laughing like hell
Character: Reine Hamilton
Summary: Her sanity is quite … questionable.
No one is born cruel.
This is a fact but those who have had the questionable honour of meeting Reine Hamilton nee Hawkeye might doubt this theory because even as a child, she had been kicking and taunting her brother, using cruel words. She has murdered frogs with her scalpel since she was five but since her cruelty has been part of her brilliancy, no one has ever dared to oppose her – and those who have dared to speak up, criticising her in any way or form have ended up pathetically. Her brother has left their entire family because of her – because there is no one less compassionate than her and because he has long grown sick and tired of her experiments.
She does not miss him – or so she tells herself – but it is true that her mental health suffers badly after he is gone. She has hoped that her younger brother would understand her one day, that he would see the reason why she has to experiment like this.
Her oldest daughter is his splitting image even though they do not share any physical resemblance. But Nerissa is highly intelligent and she dislikes the very thought of being a state alchemist just like him and the way she argues, the way she pushes back the strand of her hair – it is so much like Berthold that she snaps.
Her own daughter has nearly fallen under her hands, refusing to dodge the attack out of pride and stubbornness – just like he has taken all of her cruelty and poisoned words for so many years. Uncle and niece are two cut from the same cloth, two of a kind – brilliancy border lining to irony, sharp minds clouded by pathetic goals and ideals.
To Reine, it makes no sense. She has raised her daughter and so, her daughter should not be some imitation of Berthold, of the only one to rival her mind.
But Nerissa is like him and so she has to lie on the ground, holding her head, covering her eye with her hand and whimpering pathetically. Berthold might have molten the ice which his crazily powerful flame alchemy but Nerissa cannot defend herself with a simple snap – partially because she does not want to. She wants to take and inhale the hatred of her mother to show that this hatred will not poison her the way it has poisoned everyone else.
But the three of them – her brother, her former husband and finally, her oldest daughter – they make her lose the thin threads of sanity she has still held in her hands. She has to achieve control, control about something and everything. And this control offers the war, the war she has been argued about with her rebellious daughter in first place.
In the desert, she is the queen. She controls life and death – mostly death, of course, because she could hardly care less about her subordinates than she already does – and this is the first time she feels absolutely fine because she is good at what she does and no one says anything against the way she uses the alchemy – and no one says anything about how alchemy is supposed to protect the country. She can be the slayer and she slays mercilessly, her laughter echoing through death cities.