It's boring, sorry.
Everything happened both too quickly and far too slow.
The clearest moment was the moment before it all dissolved into semi-controlled chaos, when the technicians had stared at Lieutenant Hawkeye, and the Emissary and the Sewing Alchemist stared at the Translator cradled in her arms.
Roy didn't know why, but he and Maes had stared at the Transcriber, who lay on the table with his eyes closed and fresh scar tissue glistening like ritual markings, while the armor – the Sentinel – held its gauntlets over the tiny body, like some sort of golemic god studying its latest sacrifice.
Then the Emissary had barked out gravelly, "Out!" and everyone moved at once.
The technicians had taken Riza, some warily, some reverently, and guided her and the Translator through the hole in the wall and into the Translator's sanctum. Tucker paused, not sure where he was meant to go. A snarl and a jerk of the head from the Emissary sent him happily trailing the technicians, his eyes bright with academic hunger.
The Emissary turned his unnatural snake-like eyes on Roy and then Maes, and then the Sentinel.
"Stay."
The Sentinel abandoned the Transcriber and stepped lightly but noisily to the gap in the wall, stretching out its arms and legs so that it turned itself into gapped barricade. Once the armor had taken its position, the Emissary had turned on his heel and slithered out the room, slamming the door behind him.
Roy turned his head ever so slightly, enough to see the Emissary yelling something at Breda and Falman on the other side of the glass.
Then he and Maes were alone, save for the Transcriber and the Sentinel, at least insofar that they could hear most of the conversations happening in the now un-walled other room.
"Do you have any idea why…"
"Are you experiencing any…"
"…unprecedented, absolutely no protocol…"
After a few minutes of this, a technician poked his head out beneath the Sentinel's arm and above its leg, looked at the Transcriber, then at Roy and Maes, then disappeared.
More low-voiced conversation, mostly questions and exclamations of shock.
Then Roy head two words that sent an emotion he couldn't describe surging through him.
"…High Commander…"
Roy met Maes's eyes and mouthed the words back to him. Maes's brows rose to his hairline.
The Light-Bringer was coming.
XXX
Roy had seen the High Commander once, from a distance, during a demonstration of the man's powers. The man himself had called the meeting an Enlightenment (if anyone had any wry thoughts on the pun, they were too smart to say them), though the personnel had referred to the even as simply a "presentation."
Roy hadn't been sure what to make of it when the revelation had rippled through the ranks, through the public, through the world – that the military had brought God to reign, His power now theirs to harness as they wished. He had at first thought it was a joke and had laughed.
General Grumman had not. His face had been pale, his eyes distant and confused. Roy's laughter had dwindled into nothing, then vanished completely when the general made full eye contact with the colonel and Mustang saw what the man had been so desperately trying to hide.
General Grumman was terrified.
He then ordered Mustang and his team to report to Central to witness God's power for themselves, as all officers were being ordered to do.
It was during that demonstration – presentation, Enlightenment – that Roy had received the blood-red ruby that lay hidden at the bottom of the lower right drawer of his desk.
When he had received it, it had been a small ball of gold that had appeared before him out, as if from out out of the air.
One had appeared in front of each of the assembled officers in front of the gilded dais in the the center of Central City – he had heard some of the local officers call it the Landing, in reference to it being the alleged place where the Light-Bringer had brought God to Earth – rising out of the cobblestones and materializing from the tip of the stalk, like an egg being ejected from a proboscis.
The common officers cried out, some in shock, some in appreciation. The alchemists among them – Roy, Armstrong, the Silver Alchemist from where Roy could see him to his left, at the far end of the plaza – remained silent, watching the production with quiet but heavy disdain.
There were numerous ways to explain this cheap trick – the same array, connected and repeated, with the the transmutation activated at the beginning of the chain; alchemists in the sewers activating the arrays from below. Despite the tackiness of the display, they had accepted the offering, plucking the golden globes from the pillars of stone like ripened fruits from branches.
Upon falling into his palm, Roy's hand grew warm and someone screamed.
