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Yuuuh…this was tiring, and I don't even know why, maybe because I've been feeling sick for the entire week. I hope it's ok, I'll correct later if it's not, now I'm sick and tired of it!
Back to us…from now on, the rest of the fic actually follows the story to see Roy's pov within the well-known are sad things to come, though, and if you want you can just stop with the 6th story goes on with another ff, the actual sequel of this, in which I explored Roy and Ed relationship (so, the pairing changes, yes) and I will be posting this story as soon as I can translate all of it. Thanks for your kind reading and, as usual, enjoy.
07Soma
After a few years, in a capricious and frosty winter day, Glacier and Maes become parents for the first (and last) time. They're flattered, excited, erupting with genuine parent pride.
Everything is fine, everything is exactly as it has to be.
Sometimes Glacier knows times are not peaceful as she should believe them to be, and she's honored with Colonel Mustang's concerns about her husband. He's a kind man, she can tell, even though he seems a bit creepy and even as cold as ice. But the two brave men work together, smart and balanced, and she's honestly glad of it.
Glacier chest tightens with joy, the tiny bundle of a baby-girl in her arms; she looks up and thanks the young boy and the strange armored one,who have assisted her in such a complicated and unexpected event.
While outside the blizzard seems to be calming down a bit, Glacier thinks about the oddity of the short boy – sandy hair and golden eyes, two limbs of steel – and the much higher one, curiously locked up in an old-fashioned suit of armor.
But this is also the happiest and luckiest day of her life and she smiles warmly as her husband beams with joy at the phone with the ubiquitous Colonel.
From that moment the news about Elicya's birth and growth will travel around the world.
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Edward Elric, State Alchemist exam candidate, stares at the silent snow dancing in the sky and Alphonse, his younger brother, reads a complicate book of Alchemy .
The previous evening Glacier Hughes gave birth to little Elicya and the mystery of life has showed itself in all of its magnificence.
But the sad truth, alas, rests deep within the boys: they can't think about their mother nor they can forget the horror of their sin.
A failed human transmutation, an entire body, a leg and an arm lost in change of the potential lost soul of a child and some pestilential gushed half-alive entrails.
Their mind willingly fail to recollect all the particulars of the vivid images, they could go crazy, but in the older boy's desire to become a State Alchemist there's already a stubbornness that borders the obsession.
Yet, one can't cry over spilled milk, and what he has done protrudes from his eyes just like a monstrous and unnatural protuberance the stains a remarkable beauty, derisory echoing in his mutinied young body.
His almost-no-more childish figure has something grotesque in it, like it's struggling to be at once adult. And it sucks, and it's atrocious at so many levels that sometimes it becomes unbearable.
That's why Ed doesn't even have the courage to ask Alphonse his real opinion on how things went on that terrible and desperate night.
That's why he stubbornly looks forward, maintaining his deep frown with everyone, ready to jump in fights, fears and danger, not trusting anyone except his brother.
Clearly, there will be no hope for a normal life or a quiet living, being the warmth of a regular physical contact with some other caring human being long since forgotten.
Betraying the innermost nature of Alchemy and then asking to be an Army's Dog…deep inside the boy knows he'll always remain an outcast.
Day after day, watching over his brother with lovely and guilty eyes, he recalls the weight of his promise and the importance of the blood-bond that tightly ties them.
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There are moments in a man's life when a turning point clearly shows itself as a sudden epiphany.
The air is altered, the climate suddenly doesn't suit anymore, little things have changed announcing some irreversible change within the tides.
If the opportunity presents itself, it would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
It takes a fucking handful of one man's best part, his courage and all of his best ideas, to ride this wave of changing, overcoming all the possible obstacles, and to aim to glory and victory.
So now, Roy Mustang, passed by one degree, feels his goal much closer.
Given the great chess player he is, Roy knows that preparing the ground to play with wit and timing it's the best move. Discipline, rigor, and clear ideas .
He keeps straight ahead to the finishing line, leaving whatever it takes behind.
Roy Mustang will go on, no matter what, never taking his eyes off from the horizon of his decisions.
No pauses, no feelings-like shit.
No affective or emotional distractions.
The only weakness of a lifetime, a shameful and unwanted love, becomes what he protects and jealously guards inside the fortress of his certainties.
Even if, for example, this love is well-gone, by now just a nostalgic and hazy memory which comes up only after a great number of drinks or, sometimes, in some sticky, confused and really unprofessional dreams. That's because mind can be trained but not be erased.
