Anamnesis
He grew up in
the saddle, riding through the fields and scorching his fair skin in
the sun. He was raised on an ethic of hard work, where effort yielded
results and lack of effort meant starvation. It was an ethic akin to
the principle of equivalent trade; however much you gave was what you
received in return, except when the locusts came through. He grew up in
the country, where the nearest neighbors were the family that lived
across the river. He was raised in a place where the only time he had
to touch firearms was to take his father's rifle and fire it to scare
the birds away.
He studied alchemy once, when he was much
younger: a flight of fancy that became several years of lost time and
wasted effort. He was nine, his brother twelve, and he was fascinated
by what Michel could do with just a bit of chalk and a touch of the
hand after only three years of study. Michel learned out of books and
from the elderly alchemist who lived several miles down the dirt road.
Jean learned from Michel and from Michel's books, when the elder
sibling was done with them.
Michel has a natural talent for
alchemy, and his reactions seem effortless and graceful. He wants to
practice medical alchemy, and studies the reactions which would
transform plant material and chemicals into medicine. Jean has little
talent for alchemy, and is too busy trying to make the reaction work to
even think about whether it is elegantly executed; he works twice as
hard and twice as long to produce the same end result as Michel. He
suspects his elder brother had used up all the talent already, and left
none for him.
By the time he himself is twelve, he is
disillusioned. He is nowhere near as skilled as Michel had been after
three years. Not even his sister Therese seems to think alchemy is
Jean's calling; the three year-old enjoys nothing better than smudging
the edges of Jean's arrays as soon as he finishes drawing them.
Three years pass. Michel, at eighteen, leaves the home in order to
further his alchemical studies beneath a respected medical alchemist of
Central City. Jean, at fifteen, stays home—surrounded by papers with
scrawled arrays that don't activate and equations that don't add up—and
listens to his father muse that if he isn't any good at alchemy like
his brother, he might as well stay on and take over the farm when his
parents are too old to continue working the fields. After all, he is
well suited to it, his father frequently laughs.
Jean never
says anything in response to this statement of his father's. It is
rooted in fact, after all; of the few alchemical reactions that work
for Jean, the one he is best at causes water vapor to condense and
precipitate from the atmosphere in imitation of a rainfall: on a very
limited scale.
When she is old enough, Therese takes to
following Jean around the fields as he activates this array over
successive patches of land. She likes to call him the watering can.
This does very little for Jean's self-image.
Jean has no desire
to stay in the country and work a farm for the rest of his life. He
waits three years, until he is of age; and then he enlists in the
military with fanciful images of service in his mind. Those images die
a quick and bloody death when he is sent to Ishbal as part of the
detachment accompanying the State Alchemists. If not for his subsequent
meeting of Roy Mustang, he might have tried to leave the military
altogether.
Years pass; he gradually forgets much of the
alchemy he wasted six years of his life on. He hones his physical
prowess instead, requesting and receiving extensive training beyond
that which most average soldiers get; he is ever mindful of what he saw
in Ishbal, and he feels it necessary to be able to defend himself as
well as possible. He remembers the times he has been cornered
weaponless, and trains further in unarmed combat; he remembers the
times he was run down with nothing but a standard-issue knife with
which to defend himself, and learns to fight with a knife. Raised as he
was, he does not find the hard work tiresome. It is ingrained in him;
he must put in effort before he will see results.
His smoking
habit grows worse. In between training and his service to Mustang, he
snags a few moments to himself to lounge outside in the sun and have a
good smoke to calm his nerves.
Sometimes he forgets he ever
even tried to dabble in alchemy; but he is reminded of it every so
often, since he is stationed in Central. He occasionally visits his
brother, when he is off duty and Michel is not too busy to see him. His
brother works with one of the major hospitals of Central, alchemizing
medicine and conducting independent research of his own.