Mustang had never shared more than the cursory curtesy with the Silver Alchemist, so he didn't know that it had been Silver who had screamed in horror until he looked up to see the man staring at the gold in his hand.
Only it wasn't gold. Not anymore.
Roy instinctively glanced at his own gold and jolted, sharply but silently, as crimson bloomed on the shiny smoothness and the deep yellow was saturated with a reflective, vibrant red, as if the gold had been a blister that had been ruptured wrongly and so filled with blood. As Roy watched, the heat from the change turned his fingers, balmy from the summer morning air, to dry and itchy, and the gold was eaten away by the fresh ruby that came to rest in his hand.
Roy glanced to his lieutenant to his right and saw the identical gem sitting in her own shaking hand.
There was no to explain this.
There was no way any secret alchemist or array could transmute the gold once it was in his hand and, as far as Roy was aware, there wasn't any way to force an alchemist to transmute something, at least not without them knowing.
Above the shouts of fear and awe, Roy had looked up, over the heads of panicking soldiers, and found the Light-Bringer watching him.
Roy's night-black eyes met the Bringer's sun-yellow ones, and the message was as clear as if the creature had spoken it.
Roy was powerless.
They were all powerless in comparison to this eldritch entity, this man who had conquered God.
When the Light-Bringer had demanded that they swear fealty to him, they had.
When he had told them to repeat the mantras and cult-like benedictions, they had.
If he had told them to pull their pistols from their holsters and shoot the person standing to their left between the eyes, Roy knew they would have done it without question.
Later, when Roy met Maes at a bar that was full of men like themselves who were looking to drown their nerves in whiskey, he had barely sat down when his friend had asked them where they should start.
XXX
Now knowing that it had not, in fact, been a happy accident that had given Maes the opportunity to convince the higher ups that it should be Mustang's unit who should guard the Conduit, Roy wondered if this had been the Light-Bringer's plan from the beginning.
Perhaps not in this way, not under these circumstances, but at some point showing Mustang what his discovery had created, what his selfish grab at a promotion had done. That was why the Bringer had been watching the Flame Alchemist's reaction especially. In the moment, Roy had conceitedly and stupidly thought it was because the Bringer had considered Mustang a threat.
He wondered if the Conduit hated him as much as he hated himself.
He hoped they did.
He was broken out of his reverie by a red-faced General Raven slamming and swearing his way into the Transcription room.
"What the fuck have you done?!" he spat at Mustang, not even pausing to deliver his message as he stomped to the Sentinel, who obediently pulled itself to the side just enough to allow Raven passed, then resumed its previous blocking position.
Raven's deep-throated shouting and Hawkeye's gentle voice floated from behind the Sentinel, then the Sentinel moved again, Raven going as soon as he came, his face pale and sweaty as he left through the door to storage, leaving the door gaping. The Sewing Alchemist followed soon after, taking his place at the table where the forgotten Transcriber lay. He pushed the Transcriber's hair away from his face with one hand and pried open an eye with the other, studying the pupil and iris for a moment before letting go with a disappointed sigh.
The Emissary came next, slithering from behind the Sentinel and sneering in disgust at the pool of blood and the catatonic Transcriber in the middle of it.
"Commander's on his way. We're to hold off on any repairs or reconstruction until he can… assess the damage," he said, his glaring purple eyes sliding to Mustang on the last three words.
Tucker mumbled incoherently, looking for all the world like a boy who had dropped his ice cream on the ground.
XXX
The Emissary must have been satisfied with the security measures in Translation because he stayed in Transcription, his snake-like eyes darting between Roy and Maes as if he was trying to decide which one he should eat first.
Roy knew when the Light-Bringer arrived by watching those eyes, seeing when they widened in an odd kind of panic, then narrowed in a more characteristic fury.
When the Emissary broke into a run and threw himself in Roy's direction, the colonel had thought that the creature had made its decision and braced himself for the feeling of teeth sinking into his neck.
It passed Roy without a single glance, smashing itself through the glass behind him as if it was water. A shard nicked Roy's cheek, stinging and sending a drop of blood rolling down his jaw.
"Kneel, you worms! Don't you know who that is?! I said kneel!"