Deep inside, his heart always leaps up when that big moronic jerk of his subordinate, Major Hughes, speaks to him on the phone.
However, Roy Mustang won't get be fooled again, and day after day the mild protest of his heart becomes weaker and weaker, until it remains only in the shape of a breath, a murmur of habit.
His true and only love lost by now, Roy Mustang enjoys the acting: his bed is always ready for women he has no interest in because, certainly, distracting the surface will help him not to get to close again to anyone.
Theirs is no such a thing as love, love is for children and fairy tales, love is for the ones who had not profaned life, and even when it seems that the warmth of a naked body is calling for sincere affection , Roy quickly ducks and dodges the possibility.
he way in which a suffering spirit suffering chooses to live in the world is complicated and often incomprehensible.
So, if inside a bubble of coolness protects and hides everything, outside Roy Mustang is a rough heartbreaker, a womanizer, a magnificent, luxurious asshole, with money, shining smile and all the rest, and he will use everything and everyone to get to the top.
Meanwhile, with the corruption swarming among the ranks of military, between fanaticism and mysterious madness, he continues to be this officer he chose to be, silently expecting for a change.
It is dangerous and he has to be as stealthy as a cat, but he can tell that something is arriving.
And he will be ready, oh, so fucking ready, to jump on the neck of his target, mercilessly, deathly.
Roy Mustang knows he lost too much to gamble with faith and try to gain a pale shade of freedom, but again, like many years ago, this is an equivalent exchange, and like life's many other, is totally unfair.
After all, there would never be real salvation, and Roy doesn't even look anymore for it.
He will do what has to be done, he will become the instrument of his immaculate ideal of justice, the same one he used to discuss to heartedly with Maes, under the velvety and shining night-roof of a sandy landscape.
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His name will be "Fullmetal Alchemist", that's what the Supreme Commander decided.
The twelve years old boy who stares grumpily at him now wears the most serious and terrible look he's capable of, Roy can easily tell, along with the fact that the expression is so wrongly melt with his young age and his scary but determined attitude.
Roy sighs a little, wondering when the definition of normal became so fucked up:when was the last time this guy laughed , jumped, played? Isn't he supposed to be still in his no-problem age?
And his brother, in that unfathomable doomed state…How are they even taking care of each other?
Are they alone in this world?
The situation is quite delicate, Roy can bet it, just a glimpse of that desperate golden of the boy's eyes and he's already caring for them.
This…this…movement of silent empathy was not supposed to exist, but it has sprouted in him.
It could be the affinity he feels with this odd twos, some soundless horrors lying on the back, it could be the fact that Roy can't forget real sorrow and pain when he witnesses it.
He can't forget that night, the kid lying on a bed, arm and leg missing, groaning, half-fainting, weak, on the verge of death.
A little body so brutally maimed it hurt his eyes, the pale, exposed skin so harmless, so pitiful!
Survivors of a failed human transmutation…yes, but look now, how high is the price they paid!
Roy hopes they still have somewhere some sort of light, of hope, he wishes they still believe in the world, in their own strength and in their ability to turn back as normal human beings.
So, full of his usual icy contempt, Roy Mustang feels himself free, for once, to allow…something, someone.
Edward Elric speaks in a way it reminds Roy too much of his lost, foolish and young self, somehow, and really, he may be the most obnoxious bastard around, but there are still soft spots in his dried up heart.
Roy will watch over him, he will treat him like an adult like he childishly demands, and when he throws the guy his pocket watch, Roy grins as to challenge him.
For now, he will stand on the sidelines, observing their movements, their journey – no direct interfering - forcing them to comply with the obligation of the Army and to accept obedience and his command. Mustang also pretends to keep them tied to him, blackmailing them with the truth behind their bodies' conditions.
Therefore, how would he be supposed to be able to protect them without making a fuss or spoil all the rest at stake, the big rest?
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- You'll keep an eye on them, then? - question Hughes on the phone…but it's an utterance.
- Definitely . We'll see what they can get. - answers Roy, the phone squeezed between the shoulder and cheek , his hands working in signing paperwork.
- Ah, so I was right, you've taken them to heart!- chuckles Hughes, softly.
- I'm only assuring they won't do a mess anymore, idiot, that's it.- Mustang says, pretending the usual coolness.
- So you ask me to watch them in the same way, huh? Roger!- springs up Hughes so that Roy feels again so unnerved he could punch him.
He slams down the phone cruelly, without even answering back.
- Use the phone civilly, Sir!- thunders Hawkeye behind him while he thinks, almost bemused, that the jerk still knows how to read his mind too well.