Part VI: He gets the world and you get him
The next few weeks were a whirlwind of sharing the good news, planning an eleventh-hour wedding and wrapping up Hawkeye's single life. Telling people was easy. Everyone was so excited. Hawkeye's friend Rebecca started squealing, and Chris Mustang gave the couple both big hugs after uncharacteristically bursting into tears. Even General Armstrong had a relatively kind word.
"He gets the world and you get him," she said with a wink, "Well played."
"Well played is how Armstrongs say Congratulations," Mustang joked later.
Mustang and Hawkeye played a trick on Fuhrer Grumman. He and Hawkeye hadn't been that close over the past few years, but before he became Fuhrer she could at least walk into his office to visit unannounced. Now she needed an appointment, which seemed somehow inappropriate.
"I have at least five signals I could use," Mustang offered, the truth being that he and Grumman were much closer, "Which one should I use?"
"A bad one," Hawkeye said with a wink. Two hours later, Grumman appeared in a frilly dress in a public park where Mustang and Hawkeye were waiting.
"What are you doing here?" he asked Hawkeye in confusion as soon as he saw her. When they told him they were engaged he burst into a wide grin.
"You had me so worried," he laughed, "I'm glad it's good news!" They talked for a bit, and when they told him about the pregnancy, he seemed even happier.
"Good job boy, good job!" he exclaimed repeatedly, slapping Mustang on the shoulder. Mustang and Hawkeye spent the evening in hysterics speculating what he might have meant.
The only person who wasn't happy was Alex Armstrong.
"You can't leave!" he wailed as soon as Hawkeye told him she planned to retire. She wasn't surprised, as in the short amount of time they'd worked together, they'd discovered they had a lot in common.
Hawkeye had always considered Alex Armstrong to be a bit of a buffoon, but she quickly learned this wasn't true. He certainly had his moments, but for the large part, he was intelligent, sensitive and empathetic.
"I want to clear the air," he said the day after her transfer, "Because a lot of people don't like working for someone convicted of cowardice. But I don't think refusing to kill innocent people is cowardice. I don't think saying that there is no jail that you can put me in that make me follow an order to commit genocide is cowardice."
Hawkeye decided she liked Alex Armstrong. After the Promised Day, he'd become fascinated by the possibility of using alchemy for healing. A lot of the assignments he gave her involved tracking down people or literature he thought could help him learn more.
"Lieutenant can I show you something?" he asked Hawkeye one day. She'd cut herself because someone had stupidly put a knife away in the ammo cabinet. He pulled out a piece of paper with a circle on it and healed her cut by waving his hands.
"Wow, you're making progress," she remarked.
"True," he replied, "But what's more important is that it's dead simple. When people think of alchemy, they think of alchemists, but what if there are some things we could train anyone to do? Imagine if soldiers could heal each other in the battlefield."
He seemed pleased by this idea.
"That would be a very powerful army," Hawkeye replied.
"You sound like my sister," he spat back darkly.
The truth was that they both feared making the military more powerful. Sometimes, after everyone else had gone home, they would sit and have long, subversive conversations about the role of the military in Amestris. Armstrong even loaned Hawkeye a forbidden book on alternative forms of government, which she sat and read in the bathroom during her lunch breaks because she didn't want Mustang to see it.
"How about I put you down for a year of leave," Alex Armstrong insisted.
Hawkeye didn't know what to say.
"Your sister told you I'm going to have a child?" she asked finally.
He nodded,
"That doesn't mean you can't come back, there's no rule in writing."
Hawkeye didn't think the rules in writing were what mattered, but she didn't say anything.
"One year," Armstrong stated finally, "That's what I'm writing down, and if you decide you don't want to come back, you can retire then."
"Yes sir," she said, not sure what difference it would make.
"You have to come back," Armstrong reiterated, pointing towards the hallway, "I can't trust any of those guys out there, but I can trust you."
Hawkeye chuckled,
"Roy always used to say that."
Olivier Armstrong was exhausted when she arrived in East City after running away from home. She'd stayed up all night waiting at the train station, and she'd only managed to catch a few hours of sleep on the train. After asking directions, she walked into the recruitment office at Eastern Command and talked to a recruiter. He was kind and cheerful, and showed her various standard-issue blades after she mentioned she was interested in weapons. But he was clear that she had to be eighteen years old to join the military.
She wandered around the city, and eventually asked a cafe owner if there was anywhere she could stay. He suggested Mrs Linton's Boarding House. Olivier walked over and discovered it was a sort of hostel for young women. For her remaining money, she rented a room for three nights. It was small and dingy, but she wasn't planning to join the military for the glamour. She was hopeful that in the next few days she could find a job that paid enough to stay there permanently.