His
parents are sent a notification of Jean's achievement when he is
commissioned as an officer. He visits home at this time. His parents do
not concern themselves with military affairs, but they have little
fondness for this institution that kills so many young men. And so they
are not certain how to react to either the news of his commission, or
to Jean himself when he arrives on their doorstep. His mother frets
over him the entire time he is home, while his father grumbles that if
he'd just stayed home and tended to the farm he'd have a longer life
expectancy. His little sister, at the age of twelve, is merely enamored
of his uniform and thinks it 'romantic.'
When his mother is not
fretting over the possibility of her Jean being shot at, she is
scolding him for his smoking habit. His little sister thought that
romantic too, until the smoke seeped into her clothes.
His
parents know precisely how to react to the accomplishments of their
eldest son, however. They beam openly as they read his letters aloud.
Therese tells Jean privately that she thinks his job is more exciting.
Jean replies to her that it's exciting until somebody gets shot in the
head.
Therese is not discouraged by that answer. She asks him
if he goes to fight often. He can see the naïveté in her eyes, and
wonders if his own blue gaze looks jaded to her. He replies bluntly
that he spends most of his time behind a desk these days.
Four
years later, few things have changed. He is twenty-five, still in the
service of Mustang and well aware that his loyalty to the Colonel will
cost him the advancement of his own military career. But he
rationalizes that he never cared much about clawing swiftly up through
the ranks. He doesn't care to have too much power in such a military;
he does not care to be too visible in such a corrupt institution. He
privately agrees with Hughes: better to have a desk job than to be out
in the field. He is, however, fully aware that if the situation calls
for it, he will not hesitate to do what he must.
He is at his
desk now, indulging in the fourth cigarette of the day and regarding a
pile of newly-finished paperwork. He snuffs his cigarette in the
ashtray on his desk, regards the curl of smoke. He is the last to leave
the office, today. Usually the last to leave would be Hawkeye, but she
is not in today. Illness; or so Mustang says.
He straightens his papers, puts them away. A blank sheet escapes his grasp and flutters to the floor.
He pauses. He puts the rest of the stack away. And then he picks up the
blank sheet and a pen, and takes a moment to sift through his memory.
He draws the circle of one of the few alchemical reactions he ever got
to work, and the only one he still remembers after all these years. It
looks similar to the array of Mustang, having a cluster of triangles
contained within a circle; however, the triangles all point in the
opposite direction as Mustang's do, and there are only three of them.
The alchemical symbol for fire is the triangle whose tip points
upwards, while the symbol for water is the triangle whose tip points
downwards. The three triangles he inscribes form an inverted pyramid:
two on top with their points down, and another directly beneath it with
its point also facing downwards.
In the empty space at the
center of the three triangles, a line with a semicircle arcing
downwards from it is drawn. It is an imitation of a falling drop of
water: the alchemical symbol for precipitation. Above the cluster of
triangles, where Mustang's array had the shape of a salamander, he
inscribes instead the simplistic form of a nymph-like woman: undine,
spirit of water.
Mustang's array tweaks the levels of oxygen in the air to create combustion; this
array influences both the hydrogen and oxygen present in the
atmosphere, causing them to bond in a two-to-one ratio and precipitate
as water.
He takes a painstakingly long time to do it, when
compared to a seasoned, skilled alchemist. A practiced alchemist would
have finished and activated the array by the time he finishes the
circle and the three triangles. A practiced alchemist would have drawn
and activated a second array by the time he finishes the image of the
undine and touches the edge of the circle.
A faint, weak
shimmer of light, and a misting of water droplets peppers the sheet of
paper. He regards the feeble reaction with a tired look; and then he
gets up and leaves. He can tell it will not be long before he forgets
altogether.
The next morning, Mustang comes to the office
early. He picks up the paper—crinkled from having dried overnight—and
reads the spent array with an inscrutable look. And then he folds it
up, and places it in the tray on his desk. A flick of his fingers, and
it is ash.
He sincerely doubts that this sheet of paper is something Second Lieutenant Havoc wishes to see first thing in the morning.