Chapter 15: The Sleuth at Work

Maes Hughes was by nature a generous man. Raised in a large and close-knit family, the idea of communal property was deeply ingrained in his being. What he had was meant to be shared with those he loved, adn he did so instinctively and with happy abandon. He loved Roy Mustang just as much as any of his brothers, and liked him a good deal more than some of them. So when Roy had asked for his money, Maes had handed it over without a second thought: for more than two years he had been pressing his friend to help himself, and it was great to see Roy finally doing it.

Unfortunately for Mustang, Maes Hughes was also by nature a curious man. Roy had been pushing his luck lately, with all this creeping around – to say nothing of working himself half to death. For a while Maes had bought the story that Roy was working to recoup his savings and that he snuck out at oh-two-thirty every morning to gratify his carnal appetites. Recently, however, the puzzle pieces had been changing, and this picture no longer seemed to fit.

For one thing, there was the four thousand sens. Maes certainly didn't begrudge Roy the money, and he really didn't care why he wanted it. He just cared that he didn't know why Roy wanted it. The deadline to apply for the State Alchemist exam was the ides of March. This was the first week in June, so Roy couldn't be topping up his fee at the last moment. True, he might have finally realized that accepting something from a friend wasn't the same as taking charity, but Maes doubted it. He knew that Mordred Hawkeye had been an idiotically proud man, and he had passed that attitude on to Roy. Maes also suspected, and had for more than a decade, that when Roy had first come to live with the alchemist, Hawkeye's wife had lorded his dependency over the head of the beggared little runaway. That kind of thing could scar a person forever.

Why, then, did Roy suddenly need four thousand sens? Having now faith in his ability to wrangle a satisfactory answer out of Mustang, Maes decided that the place to start was the cadet's personal belongings.

He deliberately chose an afternoon when the first-years were drilling on the parade grounds and he knew the barracks would be deserted. Since a second classman wandering into the empty bunker might arouse suspicion, Maes was careful that his approach was not observed. Once inside, with the heavy door between him and any prying eyes, he did not switch on the light. The sun filtered through the slats of the aluminum blinds, and provided him with sufficient illumination for his clandestine mission.

Maes strode down to the middle of the room and squatted at the foot of Roy's cot. The heavy metal footlocker sat waiting for him. Many cadets did not bother with the padlocks that they were issued, but Roy was neurotic about security. Maes supposed that this, too, was Hawkeye's doing: the man had hidden his research in some kind of code that his own apprentice had taken months to break, for God's sake! He obviously wasn't the best guy to teach trust.

Ah, well. It didn't really matter. Maes knew that Roy trusted him, whether he felt able to tell him everything or not. Stiff and newly snarky Cadet Mustang was a damaged soul, and Maes empathized even if he couldn't quite understand.

And anyway, he knew the combination to the lock – not because Roy had shared it, but because he lacked a certain subtlety of motion required to hide his fingers' movement from a skilled observer. Maes sprung the lock and opened the iron chest. The box with Roy's dress uniform gloves lay neatly on top. There were textbooks and reams of clumsy class notes – Roy had never had strong literacy skills, and though he now had adaptations that allowed him to cope Maes knew he still struggled with spelling and usage. Writing of any kind was an unduly slow and laborious process for his otherwise brilliant friend.

There was a coffee can under a torn yellow kerchief. Maes knew that it had been, once upon a time, Roy's bank, where he stashed his hard-earned money. It was empty. Tucked in a corner of the footlocker Maes found a disintegrating billfold. This looked like the perfect place to stash invoices or promissory notes, but all that Maes found was a fifty-sens bill, a peppermint wrapper and Roy's spare credentials.

There was nothing else of interest in the footlocker, so Maes turned his attention to the clothes cupboard. Obsessively perfect stacks of crisply folded underwear, starched uniform shirts, neat, square, standard-issue handkerchiefs and perfectly rolled socks stared back at him. Roy's well-used "housewife" kit, with its shoe polish, the brass cleaner, soft rags for buffing buttons, needles and blue thread and all the tools required for a soldier who wanted to keep his uniform absolutely pristine, sat on the second shelf next to his standard-issue comb, toothbrush, razor and shaving mug. There was his spare jacket hanging from the rail, and his full dress togs next to it. On the very bottom shelf, hidden in the shadows as if its owner were ashamed of it, was a tatty gabardine suit jacket and its accompanying trousers, which Maes knew Roy wore with a uniform shirt and his combat boots. Those two and a battered newsie's cap were the only non-military garments that Mustang owned.

