"You're sure you don't want to come with me?"
Maes sighed heavily, his heart still lodged uncomfortably somewhere around his throat, and shook his head.
Ed stayed uncertain in the doorway to their hotel room, a reluctant hand clinging to it and eyes still clouded. He worked his mouth several times, clearly wanting to protest with something- and if it had been relating to anything else at all, Maes would've helped him in an instant.
It wasn't.
"You'll be fine, Ed," he promised, and his smile felt pathetic, but it was just all that he could do for him. "We shouldn't go together, this time. He's already not doing great, and after yesterday... he probably doesn't want the two of us there interrogating him."
"But..."
Maes took another steadying breath, one that did nothing to put at ease the nerves tightening in his stomach, and tried to will that same sense of confidence he was sorely lacking into his voice for Ed to take strength from. "I'll go talk to him tomorrow, I promise. But I think you might have better luck going now."
That part of it wasn't quite true, actually.
The both of them going to see Roy being a bad idea- that was true. Maes and Ed had tried that yesterday, and they could pretty easily see how horribly that had turned out. That at least one of them needed to talk to him today; that, also, was true. After what they'd learned yesterday- it was just unconscionable for neither one of them to even make an attempt to talk to Roy now.
What Maes wasn't all that sure about was that Ed was the best one to get through to him.
In fact, if this has been before yesterday, he'd have been sure it wasn't.
But now, it wasn't before yesterday, so Maes was sitting here not twelve hours after finding out that everything he'd ever thought he'd known about his so-called best friend had been a complete lie. He didn't even know if Roy was his friend, anymore, because he had no idea if Roy actually thought of him as one.
What the hell did he know about what was best for Roy?
What the hell did he know about anything at all?
In the end, Ed still looked thoroughly miserable, braid lank and heavy and eyes hooded with lack of sleep, but Maes was able to gently reassure him into leaving. Ed clearly didn't really want to go, and really didn't believe in going alone, but he knew as well as Maes did that it just wouldn't be right to leave Roy alone today. If Maes knew anything about him at all, if, then there'd be no better way to tell him he had no support than to stay away, today of all days.
Yeah, Maes thought morosely.
Big if.
But alongside that misery on Ed's face was also a solid assuredness. That even if he did not want to go alone, he knew one of them had to, and Maes knew he could trust Ed to do it.
After all, he didn't really have any justification to pretend he knew Roy any better than Ed did, anymore.
He didn't have any room to pretend he knew Roy at all.
But that wasn't why he wanted Ed to go, today.
That day when they had found Roy huddled on the floor of that military lab, so many weeks ago, that day when they had searched through a blood-stained and dark room of broken cages and the so-called scientists that Roy had torn apart, Maes had also found a file, stashed away in secret. The file that they hadn't even known for sure referred to Roy at the time, that had talked about dangerous chimeras being put down like rabid dogs, but by the end of the day there had been no way to deny it had been talking about Roy.
Maes had kept that folder.
And until now, he had not been able to open it.
He'd agonized over it, hiding it first in his desk, then wrapped deeps into a bundle of clothes that he'd stuffed into a suitcase the instant it had been safe to come out here. For three weeks straight now, ever since he'd tossed it open flippantly and carelessly in that fucking lab, it had been snapped shut. Knowing in that file was Roy, he just hadn't been able to bring himself to do it. He'd sat there with it in his hands for hours, a sweat broken out over the back of his neck and his skin crawling and rocks in his stomach, and he'd wanted to know, so badly, he'd had the power right there, but he'd never been able to bring himself to do it.
He'd wanted to hear the truth from Roy himself. He'd wanted to give Roy the chance to tell him everything he wanted him to know, and keep secret what he didn't, and leave it at that. Not break his trust and read all about it in this damn file.
Now...
Maes squeezed his eyes shut, fingers brushing tremblingly along the side of his suitcase, and swallowed hard.
Now, he'd stood there and watched as his scaled, fanged best friend had turned his back to show him scars from wings that had been chopped off a decade ago. He'd watched and listened as Roy had faced them and said right to them, I'm not human.
He couldn't stand not knowing, anymore.
He had to do this.
He opened his eyes, and yanked the suitcase back up onto the bed. In a matter of mere seconds, he'd torn through his luggage to find the sickeningly thick file buried deep at the very bottom, and planted it in his lap past the apprehension caught in his throat, and flipped all the way back to the very beginning.
