My brain: It's been almost 2 years since you've updated your Ace Attorney story, 2 years since Causatum, and a year since your OG one. You need to prioritize.
Me: haha FMA hyperfixations responsibility avoidance go whee
The beginning, the true beginning, was far in the past, decades, centuries, before the Conduit had been born.
The events after that, the time between the beginning of it all and the beginning of the Conduit, were too vast, too numerous to go describe.
So Alphonse kept things simple, kept his explanation to a minimum – how a Xerxesian slave was chosen by the royal alchemist to help with an experiment, how that experiment ended up being the kingdom's, perhaps the world's, greatest mistake, how this mistake led to a lonely monster meeting the kindest woman to have walked the earth, how her kindness became love and how that love had led to the boy on the table and the boy in Riza's arms.
"Wait," Riza said, at the same time Roy said in another place, "So that means…"
"The immortal slave was my father," Alphonse's voice confirmed from nowhere, "and the Light-Bringer is the creation of the Xerxesian royal alchemist, using my father's blood."
Roy felt nauseous as the implication explained everything and yet nothing at the same time.
"So the resemblance between your brother and the High Commander?"
"Is not a coincidence," Alphonse confirmed again.
In the Translation room, Riza fought the urge to push the child off her lap, suddenly seeing something unnatural instead of young, something creaturesque instead of human.
Alphonse's – the Light-Bringer's – golden eyes blinked passively, not reacting to Hawkeye's reaction or the sounds of clinical discussion and the ripping of cartilage coming from the Transcriber's side of the Sanctum.
"The High Commander is my brother."
XXX
Roy wondered why he wasn't surprised to see the Bringer the next morning in the Transcription room, speaking softly with Tucker and Dorsey while Envy leaned against the wall, its smile lazy and its gaze self-satisfied.
Maes took his place at the head of the room, next to Envy, who rolled its head on its neck and shot him a grin full of sharpened teeth. At first Roy thought Maes was pretending not to notice the Homunculus – the Conduit's blood-kin, he thought with a suppressed shudder – and then saw the lack of blood in his friend's face and the way his throat bobbed convulsively.
Not only had Maes not noticed Envy, he was seeing something so terrible that Roy was guiltily grateful that he had been posted at the Transcriber's feet.
It took Roy a minute to register the tense silence. When he looked up, he found everyone looking at him.
And the empty place to his right.
Riza's absence hurt like a stubbed toe, even if she was just on the other side of that wall, which had been repaired to the point of an arched threshold where the Sentinel now stood, its metal body as still and empty as a body without a skeleton.
"So foregoing reconstruction isn't viable?"
The voice was deep and demanding, like the sound a lion makes as he prepares to roar. The voice broke Roy out of his thoughts and found everyone still staring at him.
Unintentionally, he locked eyes with the Light-Bringer.
Alphonse's yellow eyes, the Transcriber's golden hair, a familiar length to the nose, a noticeable line in the jaw.
Roy felt his breakfast swirl in his stomach and he swallowed to keep it down.
"That's correct, your Luminance," Dorsey said, watching Roy out of the corner of her eye more for a reason to not look at the Bringer than because she was interested in Mustang, which was unfortunate for him, because he had to swallow a second time to keep himself from laughing at the tackiness of the honorific.
The Bringer seemed to notice something because his expression hardened and any trace of humor Roy felt was burned away.
The Bringer hummed, his hands lost in the sleeves of the voluminous white robe he was wearing. Perhaps he thought it made him look holy. Roy thought he looked like he had just gotten out of the shower.
"Very well. Bring out the Translator and begin repairs."
"Yes, Luminance," Dorsey said immediately, then said, "should we bring her out as well?"
Envy sneered and the Bringer hummed again.
"Yes. In fact, I should like to test her. If she is to become a permanent fixture of the Conduit, I should like to be reassured of her… compatibility."
Roy swallowed a third time, this time for panic. The way Dorsey's head shot up and even Tucker's face paled certainly didn't help.
"Summon General Raven. This is, after all, partially of his doing."