Maes looked at the military greatcoat hanging from a peg by the head of the cot. It represented the last of Roy's possessions left to inventory – save the uniform he was wearing right now and three wooden boxes full of alchemy texts. Maes plunged an exploratory hand into first one pocket, and then the other. His fingers lighted on a piece of flimsy carbon transfer paper.

"Henry, Huxley and North," Maes read aloud, studying the letterhead mark at the top of the page. "Probate and Civil Law." It was an invoice for "consultation services", in the amount of two thousand six hundred sens, and for "registration dues" in the amount of two thousand on the nose. Maes chuckled softly. "Now, Mustang, why would you need a lawyer?" he asked.

The door to the barracks opened. "What are you doing in here?" a stern female voice demanded. Maes whirled around to see one of the lady cadets – a tall brunette by the name of Schmidt – standing in the doorway. He rammed the invoice into his pocket, and tried to look innocent, but the door to Roy's cupboard still hung open.

"Uh... surprise accouterment inspection!" he fibbed, grinning toothily. "Shouldn't you be drilling?"

Then he saw that she was leaning on a crutch, one ankle held up from the ground and swathed in elastic bandages. A sprain or a strain. Damn. He should've had his contact in the infirmary check to see if any first-years were down with injuries that might preclude them from drilling.

"Gee, you should be a detective or something, Cadet," Schmidt said sarcastically. "Who authorized this?"

"It's a... project," Maes invented. "For Advanced Inspection and Command Protocols, Lt. Colonel Brighton. The lucky ones get to harass the third-classmen."

She seemed to accept the fib, for she hobbled down to the girls' corner of the barracks and sat on her bed to study. The only trouble was that Maes had to look into twenty-two more cupboards full of underwear on his way to the door. The things you put up with as a friend of Roy Mustang. Honestly.

discidium

On the way to Tactics the following morning, Roy was cornered by an enormous grin and two pale green eyes glinting wickedly from behind a pair of rectangular eyeglasses. The younger cadet let loose a long-suffering sigh.

"What now, Maes?" he asked.

"I've been thinking," Maes mused lazily. "Why would a seventeen-year-old need a civil lawyer?"

Roy paled. Maes knew. How did he know?

"Because most first-year cadets aren't buying houses or squabbling over employment contracts or—"

"I was writing my will, okay?" Roy said hastily. "I went to the lawyer so he could help me draught it up."

Maes stopped short. "Your will?" he said. "But... why?"

"I'm a soldier," Roy said. "I could be sent into battle, killed... you have to be ready for that."

"Well, yeah, but..." Maes rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "I mean, you don't have much to bequeath."

"There's my sensei's books," Roy pointed out.

"True," Maes allowed.

"And... instructions," Roy said; "in case I'm incapacitated or something..." He watched to see if Maes would buy it. It was a new fad among young officers, Roy knew from talking with the other cadets, to leave a healthy directive, so that medical decisions could be made if a soldier was unable to express his wishes. It struck Roy as morbid and a little twisted, but it, like the fib about the girl, touched on an area that Maes might not feel comfortable discussing in a hallway.

"Oh."

Roy smirked a little. He was right: Maes didn't want to talk about it. As he brushed past and resumed his walk to class, he felt a tiny pang of guilt. Maes was watching him with a sad, haunted look in his eyes. Thinking about Ira, no doubt.

discidium

Okay, so there was nothing to know about the money. That didn't mean that Maes was letting Roy off the hook. There were still the letters. That alchemy text that Maes had held for him while he went looking for those bloodstained pages had had at least two dozen unopened envelopes tucked into the front cover. Maes hadn't had a chance to look at the addresses, but he couldn't help being curious. Letters in an alchemy book? Were they Roy's? His sensei's? Who had put them there, and why?