This was it, then. This flimsy collection of papers and reports, all shoved in together into this one terrible file. He weighed it in his hands, listening to the paper crinkle, the folder shift, and above all else, felt just how damn heavy it was.
There had to be dozens upon dozens of reports in here. Hundreds of pages all shuffled together, stacking up over years of inhumane experiments and likely abuse done against his best friend.
It made him sick to his stomach.
This, right here in his hands, was his best friend's existence. Everything that had made Roy who he was was recorded here in this file.
Maes took another deep breath, steeling himself against the trepidation as best he could, and then, he flipped open the file all the way to the very back, and began to read.
The first picture alone was enough to make him regret this entire damn venture.
The earliest, oldest sheet back in the file held a stark, clinical photo, one that intensely reminded Maes of crime scene photos he'd taken in his own job. Cold and impersonal, cataloguing body parts and injuries and human- or not so human- suffering with an almost scientific air, with no regard for the dignity or pain of the people in them. Except this picture was not of a crime scene, and it was most certainly not of any impersonal stranger that he'd snapped a picture of then forcefully compartmentalized and categorized into the back of his mind to make himself not think about at night when he went home to his family.
This was of his friend.
Or... of the creature that had become his friend, at least.
Because the picture did not look like Roy.
A young... boy-like thing... slept on a cold, white floor in the center of the shot. Or, by the looks of him, was not asleep at all but instead out cold. He looked to be older than Elicia, but not by much- maybe nine, maybe ten, but even from this one picture alone it was very plain to see that the figure was very objectively not a normal child. He was not normal, and he was not human. His limbs seemed too loose, too long, like he'd been drawn by someone who didn't quite understand human anatomy, and his skin...
Maes covered his mouth with a shaking hand. He moaned into it, a low, gentle sound that he could not hold back, and the sight clutched so painfully at his heart he nearly choked.
His skin was an intermix of pale flesh and a sickly blue, scaly hide, as if he was half human, half snake. Maes had never seen a dragon before, but he'd seen pictures, and dragon scales did not look like that- but Roy's skin clearly did. He didn't let himself wonder for long what could've caused it, not wanting to ponder on what other animals they might've tried to mix with him or how the chimera transmutation could've just gone flat wrong, because this was wrong enough as it was. His hands and wrists, pale white, snaking up his left arm a sallow blue pattern of scales that climbed like a disease, a similar design up his right leg, patterned across one shoulder, one hip. It was awful. It was inhumane. It was like someone had stuck a human child's face, dusty black hair scattered over ears that tapered into gentle points, right on top of a monster's body.
There were fangs in his mouth. Page after page, Maes turned by, finding more- finding so much worse. Close-up pictures of his face, focusing in on multiple sharp teeth just like the fangs he'd seen only yesterday but this time crowded into a child's face, surrounding a tongue that was just a little too thin, just a little too long.
There were wings. Small, translucent, azure wings, curled protectively around his even smaller body except when the fragile things were pinned down for a picture.
There was a tail. A dark blue, thick, curled tail. Perhaps two feet long or even more, grossly huge and heavy that dwarfed the rest of him just like his wings, sometimes held down for pictures, other times left free to wrap around a leg or a scaled stomach.
There was a collar.
A stark black, metal collar, snapped around a pale throat like a brand, so abrasive and brazen it nearly made him vomit.
Maes put a hand to his already dizzy head, swaying pathetically even while sitting down, and for a moment was so lightheaded he almost passed out.
The last time he'd tried asking Roy about where he'd grown up, the colonel had blown him off with a careless laugh that was just so like him, and said wherever he'd grown up, it was obviously better than the barn Maes had, because at least he had the manners to not barge into his office unannounced and uninvited. Then, because Havoc had a terrible and half-dead instinct for self-preservation, the lieutenant had squished at Roy's face and announced that he'd never grown up, because he still had a baby face right there to be pinched.
Havoc had barely made it out of the room unburnt, after that, and Roy had spent the last thirty minutes in a stubborn and hilarious sulk.
It had been hilarious at the time, anyway.
Now, the thought of it alone left him sick at heart and mind, and so intensely apologetic he wanted to scream.