Those yellow, venomous eyes were still focused on Mustang as he spoke.
XXX
"They are going to have you touch my brother."
It took Riza a terrible moment to realize he meant the Transcriber and not the Light-Bringer. The realization did not make her feel much better.
"They are going to process you through the Conduit," Alphonse continued, "and you must come out alive and whole."
Riza had had little to eat or drink in the past twelve hours – a cup of vegetable soup and some water for her dinner, a fried egg on a slice of toast and bitter coffee for her breakfast. Her body ached from the cheap sleeping bag she had been forced to spend the night in. She hadn't slept in the slightest and her eyes itched and her head was foggy with exhaustion.
She wasn't sure if the Translator had slept either, what with the way he was strapped in the wall, but if he was tried, he didn't show it. He sat on the floor with her now, wearing nothing but what looked like a loincloth made from the whitest cotton.
There were no technicians on this side of the Sanctum. Riza wondered if the Translation team had been given the day off or if they had been too frightened, too perplexed by what had happened.
Riza forced herself to take a deep breath and grounded herself by fingering the coarse blanket beneath her.
"And how would I go about doing that?"
Alphonse blinked slowly, owlishly.
"Do not deny. Accept it all. Most of all, do not turn back."
Riza heard the admonishment under the advice.
XXX
It had been an accident to look.
Roy hadn't meant to, hadn't wanted to, but when the Bringer approached him, some primal instinct made him move away even before the monster in a man's skin said, "Adjust your position, Colonel. Make way for the Conduit," in a quiet roaring that was laced with an unknowable danger.
So he had, every hair on his body standing as he passed the Bringer's flowing robe, then standing higher when he inevitably reached the other side of the room and took his new place beside Tucker.
He had seen brains before, seen the insides of skulls.
It didn't make it any less awful, any less nauseating, to see the ball of blood-filled gelatin pulled from its home, its surface dotted with tiny flags like a general's war map.
He stared longer than he should have at the way the seam of the Transcriber's head had been broken at the top of the bridge of his nose, at the half-moon cuts where the eyes had been.
The eyes…
It took Roy a terrible five seconds to find the eyes.
"Mesmerizing, isn't it?" Tucker asked beside him, accidentally or intentionally mistaking Roy's staring for fascination. "The full potential of humanity, small enough to hold in your hands. And so malleable," the way he said the word sounded like he was describing his favorite flavor from an ice cream parlor, "we can mold it to give us whatever we want. Whatever we need."
Tucker frowned then, and Roy followed his gaze and noticed the differences between the flags, how most of them were blue but the ones that were a rich red had been stuck into visibly duller, almost callous-like tissue. Roy realized the discoloration was caused by a lack of blood flow, which meant that the red flags were denoting what sections of tissue were dead.
"It can be aggravating, remaking the parts we break," Tucker mused, then smiled, "but no great gain comes from no great effort. I'm sure you are quite familiar with this, Flame Alchemist?"
Roy was glad when the Sentinel jerked to life, standing straight with a shakiness Roy had been sure hadn't been there before and moving with a dizziness he knew hadn't been there before. The distraction gave him an excuse not to answer.
As the armor took itself out of the way, Roy resisted the urge to run across the room.
Riza stepped through the arch with feline grace, the Translator resting in her arms like an idol being brought before an altar to accept a sacrifice. The sacrifice in question, brainless, eyeless, did nothing but breathe, but when Riza brought the Translator close enough to reach out and place a pale hand on the Transcriber's face, he did so with the relevance of a king who had been presented with an artifact of gold.
The Translator's expression was unreadable as he skated his fingers along the Transcriber's skin. He followed the nose to the divots for the blood-filled, useless eyes that had been pulled to the side, stroking the healthy, pink-tinged flesh of the brain organized with blue flags.
When his palm came to rest over the bloodless patch marked out by red flags, the ringing, crackling sound of alchemy filled the air.
In a way, it was like the dead tissue turned inside out, pulling itself out of the way to make room for a new layer of living flesh, vessels breaking and reforming and filling with blood, nerves deconstructing and reconstructing into recycled copies of their former selves.
