OUR LIVES, CHAPTER 3: THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE

By The Binary Alchemist 2012

At the check-in at the East City Aerodrome, Ed stepped on the scale, suitcase in hand. The bulk of his gear would arrive in two days by rail, but his travel kit and a large parcel containing family gifts were going with him aboard the Eastern Star. He'd already left a hefty travel trunk of loot at Granny's house. Part of his effort to heal so much of the hurt and anger between himself and the girl who had been virtually a sister to him was to treat Winry's second family as extensions of his own. He was genuinely fond of Winry and Pitt's brood, and in turn he was the much loved Uncle Ed who never forgot a birthday, let them eat ice cream for breakfast when they visited, and never went on a research trip without sending them generous mementoes of his travels.

The parcel he was carrying with him contained gifts for his own family, including a very precious antique that he was bringing back especially for Roy. Technically the legality of owning it might have been a little dodgy, but it had been gifted to Edward and from the moment Edward had admired it he knew that Roy would cherish it.

A voice yanked him out of his reverie. "You're fatter than you look." A polished nail tapped on the scale's display. "I'm going to have to charge you an overage fee."

"FAT?" Ed's head jerked around to face the check in clerk. He lifted his hand luggage and pointed at it. "I've got this, y'know?"

She weighed the bag. She weighed Ed, minus his overcoat. "You still weigh more than you look to weigh. " She pulled out a small, well thumbed pamphlet and turned to the paper clip chart that read 'Average Height/Weight'. "According to our guide, the upward limit of weight for a man who is-how tall?"

Ed pulled himself up proudly. He'd finally stopped is growth spurt around the age of 24. Consequently, the stubborn twig of hair that he once coaxed to bob ridiculously above his forehead wasn't quite so…erect…these days, nor the soles of his shoes quite so thick. "One hundred eighty-five point five centimeters," he told her as proudly as a man among his fellows might brag of his endowments below the waist.

"Hmmm…the chart says your weight should range up to 87 kilos for your height. I'm showing you're over the line by quite a few kilos. Odd. You don't look overweight…"

"Fuckin' outrageous! First thing I'm gonna do when I get home," Ed growled to the pilot, "is petition the Amestrian Airship and Aeronatics Regulatory Board for special weight allowances for automailers".

"There isn't one," one of the alchemists on the crew pointed out.

"Ha!" Ed's grin was toothy and malicious. "There will be when I'm done!"

The pilot chuckled in sympathy and nodded towards the jump seat where Ed could strap himself down for lift-off. He had personally apologized to Edward, signed Ed off on the flight crew list and informed the gate agent in future they would have a list of approved VIP passengers that were to be admitted aloft, badge or no badge. "And Professor Elric and Professor Alphonse will always be at the top of the list. We wouldn't be in the air today without them! Charge them fare? Why, we pay them licensing fees!"

They even threw in a box lunch, a small pillow and a blanket to use along with the apology and, since it was early, a cup of coffee and a share of the crew's fresh donuts for breakfast. Travel was much nicer now that vacuum flasks were around to keep the coffee nice and hot. "Bearing bad weather we should be there by one-ish, thereabouts," Ed was told. "Have to stop for a cargo drop about half-way and take on some passengers."

"No problem," Ed shrugged. "Beats the hell out of a train ride." The coffee, thankfully, was not made by the Military, and after he dusted the sugary donut crumbs from his coat he pulled the blanket around, leaned against the bulkhead and closed his eyes….

"This'll probably shorten my life…but it's the only way…"

He clapped his hands and laid them on his own flesh as the rusty metal bar that impaled him was swiftly yanked from his body. I am a Philosopher's stone of one soul….

It had worked. At least, it had worked long enough to keep him from bleeding to death. And when he was cognizant enough of his surroundings after the horrible repair surgery in the back alley clinic the chimeras took him to, he pulled himself out of his pajamas to pee into the tin urinal the provided by his bed….

….and noticed hair. Yellow as the stuff on his head. Not much but more than the sparse bit that had been there before. There was fuzz on his cheeks too, so pale you couldn't really see it without a magnified mirror—which also revealed a face that had lost the last of its boyishness.

A young man was staring back at him. A taller young man whose voice was a fraction deeper, whose jaw was a bit squarer, whose muscles were more defined, and whose dick was…

Ah. Yes. About that. "Grow, damn you!" he'd order his member. It listened—a little—but compared to what Al was slinging around after he'd gotten his body back Ed was pissed off. It wasn't tiny…but it was clear that he wasn't taking after his father, at least not in this respect.