He could see his best friend as a child, right here. Curled up loose and limp, not in sleep but from a blow to the head or something even worse, skin spiraled blue and white and unhealthy all the way around with one huge wing half neglected and crushed underneath his side, a tail half as big as he was clutched loosely to his chest like a stuffed animal.
He didn't just look not human. That-
That was sick and wrong. He looked like he was cobbled together from a bunch of spare parts to make some sort of spectacle, a dammed horror show. It was so bad it hurt just to look at him.
That was Roy.
The real one.
Out of all the times that his best friend had called himself a monster, he had never figured he'd meant it quite so literally.
There was a date underneath the picture. That horrible, disgusting, wrong picture, that Maes wanted more than anything to just stop existing and never be seen by him or anyone else, ever again. Shaking worse, now, trembling to the very tips of his fingers, Maes smoothed the file more firmly down against the bed, and squinted at the faded print to make out the year.
1895.
Oh, no.
Roy had been ten years old, when this picture was taken.
Maes moaned aloud. Desperate, sick horror swelled in his throat, and then he just couldn't help it; he moaned again, and his hands shook so badly he nearly ripped the horrid thing straight in two.
When he'd been ten, he'd been starting a new middle school. His greatest struggle had been when he'd broken his arm that summer, climbing trees way too tall for him like an idiot, and had had to stumble back home looking for his mom, trying desperately not to cry.
He could not even imagine what this could've been like to live.
And this is only the very beginning.
Taking a deep breath, Maes steeled himself again, fighting back against the horror and disbelief and disgust that had all possessed him from head to toe. That was right. This was only the beginning, and if he wanted to get through this, if he wanted to actually understand Roy, he was going to have to get through more than just his first day as a human chimera.
He had to go on.
The file wasn't just pictures. There comments on each page, notes made by the researchers and scientists, paragraphs upon paragraphs detailing all that had been done to Roy. Maes tried to focus on them, at first, but it took only a sickening moment for him to just shake his head, desperately looking away. He had no interest in reading the comments about how proud these Frankenstein scientists were of their experiments. How successful they thought the transmutation had been, their comments about their good and healthy little lab rat, what they thought of their specimen.
He was infuriated enough as it was.
So, he turned on.
The next few pages were more close up pictures of further modifications, ones that made his stomach tighten again but, ultimately, were easy enough to pass by. He'd seen the end product already in his best friend- now he was just seeing just exactly how Roy had come to be. Close-up pictures of his ears, once pointed, now smoothed down into rounded tips under a perverse doctor's knife. Similar pictures of dental work, showing fangs shaved down and crowned into human teeth, others taken out entirely with notations to 'fix' those, too, when the adult teeth came in. The before and after shot of the site for his... tail.
It had been hacked off without care or regard whatsoever. Notations made they were going to tear it apart and sell the parts to collectors for exorbitant sums.
They'd taken a child's body parts and sold them.
And his wings...
Maes had already seen those scars on his friend, as sick and horrifying as they were. He'd known he was going to find them eventually. Perhaps not this soon, perhaps not on a Roy so young and frail, but he'd known he was going to find the origin of those scars, and he'd known he was going to have to get through it.
But nothing could've prepared him for this.
There were before and after pictures again, this time with scientists' hands in view. Multiple researchers knelt just inside the frame, pinning delicate wings in place for the camera to get a better look at where thin, gossamer tissue turned into sinewy muscle and skin, but the wings themselves- oh, god. They were beautiful. They were huge, bigger than Roy himself and spanning perhaps ten feet across his tiny back. For a heartbroken moment, nearly stricken with amazement, he couldn't help but wonder if Roy could've flown with them after all. The things were huge, and that poor child was so small and weak underneath them, surely they were strong enough, surely he could've been able to fly...
But that was a question that would never have an answer, because the next page turn brought him to another close up, after picture.
Of two massive, raw, stitched scars, curving delicately across his back, and no wings in site.
Maes closed his eyes tightly again. He breathed in hard through gritted teeth, hands trembling, and just nearly ripped the page straight from the folder.
None of it, of course, was a surprise. He knew Roy, so he'd known when he'd seen that first picture of a chimera, barely half-human thing, that there were going to have to be changes. His best friend obviously did not have a tail or wings, so they'd have to go. His best friend did not have pointed ears, so they'd have to go, too. Hell, Maes had even noticed himself, over the years; he'd realized Roy had a very... unusual... amount of crowns for someone of his age, but he'd just never thought to ask.