Roy felt his lips moving, heard himself ask the question.
Tucker grinned smugly and from the other side of the room, in front of the newly repaired glass window, the Light-Bringer spoke with true reverence.
"This is but a fraction of the power we have gained from the Conduit. Beneath it all, the designs of God."
In the time it took for the Light-Bringer to answer Roy's breathless, "How?", the Translator's hand had smoothed over the Transcriber's brain, transforming the dead tissue into living, sparking nerves. It did not miss Roy how the Transcriber's body reacted to his brain being remade. As the Translator's hand travelled across the scarred lobes, the corresponding anatomy seemed to answer in confirmation of the Translator's success.
First the arm, then the neck, jerked, as if the Transcriber was trying to push Riza away or turn his head to the side, then the leg shifted, the foot turning inward and the toes splayed. The most terrible moment was when the mouth opened and the tongue flexed, as if the Transcriber were about to speak, then snapped closed as if he had become aware of his audience and thought better of it.
"Excellent, excellent!" Tucker crowed, wringing his hands like the Transcriber was a roast turkey and he had been offered the first cut of meat.
The Translator's hand arced as it reached the hindbrain, moving back the way it came and wiping down the Transcriber's face. As it did, the skin and bone at the edges of the broken shell of the skull seemed to reach for each other, the forehead pulling itself back together and sealing with an alchemical hiss.
Roy saw the shiny scar ringing the Transcriber's brow like a crown and, though he didn't know why, he knew the seam wasn't new.
The eyes rolled back into their sockets and were drained of the blood that had turned them black, the pierced irises reforming into perfect black circles inside gold. It was only then that the Translator took his hand away, watching his second half as if he expected the Transcriber give him a critique on his work.
The Transcriber blinked, once, twice, as if testing his eyes, the muscles in his face.
Then his eyes rolled to the side and stared into Roy's own.
Roy braced himself for something otherworldly, for the creature that lived in the Conduit to study him, to judge him.
He saw a boy.
A curious, confused boy who's gaze flashed with recognition, who's mouth moved to form a word, a name.
"Mustang?"
The voice was no more than a cracked whisper. To Roy, it couldn't have been louder if he had screamed.
Then the eyes flicked upwards towards the Light-Bringer – towards his brother – and the curiosity became despair, then resignation, then nothing as the Transcriber sank into himself, then deeper, until he disappeared completely.
An empty vessel, waiting to be filled with its next transmutation.
It did not have to wait long.
"Fetch the general," the Light-Bringer ordered. "He should supervise this transcription."
Colonel Dorsey was moving before the Bringer had finished speaking.
XXX
The smirk on Raven's face as he sauntered into the Transcription room made Roy want to set the man's hair on fire.
The general stopped a respectful distance from the Light-Bringer and bowed so low that Roy's urge to knock him on his ass was nearly irresistible.
"Your Luminance," he said with great pomp and little respect as he straightened.
The Light-Bringer didn't deign to acknowledge Raven, simply turned his head on his neck and locked gazes with the Translator. A bolt of tension electrified the air, though the expressions on both their faces remained blank.
"Proceed," the Bringer said, his eyes still on the Translator, though Roy doubted that was who he spoke to.
He realized who it was when he felt eyes burning through his skull and looked to find Riza staring at him, a myriad of emotions dancing in her gaze.
He saw fear there, raw and unashamed; scientific curiosity, and of all things, anticipation.
He saw no regret.
It was this that gave him solace as Riza adjusted her grip on the Translator, shifting his weight so that she could free an arm to reach out and gently, almost lovingly, place a hand on the Transcriber's head, pushing his hair out of his eyes in a gesture that was oppositely tender to the malice she knew was behind the order.
Riza had chosen this. If this destroyed her, Roy was not to blame.
The solace was welcome, even if Roy did not believe it.
He felt rather than saw the moment of contact.
The Transcriber's widened for a moment before sinking back into his head and Riza stiffened as if she had been stabbed, but these were nothing compared to the yawning wrongness Roy felt open beneath them, like the earth had opened its mouth and they were a single movement, a single breath, from tumbling down its throat.