But he had performed the transmutation, had survived and appeared to have passed rapidly through puberty. "This'll probably shorten my life." The real question was this: How much time do I have left?

"You could live to be a hundred," Izumi told him honestly. "You could die tomorrow. Does it matter, Ed? Focus on the here and now."

He'd lived long enough to see his children reach adulthood at sixteen. He'd lived long enough to be hailed as a living legend—a heroic alchemist, brilliant inventor, aeronaut, lecturer—with Sheska's help he had a half-dozen scholarly works in libraries throughout the known world. He'd lived long enough to achieve a hard-won peace with Winry. He'd made peace with his own past mistakes. He had a stable, loving relationship with a good man. And there was no knowing how much time he had left. There was much he wanted to do—so much yet undone.

"Life's uncertain, Dad," Maes had told him over a spoonful of mocha almond fudge ripple ice cream with hot caramel sauce, which he could eat by the hour and never gain an apparent ounce. " You could kick off at the table at dinner before Sebastian serves the coffee and he'd have to fish your glasses out of the soup. You'd be all corpsified and gross and everybody would lose their appetites. It could happen. So screw it. Life's a crapshoot, Dad, so you might as well eat dessert first, okay?"

Without looking down at his hand, he began to turn and turn the golden ring on his right middle finger, the one with the inexpertly etched salamander array on it that a sixteen year old alchemy apprentice had carved under the watchful eye of the original flame alchemist. He thought about that boy, now grown to splendid manhood and more attractive as the years went by.

He came to a conclusion, one he had tumbled over and over in his mind for the past decade and a half. "All right, damn it," he said aloud. "Time to make an honest man out of that arrogant, morally depraved, snide son of a bitch." He grinned. "Ought to make the fucker wear a goddamned white dress…"

###

Roy Mustang, for one of the few times in his life, was absolutely dumbstruck.

"…you and Daddy won't need her following you around for the rest of your lives, right?"

He had no intention of retiring from public service. Ever. He had every intention of dying in harness, an old warhorse who served his motherland to his last breath. Oh, of course, if he became infirm or senile he would have to retire, but there was no other reason that could force Roy Mustang to step down from his life-long watch over Amestris. Even if he wasn't at the helm, ruling from the top, he would find other ways to serve. He'd put on that uniform at sixteen. He intended, if at all possible, to be buried in it.

With the uniform came responsibility, and one of those responsibilities was the dignified Colonel in her forties who had watched his back since his days at Eastern Command. She had stuck to his side like burr to a dog's tail. She was his shadow and his conscience. She had shaped her entire existence around him, filled her world with him to the exclusion of virtually all else, including the long suffering Havoc who still held out some small hope of settling down with her and raising a family even after all these years.

"I don't know how you're going to handle that mess, Poppy," his daughter told him seriously. "I mean, I love Auntie Riza, but I think some part of her still believes that you and Daddy are just some…I don't know…some guy thing. Something you're going to get over, like when Uncle Maes married Aunt Gracia and—"

"I'd like to know where the hell you came up with such a ridiculous idea," Roy snapped.

His daughter cast him a knowing smile over the rims of her glasses. "Woman's intuition, Poppy. Women just sense these things—however unscientific that may sound."

Roy gave her a cool, appraising look. "I can still remember when you were peeing on me and smearing peas in your hair. It wasn't that long ago, so you can cut the 'women's intuition' crap right now."

"I'm right, aren't I?"

"Negative." A sudden uneasiness in his gut told him otherwise. "This topic doesn't merit further discussion." Rising swiftly he adjusted his high collar and smoothed his glossy hair back from his forehead, revealing the few faint threads of silver at his temples. I'll see you at supper." He gestured towards her elegantly corseted form, cramped and laced and brocaded with an inch of Nina's life. "Try to wear something a little less…armor-plated."

He nearly knocked Hawkeye down as he hurried from the room. She had been right outside the door, no doubt overhearing every word. Nina caught a quick glimpse of Hawkeye's drained, stricken expression just before the door closed at Roy's heels.

###

When Nina began her alchemy training Hawkeye had told her all about Master Berthold and the tattoo'ed array she still carried on her back. "I asked the Fuhrer—he was just a major back then—to burn it off my skin…to free me from the burden of carrying such dangerous knowledge."