Even if he had, there was no doubt that Roy, again, would've lied to him.
Just blown it right off just like everything else about his past and stand there smirking and careless like always, and treat it all like nothing more than a dammed joke.
It was infuriating.
Maes slowly ran a hand down the edge of the old page again, fingers trailing over the decades old picture to curl at the corner. He looked at that ramshackle, cobbled together figure that still looked more dragon than human, more victim than soldier.
More broken than not.
He'd been wrong, to look at that half-dragon, half-human child from before and think he looked like a monster. Oh, there had been monsters there, all right- but they weren't that boy.
The next few pictures turned his stomach again, but like a devastating train crash, Maes could just not stop himself from watching. There were quite a few of healing wound sites, with mentions of the subject having been sedated, which Maes flipped past quite quickly, not interested in the dry science of it if Roy hadn't been awake to suffer through it. More stitches, more blood-stained bandages, more slow healing...
And then: new injuries.
Maes' hopeless searching wrenched to a halt, his heart skipping a beat at pictures now of not healing wounds, but bruises. Burns. God, the burns, so many burns- picture after picture of shiny, raw red skin, deep bruises, bleeding, torn cuts- Maes gasped and his mind swam with hot anger, because they'd hurt Roy-
Until he blinked, and realized the picture were not, actually, of Roy.
The pictures were of humans. Full blooded and bodied and adults. Injured adults.
When Maes realized they were cataloguing, not Roy's injuries, but injuries that Roy had done to them, his chest warmed with such strong spark of pride he very nearly couldn't help but smile.
Atta boy, Roy.
There were notations again, little segments underneath the close-ups of injuries explaining just what had happened, and confirming that he was right: Roy had done this to them. Roy had fought back, and Roy, even while still hurt, still healing, still a child, had fought back and won.
Maybe it was wrong. He didn't care.
He was still so proud of Roy that he could burst.
The researchers wrote on. Explaining that the subject was both feral and uncontrollable, that he'd hurt not only research staff but himself, and Maes glowered in abject disgust. Feral? He was a young child who'd been kidnapped from his home and woken up with the monsters who'd stolen him and in the wrong fucking body. He'd woken up chained and with his wings and tail severed like he was some kind of brutish canvas to be decimated instead of a living, feeling being.
Feral? He'd been terrified.
But it was abundantly clear that the scientists there had been equipped to only deal with a feral, wild animal.
No one there had had any interest, or any ability, in helping a frightened, hurt boy.
The next little note from the scientists, underneath a picture of what looked like a tiny but deep bite mark into someone's arm, said that this reaction was standard with chimeras. That they were just used to dealing with wild, dangerous animals lashing out, the younger they were, the worse it was, and they were going to use the standard punishment protocol to render him docile and obedient. Maes' vision went red again, anger pulsing in his head as he stared sickly at the next paragraph detailing just what they were going to do to Roy; he couldn't focus enough to read it at all but words popped out all the same; isolation, restrained, burns, and he couldn't do it. He had to know what had been done to Roy, but this- how they'd... broken him...
He couldn't do it.
He couldn't do it, and more than that, he did not need to know.
If Roy wanted to tell him some day, if Roy even remembered it for himself, he would listen. But he would not learn it from this file.
Maes, breathing hard still through clenched teeth, tamp forcibly down on the rage swept through his mind, and for several moments didn't let himself do anything at all but just breathe.
When he could think again, he blindly swept past the next couple of pages, and read on.
The next picture of the young, pale chimera had him on the floor of a padded cell, that ugly collar still around his throat and this time with an equally ugly chain of an iron leash hanging from it, the end bolted down to a lock in the floor clearly made for just that purpose and restricting him to little more than a six foot radius. Then, even uglier, was a terrible leather muzzle strapped around his jaw and head as if he was a wild dog, clamping his mouth shut and obscuring most of his face from view.
For a sick heartbeat, Maes was almost glad for it, because he could see bruises on the rest of Roy's body, and did not want to see if they were on his face, as well.
From the black scorch marks that already laced the padded walls, he didn't have to wonder why they had gone to such lengths to shut him up.