He tried to wheedle his way into the commissary storage bay, but without success. Breaking in was out of the question, and every time he tried to broach the subject with Roy he was rebuffed – humorously, if Mustang was in a good mood, and sarcastically if he wasn't. Why Roy wasn't interested in talking about the book Maes couldn't say, but after a week he found something else to wonder about. His informant in the records office told him that Cadet Mustang had quit his job at the bar.

"Why?" Maes asked. "I thought you needed the money?"

"I need the sleep more," Roy said. "Besides, if I take yard detail, I can make half what I made at the Arms, without having to leave campus. And I'll be done at twenty-three hundred hours."

"One question..." Maes said. "What about your goals?"

"What about them?" Roy asked.

"Well... are you still going to try for State Alchemist, or not?" Maes asked. "I mean, you've just wasted four thousand sens on a lawyer—"

"It wasn't wasted!" Roy said with unexpected vehemence.

"Fine," Maes agreed softly. "Okay. But shouldn't you be planning for your life instead of your death? You're young. It'll be another two years before you'll see any combat. It's not going to do any good to dwell on this. You can't keep fixating on the fact that you could die: we all could! Any one of us, in the military or not. You can't focus on that."

Roy nodded mutely. There was a strange, vacant look in his eyes. "Did you hear the latest news from the front?" he asked.

"Aerugo?" Maes asked. "They're pulling back. We—"

Roy shook his head. "Ishbal. A group of terrorists ambushed one of our convoys – killed two hundred and eighty-one soldiers. Why do you think they hate us so much? Amestris is just trying to bring order to a wild region. Is that so terrible?"

Maes shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows," he said. "War isn't pretty, and I hear most of the combat in Ishbal is street fighting. That's harder than normal warfare: the enemy has an advantage."

"I've read the textbook, Maes," Roy said patiently. "Do you think that Fessler has?"

Maes chuckled softly. "Better not let the faculty hear you talking about a superior like that," he said. "It's Colonel Fessler. For now: word on the grapevine is he's up for promotion."

"Huh. Maybe that means he's almost finished," Roy said. "How long can it possibly take to stamp out a rebellion? They've been at it for two years!"

"People don't give up their freedom so easily," Maes told him blackly.

"We aren't asking them to give up their freedom!" Roy said. "All we want is for them to accept our laws and stop killing our people."

It was the popular consensus, but Maes wasn't sure. True, Ishbal was a region of Amestris now... but three decades ago it had been an independent state. The eastern expansion under the late Fuhrer McFarland had annexed their nation and brought it under Amestrian control, and ever since the political situation had been volatile at best. The Ishbalans were a desert people; proud, independent and deeply religious. They spurned the trappings of modernity, and their religion taught that alchemy was an abomination: an outrage against their god.

Relations between the occupying Amestrian forces and the locals had always been strained, but everyone knew that it was a single incident that had sparked the current conflict. In a moment of tension, a young soldier had lost his nerve and shot an Ishbalan child. The mishap had served as a rallying cry for dissidents across the desert nation, fanning the fires of discontent into full blown conflict.

The question of Ishbal was frequently played up in the papers and on the radio. Cinema houses showed newsreels of firefights, in which the military was always triumphant. It was talked about in the street, and it was frequent fare for the cadets, both in and out of lectures. Like Roy, many Amestrians believed that this uprising could not sustain itself much longer. The rebels would be put down, and the ordinary people would settle contentedly into life under Amestrian rule, free of the nonconformists who were winding them up into a rage. Colonel Fessler's impending promotion was a sign that victory was at hand.

Maes had his doubts. He wasn't sure that the problem could be so easily resolved. It didn't seem like a squabble between a few terrorists and the military police details. It was a clash of two vastly divergent cultures: modernity versus faith. Neither philosophy could yield to the other, nor could they compromise. And if there could be no compromise of ideals, there could be no resolution of the conflict. As for Colonel Fessler's promotion... wasn't it possible that he was being made a Brigadier General because the conflict was escalating to a scale beyond that which could be considered the realm of a colonel? Maybe they were promoting him because this wasn't just a fair-weather rebellion.

Maybe, Maes thought, this was civil war.