" Can I see it?"

With great reluctance, Riza Hawkeye excused herself and returned, modestly draped, her pale skin exposed only enough for the girl to examine the burn scars and the blackwork that still covered much of her body from the nape of her neck to the small of her back. "Guess it would have killed you to burn it all," Nina whistled, shaking her head. "Looks like Poppy got the key parts of the diagram. It's not useable. Thanks for letting me see it."

Later, Nina suddenly put down her teacup and stared intensely at her older friend. "You could have said no."

Hawkeye blinked. "What?"

"That," Nina gestured towards Hawkeye's back, "is wrong. I know many alchemists get themselves tattooed—but you're not an alchemist. You let your father do that to you?" Hawkeye lowered her head and nodded. "That's….all those needles…the size of that array…how could he do that to you? My daddy would kill anybody who tried to hurt me like that—if Poppy didn't kill them first. Or I would have run away, I don't know." Her brows knit together and she shook her dark head. "Why did you let him do it?"

She was naked, prone upon an improvised work bench, at an age when no young girl is eager to show her body to anyone. It was not for any medical reason. It was not for the eyes of a lover, even if she had thought of such a thing. She was there because her father told her to do it and in the House of Hawkeye Master Berthold's word was Law.

A tiny metal comb, needle sharp, soldered to a lengthy rod. A stick of bamboo, curved, its tip split into tiny razor-sharp points. A metal rod, engraved with alchemic glyphs and formulae, even as the table she was laid upon, her hair shorn off high to expose her vulnerable neck and only a modesty drape covering her from the small of her back downwards. There was a coarse towel beneath her and another rolled under her forehead. One absorbed her sweat and her blood and droplets of ink. The other absorbed her tears.

Master Berthold sponged her back with alcohol. "No use getting infected and ruining my life's greatest achievement," he said to himself. He had already traced the grand array in ink on her skin and now he would make it truly indelible.

Using sure, quick strokes he laid the needle-comb against her flesh, its points freshly dipped in ink. The metal rod was tapped against the handle that held the piercing device, driving the points in and in and in. It burned and stung and he could not see her screw up her eyes to keep the tears back as he switched back from the straight comb to the curved bamboo and to the agonizing pen of clustered points that allowed him to inscribe the formulae that he recited aloud as he worked:

"This is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:-
As below, so above; and as above so below. With this knowledge alone you may work miracles."

Tap…taptapTAPta-taptap…tap. "Don't move," her father warned her. She was feeling sick, lightheaded.

"And since all things exist in and emanate from the ONE Who is the ultimate Cause, so all things are born after their kind from this ONE. The Sun is the father, the Moon the mother; the wind carried it in his belly. Earth is its nurse and its guardian.
It is the Father of all things, the eternal Will is contained in it."
"I think I'm going to be sick, Father," she moaned softly. "Please, may I-"

The master laid a cautioning hand on her shoulder. "I need you to stay still." The needle moved again.

"Here, on earth, its strength, its power remain one and undivided.

Earth must be separated—" he blotted up the beads of bright blood that oozed down her side, along the curve of a breast that was still budding. He would have preferred to wait until she was grown, but the searing pains in his chest warned him that he was running out of time.

Tap..taptaptaptap…tapTAPtap. He reached for the stylus again.

",,,separated from fire, the subtle from the dense, gently with unremitting care.
It arises from the earth and descends from heaven; it gathers to itself the strength of things above and things below.
By means of this one thing all the glory of the world shall be yours and all obscurity flee from you—"

"Father…please…"

"I need you to be still," he commanded. "Don't make me tell you again."

"I'm about to be sick…I have to—"

He twitched aside the covering towel and the one beneath her sweaty face. There was a slit in the table. He shoved a pail under it with his foot. "Here, then. Do it and be done. There's no time to waste!"

She heaved and choked, her body clenching pitifully. She began to sob.

He firmly pushed her back down. "Enough, now.' He cleared his throat, bent to her skin and the burning began anew.

"-It is power, strong with the strength of all power, for it will penetrate all mysteries and dispel all ignorance. By it the world was created.

From it are born manifold wonders, the means to achieving which are here given."

It took seven days under a waxing moon.