Maes had seen a human muzzle like that be used before, just once. Long ago, back during Barry the Chopper's rather swift trial; that cannibalistic serial killer that Ed had taken down what felt like a lifetime ago. It had been Maes' case until it hadn't, and he'd handed it off to the legal office for prosecution, so he been lucky enough to not even experience it himself but he'd heard the stories, all right.
The stories of how, even handcuffed to the damn table, the monster had tried, and sometimes even succeeded, to bite chunks of skin right out of his interrogator's arm.
Maes hadn't been the only one uncomfortable to see him muzzled at trial, but the evidence had been staring them right there in the face that it was necessary. That Barry the Chopper was insane and maybe Maes had tried to avoid looking at him but they'd had no other options and been dealing with a grown man who'd terrorized all of Central for months.
This was against a terrified child.
He wanted to fucking kill them.
Disgusted and heartbroken, Maes just didn't want to look at it anymore, but even so couldn't help but wonder why Roy hadn't just taken the damn thing off himself. His hands, curiously, had been left free. He might've been just a child here, and he might look almost nothing like his friend, but the Roy he knew never would've stood for that. He supposed they might've just scared him so badly before, trying to convince him that fighting against their rules and restraints wouldn't be worth it, but something about it just didn't sit right with him...
Then, he blinked, and actually looked closer.
The boy was curled on his side, batting at the leash with his feet and hands like an oversized cat trying to grasp a toy, obviously trying to yank it off. As heartbreaking as the sight was, though, it was even more bewildering, and only started to make sense when he actually looked closer at his hands. He hadn't really looked at them before now, because unlike the rest of him, his hands were actually human, all ten fingers and all human skin and no scales or claws or scars, but somehow, they still seemed... off.
Limp and awkward, as if they were asleep or completely numb. Thumping against the chain of the leash as brute-force clubs instead of delicate tools, fingers not working at all...
Maes' eyes widened in shock.
He didn't know how to use his hands.
Dragons didn't have fingers. They certainly didn't have opposable thumbs. They didn't even have proper hands to begin with.
So, Roy, this ten year old dragon who'd woken up in this cobbled together mess of a human body, had no idea how to use them.
For him to try and actually work the hard buckles clamping his jaw shut, buckles that he couldn't even see-
It was impossible.
They hadn't bound his hands, because it hadn't mattered.
This time, Maes had to stop for a few brief minutes, breathing unsteadily into his hands and trying not to fall apart, before he went on again.
Soon the pictures changed again, taking the chimera from a padded cell to a cold, even more impersonal cage, just big enough for a ten year old, which meant it was disgustingly small. The leash and muzzle left, while the collar stayed. It reminded him just like the first room he and Ed had found in the labs, with scientists dead on the ground and a broken cage in the corner with half-melted bars, but this time, there weren't going to be any dead scientists.
This time, Roy wasn't a trained soldier and full-grown man with the strength to protect himself.
This time, there wasn't going to be any happy ending.
The pictures started changing faster, now, morphing from daily check-ins to weekly updates. Maes was only able to tell from the dates scrawled down off to the side, because even now after dozens of pages, he still didn't recognize this half-human child well enough to see him aging, see him changing. But the dates told him he was, and with that, Maes at last started to see what his best friend's childhood really had been like.
Restraints shifted in and out of the pictures; it seemed that Roy had somehow gained enough trust to be left untethered in his cage, but whenever he was let out of it the leash and muzzle came back. The first time Maes saw it, turning the page to find a snapshot of his best friend, still healing, still just a child, struggling on all fours like a leashed dog out for a walk he nearly hurled the fucking thing across the room. What, they'd turned him into a human but still treated him like a wild animal? They wouldn't even let him stand on his own, still had to treat him like a dumb beast with every chance they got?!
And then, once again, he turned the page, and understood.
The next picture was of Roy, upright at last- but not at all on his own two feet.
Lab-coated researchers ringed him on all sides, not to hurt him, but to help him. There were hands under his arms and at his sides, propping him clumsily upright but it was obvious even from the still picture that Roy was severely unbalanced, and if it hadn't been for all the support would've toppled over. Maes swallowed hard, desperately not wanting to look closer, but somehow, he made himself do it again, first at Roy but then to those surrounding him, and...
And he was almost positive that one of the scientists behind Roy, one hand at the small of his scarred back, the other holding his arm, was a much younger, much colder, Marcoh.
Maes' eyes narrowed.