Olivier walked from business to business, asking for any type of work they had. It was harder than she thought. To start, it was getting close to winter, which was a slow time for a lot of businesses. She had also never cooked, cleaned or done laundry. She didn't know what a tailor was. She considered babysitting because she had spent a lot of time caring for her brother, but she didn't have the right affect. She unnerved people, and they didn't like not knowing who she was and where she came from.
The three days passed, and Olivier packed her backpack and left Mrs. Linton's. That was the first of many nights she spent on the street. It was bearable for a while, she convinced herself she was playing a game, testing out the survival skills that she had read so much about. But it got colder and colder. She spent nights shivering and barely sleeping, and her hands and feet burned as they thawed out at whatever early-opening public place she went to warm up first thing in the morning.
She started to understand what a lavish life she had led up to this point. Beds warmed with heating plates, breakfast brought to her room in the morning, clean clothes laid out, baths drawn. Olivier knew one phone call to her family would get her back to that, but she couldn't, not now that she'd come this far. But she started to worry. The cold and poor nutrition was taking a toll on her body, and she worried she wouldn't be in any shape to join the military by the time her birthday came around. She also knew from reading survival manuals that it was cold enough that she risked falling asleep and not waking up. One especially cold night, she remembered the friendly military recruiter she'd met her first day in East City and decided to ask him if he knew of anywhere she could stay. She thought about all the empty rooms in the Armstrong mansion. Surely the military had an empty gymnasium, a shed even, where she could sleep.
The recruiter was friendly, but didn't have any answers.
"Please," Olivier lied, "My parents died and I don't have anywhere to go."
He gave her some money, and suggested Mrs. Linton's, and the recruiter next to him gave her some money as well. She thanked them graciously and left.
Olivier was a few blocks away when a man approached her. She recognized him, he'd been standing in the recruiting office while she was asking her questions. He was an older man who wore a military uniform that marked him as a Sergeant.
"Excuse me Miss," he said, "I'm Reggie. I heard you talking to the recruiters, and you can stay at my place if you want."
He was showing immense generosity, and it seemed strange to Olivier that he hadn't shown it in the recruiting office where it might have impressed his colleagues. He had also approached her from an alley between military buildings as opposed to following her from the office on the sidewalk.
"That is very generous, are you sure?" Olivier asked, trying to get a better sense of him.
"I am," he said, "It's rare I get the company of a young woman like yourself."
Suddenly, Olivier understood what the deal was.
Living with Reggie wasn't that bad, all considered. He was gentle and patient, and he treated her like his girlfriend, buying her gifts and taking her on dates. He never did anything that could get her pregnant. Olivier spent her days reading his old military training materials, visiting the library and going on runs to improve her physical condition. It wasn't any different than being married to Lamonte, she convinced herself, other than she had an escape hatch. She knew what her goal was, and she was doing what needed to be done to achieve it.
But Olivier was angry, especially at her parents. What hurt the most was the rejection. She was willing to forgive that they had different ideas about what was best for her, but she couldn't forgive the way they'd talked about her, saying over and over how graceless and ugly and worthless she was as they arranged her marriage. Treating her like a piece of trash they had to pay someone to take away. She raged. But then who was she really? She was powerless, nothing, with no value to anyone except her body. She spent hours pounding the punching bag in the corner of Reggie's apartment.
A few months later, Reggie was transferred. He offered to marry Olivier so she could go with him, but she declined. Somehow, this bothered her the most of all. After all the time they'd spent together, he still thought she was joining the military out of financial need and would jump at an alternative. Clearly she was just an object to him, he had never bothered to get to know her at all.
Olivier didn't see Reggie until many years later, when she was planning a large military action with several other officers. They brought in all the men who would be involved to brief them, and standing in the crowd was Reggie. She stared at him, thinking of all the small ways she could torture, demean and humiliate him now that she had the power. When they'd met she'd given him a false name, so she waited eagerly for the moment he saw her face, hoping a look of horror would appear when he realized who she was, a then-Major with a reputation for being vengeful and terrifying. But as time passed, she realized he didn't even recognize her. Olivier would always remember Reggie, but to him she was just one of many stones on a path he barreled down recklessly, barely taking notice of any specific one.
"I cannot work with that man," she declared, pointing and interrupting another officer who was speaking, "He takes liberties with young recruits." Then she ran out of the room before she fell apart. A few minutes later, one of the officers found her, and brought her back into the room. Reggie was gone. She never found out what had happened to him.
Without Reggie, Olivier was back to sleeping outside, but it wasn't so cold now. She could survive. Still, she sold her body three times to make ends meet before she turned eighteen. On her birthday, she walked to the recruiting office. The same recruiter was still there. He smiled widely, and gave her a high five. They bantered and joked around as she filled out the papers and signed her name. She laughed and smiled, trying to pretend that she was the same person she had been before.