When it was done she could no longer rise unassisted from the table. "Well done," he told her. "Now my life's work will be preserved for the ages." He had hired a woman from town to coat her back with salve and bandage it lightly. Only the clink of coins in her pocket could persuade her to stay at her task. Only her fear of this madman kept her silent. "Goodness, if he would do such a dreadful thing to his own child, who knows what else he is capable of!"

By the time the seven days of torment were done, the young woman who first laid down upon the towel covered table was not the same one who lay mutely on her own bed, face down on the cool sheets, her back stinging and scabbing up, eventually healing cleanly.

If she couldn't trust her father, she resolved, she would find someone in the world she could trust.

In the end, it was a boy soldier, not much older than she was, with a pale baby face and naive dreams of making the world a better place. He was soft-spoken, gentle with her in her grief and buried her father with genuine concern and affection. His heart, it seemed, was great enough to forgive even a monster like the man who had used his own child's flesh as the canvas for his own ambition.

"Will you follow me?"

"I will follow you into hell, Sir."

And so she had, for a quarter of a century. She gave him her loyalty, obedience and duty as a soldier. He rewarded her with a Colonel's commission.

She gave him her days and, in the privacy of her own heart she spent her nights dreaming of him, yearning for him, aching for him. He rewarded her by taking another man into his bed. And now, it seemed, he was planning on just throwing her away. She'd known…she'd hoped…one day Roy Mustang would….

But he didn't. And now, she realized, he wouldn't. And once again she was sick at her stomach and the scars beneath her back seemed to burn once again as if they had never really healed…

###

It wasn't about politics-at least, not in the past. Kelley Winchell had no axe to grind, not personally.

There was generally no vendetta, any more than there had been with Grumman or the Armstrongs or anyone else she'd written about. She was a reporter and she had uncovered a story and it would probably be a best seller. That was about the extent of it.

This book was different.

Fifteen years ago a former newsman named Frank Archer did time in jail as an accessory to espionage. He'd gotten out and brought his old grudges with him. There was dirty laundry and he didn't mind airing it at Roy Mustang's expense.

Fifteen years ago an Old Guard terrorist named Edison had been tried and sentenced to death for the murder of a bakery owner and a free lance reporter named Charles Foster-and conspiring to assassinate Fuhrer Mustang. Edison was gone—his private journals were not. While working on the Armstrong expose she'd met a man who'd met a man who said he knew a man who had the journals. She'd risked the entire book advance payment to procure those notebooks and years to find someone who could translate the encryptions. She might have brought it all to light sooner but when she'd heard that Mustang would be celebrating his fiftieth birthday in office and that there would be plenty of press coverage—well, why not?

Before, it was all about money, pure and simple. She wasn't in anyone's back pocket, like the late Charles Foster had been. She'd become the doyenne of tell-all biographers because it paid well. If she'd been interested in accuracy she'd have gone to work for the Times. Her books sold and sold well and gave the punter on the street a sense that he knew the inside story on the most famous men and women of the day. Not to mention knocking the mighty off the catbird seat—as she had done with former Fuhrer Grumman—was exhilarating.

This book was different. This one was going to be the one to push her over the top. The single most popular seated Fuhrer in modern history was a man who was, as he presented himself, an open book. Nearly everybody knew he was raised by a notorious madame. They knew that during the Ishballan Rebellion he had used alchemy to destroy entire cities—that women and children were melted into puddles of fat and charred bone at his hands. He didn't apologize for the former and had shown open contrition for the latter.

What he didn't talk about was The Promised Day and what he knew about it.

And, thanks to Edison's journals, she had the truth of it—of the Bradley assassination conspiracy, the Doll Army, the experiments of Lab 5, the chimeras and the Philosopher's Stones. Roy Mustang had been the single most powerful alchemist ever sanctioned by the State as a living weapon. Who'd have imagined that beneath that suave, elegant façade was concealed the twisted soul that orchestrated the near-annihilation of the Amestrian race?

This book would break ground and change the world. And when the truth finally came out, they would hang him. Not that she especially wanted to see him killed, but it was history and he had dirtied his hands and everyone was blinded by his charm and good looks and worthy deeds. They had all conveniently forgotten the day of the eclipse when every man, woman, child—every living thing in the country—died….for the sake of Mustang's lust for immortality.

On November 20th the truth would come out, and Roy Mustang's fiftieth birthday, if there was any justice in this world, would probably be his last…

…..TO BE CONTINUED…