There he was. Just as Ed had accused him of, and just as Marcoh had admitted without hesitation, pleading guilty to the both of them like a man bowing his head before a judge. Back all the way in the very beginning, Roy nothing more than a little kid who in that picture alone was confused and scared who didn't understand what was happening to him or why, and there was Marcoh, standing right behind his already abused best friend to prop him upright like a used doll.
Because he couldn't use his legs, either.
Dragons weren't bipedal, and humans were.
Roy hadn't known how to walk.
He hadn't, Maes realized as he turned the pages, known how to do a lot of things.
He hadn't understood Amestrian, so they'd had to teach it to him. A specialist who understood the dragon's written language had appeared, teaching a chimera who could barely read how to listen. A speech therapist had taught him how to speak, because, as the pages turned, he'd realized Roy had been all but mute for years, because he just hadn't known how to talk.
Even as he learned how to talk, the muzzle stayed in other snapshots, even those with the physical therapists who taught him first to stand, then to walk, then to write, then to run. There was a picture of an older Roy, perhaps a young teenager, now, stumbling on a treadmill at what looked like a slow jog, muzzle still locking his jaw shut and leash bound nearby so stop him from running anywhere but right under his own feet.
They were teaching him how to pass as a human.
And knowing the Roy that he knew now...
They had succeeded.
Maes had never once looked at Roy in the ten years that he'd known him, and seen any of this. They had taken a scared, young dragon, and broken him like a domesticated mule, then built him back up under the skin of a human- and Maes had somehow been too blind to look at his own best friend, and realize something was not right about him.
He'd known the military he belonged to was wrong, and responsible for so many horrible things, and had to be remade from the top down, but this...
This was inhumane. This was sick and horrifying. He'd spent years elbow-deep in the worst criminal cases Central had to offer, and reading this file now, it wasn't even a contest; this was the worst he'd ever seen, ever read, ever even imagined. This was his best friend's entire life emblazoned down in cold black and white, of suffering and abuse that he'd never had so much as a friend through or support against, and even when he'd somehow gotten a life outside of the military labs Maes had never once been smart enough to look past all his fabrications and lies to realize he'd been this hurt.
How had he, just... never had any sort of idea...?
"I'm... I'm sorry, Roy." He dropped his head into his hands, vision whiting out as he searched for any respite at all from that terrible file, his heart squeezing almost into two and hurting so badly he almost choked. "I'm so sorry..."
But apologizing wouldn't help Roy. Apologizing, and Maes sitting here feeling so horribly about himself and pitying his best friend, and wishing he could change every moment of the last ten years that he could, weren't going to help anything.
All he could do now, was keep reading.
So, when he'd finally managed to collect himself again, through the grief collected around his heart and making his stomach sink like a stone, Maes took a trembling, deep breath.
Then he read on.
The file took him from the earliest months to years on. Roy got older, bigger, more recognizable, something approaching human. Instead of being taught the alphabet he was now being tutored through Amestrian history and military strategy, a school of one and where the punishment for getting an answer wrong was much, much worse than a bad grade. Instead of standing with the support of a whole team of researchers he was set loose in a specialized training area, learning to breathe fire just the way the military wanted from him.
As Roy aged and the pictures changed, however, the injuries did not.
There continued to be bruises and burns catalogued, sometimes from what Roy had done to the researchers, but more often than not, what they had done to him. Not always with explanation, but just the vivid purple and red swelling from a beating or a hard fall no one had caught him for, and Maes never had the heart to try and understand it any more than that. Along with pictures of injury and abuse, there continued to be mentions of punishments in the file, as well- not always with pictures, anymore, but little notations all the same.
Subject intentionally burned his instructor. Subject was reminded that the use of his mouth is a privilege, not a right, and will be left muzzled for a period of no less than thirty days before we consider restoring that privilege. Subject was burned in the same fashion as his instructor.
Subject refused to participate in day's exercise regimen. Subject will be left in the punishment box for three days.
Subject has failed to progress in his lessons as expected. Subject was informed for every day of rudimentary progress, he will not be given an evening meal.
Subject struck an instructor. The instructor broke the subject's leg in retaliation. The instructor has been dismissed for delaying the subject's training. As is standard for this subject, he will be transferred towards punishment accommodations C until he has healed enough to re-enter training.
Subject failed to comply...