A grunt of pain from Breda, and Roy looked over his shoulder to see the second lieutenant on his knees over a spray of broken glass, the Emissary standing over him from where it had kicked his legs out from under him. A look over his other shoulder showed him Falman cowering from the shattered window rather than bowing, but either the Emissary didn't consider it a significant enough different or, as Roy suspected was more likely, it preferred it.
"Peace, Envy. I doubt they knew of my arrival."
Whoever was speaking was too far behind Roy for him to see, and he didn't dare turn fully around to get a proper look. He knew it was, recognized the deep baritone voice, even if the only other time he had heard it had been from a distance. He looked across the room at Maes, who's expression was fixed on an obvious point passed Roy with his expression unreadable.
"Why are you wearing that skin?"
The bizarreness of the question had Roy turning before he caught himself and snapped forward again.
A strangely pregnant pause.
"I… you said you wanted me to keep my presence discreet, Father –"
"A concern that clearly no longer exists. If you are not going to hide, let them see you for what you truly are."
Something that sounded suspiciously like alchemy, and then someone was crawling through the broken window.
Roy couldn't tell if they were a man or a woman, and the more he stared, the less sure he became they were even human. Their limbs seemed too long to be natural, their hair more like tentacles than braids. It wasn't until he saw the maroon arrays on the person's black clothes, which were little more than a cover for their chest and their waist, and recognized the slitted purple eyes that he realized who the person was.
The Emissary, in its true form, cocked its head to the side and grinned wickedly.
"Not what you were expecting, eh, Colonel?"
Mustang didn't have a chance to answer, even if he had been planning to.
The door to storage swung open with an inhuman grace and the Emissary's smile vanished, replaced by a blank expression and a bowed head. Roy and Maes wasted no time following its example.
"Explain."
The word was spoken calmly but felt so heavy that a part of Roy wished the Bringer had shouted it.
The Emissary looked up, seeming to take the address as permission to make eye contact, and jerked a thumb at Tucker, who had half bent at the waist in respect of the broad-shoulder man in front of him.
"This worthless creature cut out the Transcriber's heart and then couldn't put him back together. So we had to bring out the Translator," the Emissary spat out the word as if it tasted bad. "The two were stuck together for so long that they merged. When they got pulled apart, the Translator went to his," Roy fought the shiver that tried to send itself down his back when that jabbing thumb switched fists and was redirected towards him, "little lady friend."
A quiet pause, and then, more curious than accusing, "Did she touch him?"
The Emissary snorted.
"You could say that."
The Bringer was quiet again, then brushed passed the Emissary to the Sentinel, who stepped out of his way long enough for him to cross into the other room.
Roy heard the sucked breaths and the accolades from some of the technicians, which were placated by the Bringer, and then the shaking, nervous voices that answered his smooth questions. He heard Hawkeye's voice above them all, not disrespectful but not particularly reverent either.
When the Sentinel moved out of the way a second time, it was for the Bringer and, to Roy's terror and relief, Hawkeye behind him, who was still cradling the Translator in her arms. Dorsey and Howard were right behind them. The Bringer's and Hawkeye's expressions were blank while the colonels looked like they would have preferred it if Hawkeye had spontaneously combusted.
"We shall make the announcement in time. For now, you are to make the Mother as comfortable as possible. Envy and the Translator are to tend to the Transcriber. If the Translator insists on the Mother's presence, do not deny him."
"High Commander Bringer, sir."
Roy had not been expecting Riza to speak. Neither had anyone else, judging from the way everyone was now staring at her, save for the Translator, who was staring ahead stalwartly, his teary eyes now dry and his face devoid of any particular emotion.
"You may speak."
The Bringer's voice made Roy instinctively look at him, and when he did, a realization occurred to him that nearly sent him reeling, and the more he considered what it meant, the sickening suspicion curdled further in his stomach.
"May I give something to my colonel, before I am detained?"
The Bringer blinked slowly.
"Which would be?"
