June 5

When the Brigadier General next slipped into her bar, Chris automatically walked up to her office to fetch the packet of letters. But she stood there silently, with one hand on the handle of her open desk drawer, staring down at the neat packet and the papers underneath it, for several long minutes.

So far Chris had kept her opinions about Grumman's interest in this man, this alchemist Berthold Hawkeye, to herself. She wondered now whether to speak to Grumman as the old friend he was, or as the client with whom she maintained a solid professional relationship.

Either way, she thought, picking up the packet, it was time that she cleared a few things up.

"You're a bit early this week, old man," she murmured as she set his drink down. "My girls haven't finished squabbling over the last letter yet." Grumman just smiled up at her.

"What, I can't come in without an ulterior motive?" he said cheekily. She just raised an eyebrow at him, and he laughed. "All right, you caught me. I find the boy a very capable storyteller. I feel like I'm waiting for the latest installment of some weekly periodical story."

"It is a rather interesting read, isn't it?" Chris chuckled, settling into the seat beside him. "This week's letter was a particularly fat one, too. The girls are having kittens over it." She paused, dark eyes steady on his. "Apparently the young girl had a nasty little accident."

"Accident?" Grumman echoed, much more sharply than he'd intended. Those dark eyes bored into him, and he made a concerted effort to collect himself. "Is—are the children all right?"

"No permanent damage. But it's quite an exciting story, I don't want to ruin it for you," she said slowly, taking in every bead of sweat and every twitch of his mustache.

Damn it, she knew. How could she not know?

"Very good of you, my dear," he replied, with almost his usual suavity.

"Tell me, Brigadier General," Chris all but purred. "Does any of this have to do with Tereza?"

Fuck.

Grumman's fingers tightened around his glass.

"How long have you known?" he asked with quiet defeat. Chris took pity on him.

"Since the first letter, or very nearly." He let out a humorless laugh. Of course she had.

"How?" he asked, still staring into his drink. Might as well learn where the weak flank was for future reference.

"As soon as my brat mentioned that a young female relative was living there as well, I realized that she had to be the one you really wanted intel about," Chris admitted.

"I must be slipping," Grumman murmured. "I should have known better than to underestimate you."

"True," she said simply. "But in any event, it struck me that you'd wanted an inside man roughly the same age as the girl all along. Naturally he'd notice her and be likely to talk about her without additional prompting. Otherwise, you'd have gone yourself and made the usual State Alchemist recruitment offer, even knowing it would be refused. Or sent one of the girls with a plausible cover story and let her try to charm the information out of him. But those options wouldn't have suited your purposes half so well, because it was the alchemist's daughter, not the alchemist, that you were interested in."

Grumman nodded but did not speak. No point hiding it now.

"So, I asked myself why," she continued. "And then I ran into an old friend of mine who used to work with the registrar's office in Central. He still has a few useful contacts, and pulling a few marriage and birth records was simple enough."

One thing about Madame, she didn't gloat. Nor was she malicious.

"He'll keep what he learned to himself, Grumman," she added quietly. "He doesn't have any reason to believe that it's sensitive information, but he knows very well that I could destroy him if anything leaks without my consent."

Grumman bit his lip, hard.

As a matter of fact, there were several important men who were very lucky that Chris wasn't the blackmailing type, Grumman thought. She might sell information to the authorities at exorbitant prices, but she never used personal information against a man for monetary gain…she was not the sort of woman to threaten to send incriminating photos to a jealous wife, for example. She considered that kind of extortion beneath her, regardless of what her personal thoughts on the matter might be. And it was this little code of honor of hers that ensured she had plenty of favors at her scarlet-lacquered fingertips.

"I—I knew she'd had a child, but beyond that…" he stopped, annoyed by the thickness of his own voice. Fighting against the thrall of his overwhelming emotion, Grumman tried to breathe in and out slowly, but even Madame could hear that the breath stuttered in his chest.

"Take your time," she said gently. She placed her hand on his forearm for the briefest of moments, letting him know that she understood the reason for his deception, and that she wasn't angry with him.

"I just…needed to be sure that the girl was safe and happy," he began slowly.

"Your granddaughter?"

"Yes. The only family I have left, now."

"You've never met her?"

"No. My daughter and I were not exactly on speaking terms when she had the child. You see, I never liked the man my daughter married, and not just because she went against my wishes when she ran off and eloped with him. Bad enough that he was ten years her senior, but even that I didn't mind so much."

"Nothing wrong with being an alchemist with family money, either," Chris mused, recalling their first conversation about Berthold Hawkeye. "So it was his personality that rubbed you the wrong way?" Grumman raised his glass in a silent, sarcastic salute.