The notes just went on and on. Punishment after punishment, page after page, year after year, the detailed abuse notated down no matter how far Maes turned, because the file went on and on. Because this was not just an experiment, this was not just a few weeks of suffering and mistreatment, this had been Roy's entire childhood. This file, right here, was everything that Roy had ever known as a child.
If it could even be called that.
Maes wasn't so sure he'd go even that far.
He'd been there for every day of Elicia's childhood. The worst she'd ever screwed up, the worst they'd ever had to be with her, was when she'd pushed a boy at school for saying her dress looked ugly. They'd grounded her for the weekend, and told her that just because someone was mean to her did not mean she could ever hit them.
Roy had hit at the monsters who'd completely destroyed his life and deserved a hell of a lot more than a fucking punch. Had lashed out just to protect himself, to save himself from something he was terrified of, from things that were actively hurting him.
They'd beaten him for it and locked him in a box for weeks.
He wasn't sure what that was- if there were even words to describe it at all.
It was not, however, a childhood.
The file continued. Roy grew older, got bigger- more human. In the earlier pictures he'd seemed more like a human puppet, awkward even in the still pictures and now that he knew what he was looking at it, it was very easy to see it that it was not anything human controlling that body. But as the years passed, that slowly changed. As a boy turned into a teenager, his steps began to find purchase. His hands began to grip and coordinate and work.
Even underneath blue, leathery scales, the scars of amputated wings and a severed tail, the leash that still dangled and the muzzle that still neutered his powerful mouth, he now looked like a human. A deformed, imprisoned, broken human.
Slow, stubborn tears had formed in his eyes at some point long ago, and they slipped down his cheeks now, unbidden and unheeded. Maes sniffed slightly, not even trying to clear his throat but willing the painful lump back all the same, and turned another page.
He stopped dead.
Roy stared back up at him.
Not the chimera- but Roy.
It was that teenager again, obviously years younger than the Roy he knew now and had to be the same one from the page before, but if Maes hadn't known they were one and the same he didn't know if he'd ever had recognized it. Because instead of a clinical folder on a lab floor or a cold cage of a bare, beaten chimera, this was a picture he had seen staged a hundred times before, and seen on his friend's person even more than that.
Roy's military ID.
There he was. Standing there in full uniform, or at least his upper half, because that was all that he could see. The high collar and long sleeves hid every bit of his inhumanity, his true identity, and like that he looked no different than the dozens of officers graduated from the Academy every year. He truly did look like a human, now, like his friend, when just one page and one day before it he'd been a lab experiment locked in a cage with a black eye and split lip. God, his previously unkempt, tangled mess of hair had even been cut short, trimmed close to his head under military standards in a way that was perversely similar to his clipped wings.
That disgusting collar, locked around his throat that had branded him so many years as nothing more than a stupid, wild animal, for the very first time, was gone.
It was also such a sudden, wholly startling change from just the page before, it didn't make sense at all.
Sure, Maes had known that at some point, this file would change from a beaten, frightened child into a soldier. His best friend was a soldier, this file was Roy's life, so at some point, that chimera was going to have to grow up into a soldier, but he'd not expected it like this. He'd... well, he didn't know what he'd expected, but something more than this. Frowning, Maes turned a page back, for a moment hopeful that he had missed something, but no matter how hopefully he turned between those two pages it did not magically create another picture to make sense of it. There was no other picture.
Someone had just looked at that fragile, unstable, unhealthy, broken chimera, barely more than a child, and thought they could dress him up as a soldier, give him a gun and some fake gloves, and send him marching out on a battlefield.
His heart in his throat, and rage collecting right there around it, Maes turned his eyes to the paragraph besides the picture, and began to read.
Fuhrer Bradley, against our recommendations, has ordered that the subject be drafted into combat in the Ishvallan War. He will be sent with the State Alchemists under codename Dragon Alchemist. He has been given his orders, and we expect that he will follow of them; however, a team of researchers will accompany him under Dr. Tim Marcoh, to ensure that he does so, and handle the consequences if he does not.
As stated before, the team has serious reservations about drafting the subject into combat this early. He is still two years underage, but, as the Fuhrer insists, the paperwork that will be submitted under his name will edit his date of birth to change that fact. He has not finished his physical training, and would not pass through the Academy's physical testing for cadets. His mental stability is also in question. He is obedient, but we worry the stress of both combat and a new environment could place this in jeopardy. Given the subject's extraordinary ability with fire, this could spell disaster for our troops if he choose to turn on them.