Riza unfolded the hand that Roy hadn't noticed was closed and was surprised to see his own silver pocket watch in her palm. He did not remember giving it to her, but then again, he rarely remembered to bring it anywhere at all. It was easily believable that his second lieutenant would carry it on her person on his behalf, in the even that the status it represented was ever required.
The Bringer tilted his head in what looked to be like forced curiosity, then nodded elegantly and said, "Very well."
"Thank you, Commander Bringer."
Hawkeye approached Mustang slowly, and with her came the Translator. Despite his best efforts, Roy stared at the Translator, the same terrible realization still circling in his head.
Despite his better judgment, he looked the Translator in the eyes.
The boy's golden irises stared back at him, the black pupils in the middle seeming so normal, so insignificant compared to the boundless knowledge Roy knew was behind them.
He waited for something to happen, some thrill of divine power or influx of incomprehensible information to break into his mind.
He smelled fresh flowers and realized it was some kind of scented soap that the technicians must have washed the boy with.
Riza proffered her hand as best she could with her arms full. Roy proffered his own and Riza turned her own upside down to drop the watch into his palm. Its coldness was an echo of the numb confusion wallowing in his chest.
"Farewell, sir. I expect to see you indeterminately."
Mustang didn't get a chance to answer, even if he had planned to.
XXX
Roy and Maes did not go to the bar that night. Roy felt too sick to ingest anything beyond water and Maes couldn't seem to puzzle out what had happened enough to say anything.
They ate dinner silently. When Gracia asked after their subdued moods, Maes had waved her off with a clipped, "Classifed."
Gracia looked forlorn, but did not press her husband.
Once Gracia had cleared the plates and taken herself to her and her husband's room to tend to the baby, Maes and Roy sat at the table, their chins on their steepled fingers and their gazes locked on nothing at all.
It was then, in that terrible, stressed silence, that Roy heard it.
He had put his watch in the pocket of his uniform jacket, which was now hung on the coat rack by the door to the apartment. It was from that direction that he heard a high-pitched shout that seemed to be muffled by distance and walls. He ignored it the first time, assuming it was from a child in another part of the complex.
He began to grow annoyed when it continued and felt his heart jump into his throat when he heard something that sounded like his name.
Roy sat up and looked at the door, his ears now straining for the next noise.
"Roy!"
There was no mistaking it.
"Where – what? Roy?" Maes asked when Roy abruptly stood and made his way to the door, reaching for the door so that he could remove it as a barrier for the sound.
He heard his name a third time.
If his heart had been in his throat, it was now surely on his tongue, because the shout wasn't coming from outside the apartment.
It was coming from his coat.
His first thought was that the Translator had cast some sort of spell on his uniform. He grabbed his jacket by the sleeve, holding the cloth and waiting for some spark of pain or understanding.
He felt vibrations, like something inside the jacket was fighting to escape.
Something inside the pocket.
When he pulled it out, the watch was shaking, like an egg trying to hatch.
Maes had stood, making to follow his friend, when Roy turned back and returned to the table, watch in hand.
"Roy, what –"
Maes's question died in his throat as Roy dropped the watch onto the table, where it clattered against the wood. They watched it wiggle for a moment, then a much less muffled, woman-like voice called out, "Mustang?"
Roy was moving before he knew what he was doing.
"Don't open it!" Maes snapped, sounding scandalized, but it was too late.
The fingers of one of Roy's hands held the watch still while the fingers of the other unclipped the lid, and the watch sprang open.
Instead of the white, numbered face of the clock; there was a steel disk sitting inside the case.
Stamped on the disk was what looked like an arcane symbol etched in blood.
"Holy hell," Maes breathed, then, "Holy shit!" when the voice, no longer muffled, vibrated from the disk.
"There you are. I was starting to think you'd never find me."
"Alphonse."
The name fell out of Roy's mouth unbidden.
"You remember me!"
Roy wondered why the boy sounded so happy.
"Roy, what the hell is going on?"
Roy looked at Maes's white face and realized he was experiencing the phenomenon of knowing something the Head of Intelligence did not.
Before Roy could explain, Alphonse's cherub voice rang, "Let me explain, Colonel. There's a lot to cover, and you two need to sleep."