"From the moment we met," he said, and tossed back half his drink in one go. "I could see right off that he was a cold, hard sort of man, and I was afraid that his cool reserve would break Tereza's generous and sunny spirit. She was such a demonstrative girl; very affectionate and warm. Effervescent. But as for him...the man was just so damn stoical. But Terri was so young, and so headstrong, and she kept insisting that they were in love...In the end, it didn't matter, anyway. It wasn't lack of affection that took my daughter's life."

He swallowed the rest of his drink and took a moment to compose himself. Madame kindly pretended not to notice the tears that he was fighting to blink away.

"Anyway," he said at last. "I knew that she'd had a child before her death, a little girl." And the ghost of a smile graced his thin lips. Chris assumed he was imagining what Riza Hawkeye looked like; whether she resembled her mother in spite of the shorter hair and dark brown eyes her nephew had so carefully described. "And...it occurred to me that I might take the girl from him by force if I wanted to. But first I needed to know more about her and what their home life was like."

"And if she was unhappy, or the financial situation was too bleak..." Chris began.

"Then I'd offer to take her off his hands, so to speak," Grumman nodded. "I still don't know what to do. Hawkeye seems to be the same cold-hearted bastard that he always was. An emotionless machine devoted only to his damn alchemy. Maybe even worse, now, without my Terri to soften his edges."

"And yet the child seems to care for him a great deal," Chris argued gently. "That sort of devotion comes from somewhere, doesn't it? It can't be maintained indefinitely without some spark of affection to keep it alight."

"I know. That's why I'm still so unsure of my next step, Chris. I want to do what's best for my granddaughter."

"I will say this: in spite of his apparent coldness, I believe that her father loves her. And that he wants the best for her, too."

"What proof of that do you have?" he said, somewhat bitterly. Chris shook her head.

"You'll have to read between the lines of my nephew's last letter, old man. Putting that aside for a moment, are you afraid to take the girl in? To raise her as your own?"

"Only afraid that it would do more harm than good. I don't know whether hauling her off to live with a strange old man would be the right choice. Even if her father was willing to give her up and she was willing to come, I'd be uprooting her, forcing her to change her whole lifestyle, thrusting her into a life she's never known…"

"It would be very difficult for her at first, to be sure," Chris said thoughtfully. "She's a very shy and sheltered child, and to be put into a public school, or a boarding school, whatever you like, would be a very great culture shock for her. On the other hand, she doesn't have many friends where she is now, and it might be a good thing to see more of the world rather than stay locked in her ivory tower in the country."

"That's just it though…she's at a delicate age. She doesn't know me, and she'd have no one to confide in about her troubles. She wouldn't be able to hide or retreat. She'd be thrown to the wolves in a city public school like that; exposed and made to perform in ways she never has before…wouldn't that damage her?"

"I don't know. How could we ever be sure?" Chris wondered, pursing her lips a little. Grumman noticed that she'd said "we" and not "you." Did that mean she'd taken an interest in this child's welfare as well?

"I wouldn't even have to have his consent. I could fabricate the proof necessary to declare him an unfit parent; there are several judges who owe me favors…I could have myself appointed her legal guardian by tomorrow if I wanted to," he admitted.

"Would you want to?" Chris countered.

"If my wife were still alive, Chris, it wouldn't even be a question," Grumman sighed. "We'd have had the child the moment her mother had died. But as things are now…"

"You're afraid history will repeat itself, somehow. Or that the girl will resent you for taking her from her father?"

"Yes. I don't know what to do with a girl. Look at what happened to Tereza—I'd destroyed any chance I had at a relationship with my own daughter by the time she was old enough to talk. She couldn't wait to get away from me."

"That's not entirely true, is it, old man?" Chris asked gently. Grumman slumped in his stool and sighed.

"I honestly don't know, some days," he replied softly. Chris studied him for a moment. It was odd, and difficult, too in a way, to see him laid bare like this.

"I wish I had an easy answer for you, my friend," Chris sighed. "But I will tell you this: you need to read those letters, and then you need to come back in a few days to collect the letter my girls are currently holding hostage. And then you can decide for yourself whether Berthold Hawkeye is really the cold-hearted bastard he seems to be on the surface." She rose and poured him a generous measure of the expensive brandy he favored. And then she glided away with a rustle of silk, leaving Grumman staring down at the packet of letters on the glossy surface of her bar.

He was gone, and the letters with him, before she'd made it to the end of the room.

A.N. So this chapter kind of surprised me...I was in the middle of writing the chapter I intended to post this week, and then this happened instead. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading it! And as always, constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated. :D

Fun fact of the day: I read somewhere that the name Riza, which is a derivative of the Hungarian name Tereza, can mean "guardian" or "hunter" (depending on who you ask). No idea whether this was REALLY what Arakawa-sensei intended, but I liked the idea, and so I chose to use it for Riza's mum's name, since she isn't given one in the canon (that I know of, someone please correct me if I am mistaken!)

xoxo Janie