If I hadn't had Ed... I wouldn't have been surprised if I had done just that. The playhouse... It sounds so easy, but it wasn't. The darkness, the closed space where you couldn't even stretch out, the constant drumming of the rain and every time you escaped it, all that happened was that you got outside, was soaked within seconds and so cold that it hurt, then it was just doing your business in the toilet tube and knowing that you had to get back in because of the cold, wet pain slamming down on you. Because you knew that it was deadly to stay outside and it would get harder to get warm again if you dawdled. And during all that, you knew that when this torment ended, then you might just be facing something far, far worse, but you didn't know yet what it would be... Melanie loved to do things like that... She left us alone for hours at a time every single day, which gave us plenty of opportunity to kill ourselves if we wanted to. We could have done it easily... But she knew that we wouldn't, because we'd be leaving the others behind..."

"I don't think it sounds easy at all, Roy. That is psychological torture and a highly efficient way of doing it... I don't think anyone in their right mind wouldn't feel that way at some point in your situation."

Roy clenched his fists. "And the worst part is that now that I'm back here, after every damn thing we went through, I couldn't even come home with a split lip. All my injuries were healed up, all the pain is mere memories, and Ed is yet again the one who didn't get out in one piece. He didn't even get out with his soul intact."

Roy slammed his fist on the table in frustration and guilt and every damn emotion that had been crushing him for over a month now.

"Uh, Roy... Is... Is this a bad time?" came a small voice, and Roy turned around to find Heather standing in the kitchen doorway, her right hand on still on the door handle. She looked upset and Roy had a feeling that she had been listening for quite some time, before she now decided that it had gone on for too long and that she ought to make her presence known. She still had the cotton roll with Ed's message to her held tightly under her left arm.

She was looking very much like a small child and little else where she was standing in her light blue nightie that reached her knees.

And she had tears in her eyes. Tears of guilt and misery that she shouldn't and had no reason to have.

But she was an Elric and Melanie was her biological mother, meaning that she was more or less genetically bound to be blaming herself. And her lips were trembling as she looked up at Roy and Roy only. "I-I'll go now... S-sorry..." she said suddenly, turning on her heel and running off.

"Heather!" Roy shouted, getting to his feet and taking off after her. "Stop!"

He found her pausing on the third step of the staircase, looking up at him in misery. "I-I'm so s-sorry... I-I shouldn't h-have been l-listening!"

Roy sighed, reaching out and placing his hands on her shoulders, finding it slightly unnerving just how small it made her look. "Heather, why were you downstairs in the first place? It's past one in the morning."

"I-I..." she looked down. "I wet the bed... Uncle Al's transmuting the sheets clean and stuff and Riza helped me wash up, but I was hungry, but you were talking and I didn't wanna disturb you. But you kept talking about stuff you don't really want me to know and so I didn't know what to do and I'm sorry, Roy," she whispered, her voice breaking slightly.

Roy sighed and quickly picked her up, letting her use his left arm as a seat, to which she responded by freezing. "It's not that I don't want you to know like it's some dirty secret... I just don't want you to think that it's your fault. Because it isn't. None of it is because you were born a week after we were rescued."

At that she began sobbing.

Roy put his free right hand on her cheek, tilting her head up to look at him. "Heather, please... I don't blame you, none of us do..."

"But... But..." She grimaced with her emotional torment. "I HATE HER! I HATE HER, I HATE HER, I HATE HER! I-I was inside of her as she tortured you and Dad! She g-gave birth to me! I feel filthy all the time because half of me is her and I HATE HER!"

Then she broke down into wails and Roy was kind of lucky that the sleeping pills knocked Edward out for about eight hours and wouldn't wake up no matter what. Otherwise he'd have been too agitated to sleep for hours.

"Heather, it isn't your fault and you're not filthy for something that wasn't even optional for you. You had no control over it. You made your choice with your first words and that damn well makes you clean in my book. Now let's get you a sandwich and you can meet my aunt."

"I-I'm really sorry 'bout the bed thing... I-I'll try not to let it h-happen again..." she whispered.

Roy sighed. It felt weird to carry a child like this. To carry such a small being and actually being entrusted with them. In many ways, Heather's life was even more in Roy's hands than even Ed's. Because she didn't exist. She couldn't magically appear. Yes, they could try to make up a story about how the Elrics have just discovered a half-sibling, but Roy was still going to be in major trouble for taking in a six-year-old without telling anyone. He had been talking with Riza, and they had settled on calling Grumman who would be arriving tomorrow morning at ten so that they could discuss it with him to find out just what he thought was best.

However, he had zero experience with Heather's statement, at least as a responsible grownup and not a child. And so he decided to use logic. "It's all right, Heather. You're only six and that is fairly common for kids your age. And seeing as how this is only the third night since you were born, it makes even more sense."

"I-I dreamt that I had to pee, and I was at a toilet and sat down and then it got really warm and wet and I'm sorry..."

Roy wasn't really sure what to say.

Then Heather giggled slightly, her voice still full of tears. "L-like father like daughter..." Then she hugged Roy's arm to her and began crying again.

No, this had been a very long day for all of them.


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(But no flames)