Roy was familiar with the beginning of the story – how the Elric brothers' mother had died, how they had decided to use their talent and their father's research to design a human transmutation circle, how the transmutation had not only failed, but rebounded so horribly that the older one had lost his leg and the younger one had lost himself, nothing but his clothes left when the transmutation had finally stopped; how the older one had performed soul alchemy, trading his arm for his younger brother's soul.
Roy closed his eyes, not able to look his friend in the eye as Alphonse explained how Mustang had found them instead of their father during his recruitment expedition, and how, one way or another, the military police had found them before Mustang had come back for them.
"Father found out about the bond between my brother and me and decided to see what he could do with it. That's how we became the Conduit."
It was said so nonchalantly, like Alphonse had been commenting on the weather rather than his and his brother's quality of life.
"I knew you had a brother and that you had a special… bond," Maes said, his eyes sliding a bit accusingly towards Roy, "but I didn't know the nature of that bond – the armor, I mean."
"The colonel and the first lieutenant promised not to tell anyone."
Roy hated how grateful he was for that deflection. He wasn't sure how he felt about the way Maes's eyes softened and he looked away.
"So, if you lost your body when you and your brother attempted human transmutation and your brother put your soul in the armor, why did we see both together today in the Sanctum?"
The "Sanctum" had been the word the team had begun using to describe the laboratory where the Conduit was held. It was off-putting and falsely holy, just like everything else about the Conduit.
A contemplative pause, and then, "Father put me back together."
Roy felt his brow involuntarily rise into his hairline.
"Your father?" Maes said what they were both thinking.
"You call him the High Commander. Everyone else calls him the Light-Bringer. He and the other homunculi call him Father."
"The homunculi?" Roy took a turn speaking for his friend. "Homunculi are imp –"
"They call themselves the Emissaries, but what they and the Father – the Light-Bringer – really are is homunculi. The Emissaries are his children."
Roy and Maes exchanged a confused glance.
"How –"
"What do you want?"
The change in subject as well as tone – an odd thing to detect from a silver disk – was so abrupt that Roy jolted and Maes pulled away slightly.
"You all went through a lot of trouble to contact us. Way too much trouble for a bunch of questions. Especially the first lieutenant. She's with my body, and she can't hear what you say to me, but I can tell her, and I can tell you things she can't hear, either. Like how she's shaking and she told me she's just cold but I know that she's probably more afraid than she's ever been in her life. So what do you want so badly that you – all of you – are willing to go this far?"
For all that Roy has prepared and rehearsed, his mouth went dry and his tongue felt too swollen to use. Maes must have been suffering similarly because he was quiet for a moment, then coughed, then was quiet again before he found his words.
"We want to know if you and your brother are being held against your will."
The tension was palpable, so much so that Roy had to fight the urge to shake it off his shoulders.
"What do you mean?"
The voice was so guarded, so testing, that Roy could taste the secrets that lay beneath.
"Did you agree to this? To the Conduit?"
Alphonse was quiet for so long that Roy wasn't sure he was going to answer.
"Yes."
"Both of you?" Maes added to Roy's question.
Another beat of silence.
"Yes."
Roy and Maes glanced at each other again, and Roy saw the unknowable emotion he was feeling on his friend's face.
If the Conduit was willingly choosing to be used as the device they were, Roy and Maes couldn't use emancipation as an excuse for rebellion.
Most would probably think that any desire for such a rebellion would have been born from selfishness, considering the boon the Conduit was so often lauded for being. Most didn't know about the Amestrian government's hunger for land, resources, people.
It was with this in mind that Roy chose his next question.
"Is it true that your ability to create something from nothing is used for replicating large quantities of food?"
"Define large."
Despite himself, Roy felt the corner of his mouth quirk up in a smile.
"We can make certain amounts of certain resources in a certain amount of time. It really depends on what's being made and how much. Replication from non-matching materials can be a slow process because of radiation containment from particle fusion and decay, so the government keeps it to simply structured resources that don't spoil easily, like water. We can make more complicated things, like wood and bread, but the process takes longer."
"But you can do it?"