This concludes the first successful phase of Project Mustang.
And, that was that.
That was his best friend's childhood.
That was, in fact, most of his life- all the way down to his very name.
A military experiment.
Maes swallowed waveringly again. He sat back on his bed, head reeling, and for a long while, could not think or say anything at all.
At last, somehow, some little bit of what he'd just read filtered through to him again. His brow furrowing, Maes leaned forward, first checking the date noted by this most recent and jarring picture, then flipped all the way back through the years to find the very first one of a recently transformed child.
Then, he sat back, and he laughed.
The notes were right. Roy had been two years underage, in that last picture. Which meant in that first picture, he had not been ten, but eight. Which meant that right now, Roy was not twenty-nine, but twenty-seven, and had never been one year younger than him, but three. He'd been eight when he was transformed, sixteen when he'd been sent to war, and just eighteen when he'd stepped off the train to Central a semi-free man for the first time in his entire life.
In the days after the war, part of Maes had hated Roy for decompensating into that stressful little ball of depression and madness. Part of Maes had hated dragging himself over to Roy's black hole of an apartment almost every day to haul him up to his feet and make him do something beyond just sit there and hate himself. He'd gone because he'd known he was the only one there to do it, because he'd honestly been afraid that if he didn't go over there, some day he'd wake up and go into work to find the office buzzing about how the war hero Major Mustang had blown his brains out.
So he'd kept on dragging himself back to Roy, no matter how much that part of him had hated him for it. No matter how much, some days, he'd wanted to scream at him I'm just as guilty as you, Roy, wanted to browbeat it into him as he holed himself up in his room and hid in corners and clutched his hands over his ears that Maes couldn't take care of himself and take care of him, too.
Now, sitting there with miserable tears still burning in his eyes, he couldn't help but laugh at himself aloud.
Knowing everything that he now did, it was amazing that Roy had held himself together as much as he had. It was a dammed miracle he'd come out the slightest bit sane, never mind passed as anything beyond an eccentric, traumatized, anti-social hermit, and even with all Maes had done to try and help him then, he honestly didn't know how he had never walked in to find Roy had shot himself after all.
He knew if their positions had been swapped, he couldn't promise the same for himself.
It took some minutes for the brokenhearted laughter in his chest to die away, even if the despair that came with it did not. Maes rubbed absently at his cheeks again, still trying rather desperately not to think. Because if he started thinking, he knew he would start searching past every memory he had of Roy, now for hidden meanings, hidden hurts, now to understand, and he suspected that great analysis was unavoidable regardless, but for now... he just couldn't.
So he sat there, trying not to think, and staring numbly at that damn file until it had narrowed down to become his entire world.
And then, something else filtered its way through.
Maes picked up the file again, slipping a finger over Roy's military picture, then flipped back through a second time. This time, not to the very beginning, but instead to one of the earlier on pictures. After Roy had woken up, after they had broken him in like a bad dog, and he'd given up fighting his captors to submit in defeat instead.
He gazed down at the sobering, terrible picture again.
He flipped back to Roy's military picture.
He flipped back.
His heart sank.
The look on Roy's face was the same in both.
It was hard to see, at first. One was a newborn chimera, blinking up at the camera past a muzzle and the bars of the cage, while the other was a teenage almost-human, decked out and posed like a soldier. They didn't look at all similar and if it hadn't been for the file telling him they were one and the same, he never would've looked closer to compare the two.
But they were the same, and when he looked closer, he saw the exact same look on the boy's face as the soldier's.
A fragile, frightened child, staring to the camera with eyes hollow and empty as caves. The look on his face in both was lost and confused, dazed almost like he'd been drugged. He'd woken up one morning turned into something not quite human, then woken up another morning and been dressed up as a soldier, and Maes wasn't so sure if his friend had even realized the difference at the time. That he hadn't simply interpreted the uniform they'd given him as just another test to navigate, fingers struggling with buttons and tassels they didn't know what to do with, only instead of returning him to his cage afterwards they'd snapped the collar off and set him down on a train to Ishval.
And underneath that soldier's exterior had still been a dazed, frightened child who didn't understand what was going on, and wanted to go home.