"Yes."
Roy and Maes looked at each other, contemplating the possibilities, the pros and cons of the choices they made. Maes had the cons in mind when he spoke.
"Do you replicate weapons?"
A noticeable pause.
"Yes."
The scales were even – the people thrived from the boundless food and died from the boundless guns and bullets.
"I think I know where this is going," Alphonse's voice sang from the watch. "So I'll save us the time and just tell you that the answer is no."
Roy blinked, swallowing his consternation as the unforgettable sights, smells, and sounds of the Transcriber's ribs being broken off like dead twigs flashed through his mind. Maes simply crossed his arms, looking less surprised and more challenged, like the Translator had demanded that he solve a mathematical equation in his head.
"No, huh?" Before Alphonse could repeat himself, Maes continued. "You said it yourself – we've all come a long way to get to this point. If your answer is non-negotiable, perhaps you could do us the service of telling us why."
Alphonse sighed – a bizarre sound, considering the disk had no lungs.
"I'll have to go back to the beginning. It's a long story."
Maes sat down in his chair and crossed his legs under the table.
"We're all ears."
Another un-contained sigh, this one exhausted rather than annoyed.
"I'll cover the basics tonight and start explaining everything else tomorrow. Your lieutenant is tired."
Your lieutenant.
Roy felt the magnanimity of what Riza had accepted, what he had doomed her to.
"First, you need to know about Philosopher's Stones. Second, what, exactly, a Homunculus is."
Maes nodded politely. "Okay."
Roy simply stared ahead.
"Third… are you either of you familiar with the lost kingdom of Xerxes?"
XXX
"I bet you think we're stupid."
The Transcriber didn't move beyond the rise and fall of his concave belly has he breathed.
Envy hissed, his tongue flicking from between his teeth like a serpent as his fingers lengthened into claws.
"I know you can hear me. Your sound processors might be mush, but you know I'm here."
Nothing but breathing.
Envy pressed one of his sharpened fingertips on the boy's eyelid, peeling it back with a gentleness that was opposite the cruel smile that stretched his face.
"Lucky for us, Father has decided to take your little stunt as an opportunity."
The golden eye didn't move, the pupil not dilating, not shrinking.
"That doesn't mean there won't be consequences."
Another finger on the lid of the other eye, another motionless, sightless stare at the ceiling.
"We'll redo your wires. But first, Father wants us to take a closer look at what you can do when your tank's only half full."
The sound of a door opening and closing, footsteps, and then Tucker was there, the melancholy from earlier only a memory. His grin was curious where Envy's was hungry, but the man's fingers twitched as if they were itching to pick up the nearest instrument.
Beneath them, above them, under them, in the cracks in the walls and the floor and the ceiling, the darkness seeped in, crawling up the leg of the table and twining around the Transcriber's arms and legs like the tails of happy cats.
Envy leaned in close, close enough that it could see its reflection in those empty eyes.
"Maybe this'll teach you and your brother to think the next time you feel like… well, anything."
The vines reached the Transcriber's head, the minuscule hands at the end digging into his skin, each finger like a hook.
When Envy raised its other warped hand, high enough that the fingers wavered right above the Transcriber's eyes, he moved.
His lips parted as if to speak and his head jerked to the right, as if he was considering trying to move his head, his eyes, out of range of those claws.
Envy laughed, watching the manic expression in the reflection.
"Too late to say sorry, pipsqueak."
XXX
On the other side of the Sentinel, Riza held the Translator to her chest, the thin blanket the technicians had given her serving no purpose other than to pull the boy closer to her when she heard the unmistakable sound of a head being broken open.
When she heard a sound like a giant egg cracking, the Transcriber laid a hand on her cold, shaking wrist.
"Sleep," his shrill child's voice said with the wisdom of a man. "Tomorrow will be long."
And so the plot thickens from the consistency of water to that of cheap pancake syrup that claims to be made from maple sap but everyone knows it's actually just water and sugar and synthesized chemicals designed to please your taste buds!
It might be boring for a while. I'll do my best to keep it interesting.
Happy Halloween, I guess.