The Translator closed his eyes, sighing and relaxing as if he had decided to fall asleep listening to Hawkeye's heartbeat.
Then he grinned, slowly and wickedly, and Roy braced himself, but did not prepare him for when the Translator opened his eyes and the thing from before looked through them.
The creature lazily turned and tilted the Transcriber's head so that it was looking at Riza's chin. Riza either could not or would not lower her head to meet him. Her face had gone pale, her throat bobbing as if she was fighting the urge to vomit.
"Look at me."
Roy found himself hoping, praying, that she wouldn't obey.
When she did, Roy watched every muscle move in her neck and head, expecting them to betray her and throw themselves out, snapping the bone and brain beneath.
What he didn't expect was for the monster in the Translator's body to reach the Translator's hand to Riza's face, cupping her jaw with a gentleness that felt like a mockery of the creature's true nature.
"What do you see?"
Riza didn't answer, simply stared unwaveringly, unchallengingly, into those eyes that were full of nothing and everything all at once.
"I'll tell you what I see."
The hand on her jaw crabbed its way to her ear, pushing a stray lock of hair behind it.
"I see a walking, breathing, sack of unforgivable sin stretched over a gross misallocation of common minerals."
The Translator's fingers twirled around the hair.
"I see a monster laying itself before the hunter, begging him to shed its skin."
The fingers curled into a fist and Roy realized what was about to happen, barely able to stop himself from reaching out and slapping that tiny hand away.
"I see a thief, mourning over her gold and jewels, praying for her victims' blessing."
The fist fell and the hair came away with a ripping sound, blood welling from Riza's torn scalp. Her eyes filled with pained tears but she said nothing, did nothing, other than breathe and stare into that pitiless gaze.
The monster frowned with the Translator's mouth and dropped the hair. It fluttered onto the Transcriber's sunken stomach, as forgotten and insignificant as the Transcriber himself.
"There is no such thing as forgiveness, You accrue misdeeds like stones and when you die, those stones will fall, crushing everyone foolish enough to be near you."
When Riza didn't react, the frown turned into a faux sympathetic grin, and the Translator's hand fell further, brushing the air over the Trascriber's chest.
"Were you hoping he would forgive you if you showed remorse? If you pretended to care? Do you really think anything you could do could equal what has been done?"
The tears in Riza's eyes were still there, not falling, but not disappearing either. The creature's smile became genuine, seeming to realize it had found the crack in her wall of silence.
"Let's ask him, then."
There was a hissing noise and Roy looked passed Riza to see Envy's eyes had slotted and his nails had sharpened into claws.
It looked like anger. Roy didn't think it was.
His suspicion was furthered by a strangled choking noise and the sound of retreating footsteps.
"Hold, General," the Light-Bringer ordered, his eyes glimmering with something close to amusement, "or is the Conduit not under your care?"
The footsteps stopped, but Raven's shaky, frightened breathing was loud and heavy.
The Translator's fingers touched the center of the Transcriber's chest, where the vertical scar met the horizontal one. There was a moment of what felt like tense teasing as everyone waited for what they knew would happen, what had to happen.
The Translator's palm pressed onto the blade of the Transcriber's ribcage and the Conduit came together.
All three parts of it.
It was not Riza who stiffened as if she had been turned into a statue.
It was not Riza who turned her head to stare unblinkingly into Roy's eyes.
It was not Riza, could never be Riza, who spoke with the damnation of all the devils in Hell.
"Look at what you've created. I am the eater of worlds. Feed me."
Raven took several steps back. He probably would have taken more if the Light-Bringer hadn't said, "Hold, General."
Dorsey was glancing between Roy and Riza – the Conduit – and as realization dawned, hatred curdled it just as quickly.
The Light-Bringer simply hummed, tilting his head in a kind of bored curiosity.
Riza's hand, clawed where it had once been gentle, reached for him, stopping right above his chest, as if the Conduit was considering ripping his heart out with his lieutenant's fingers.
"We are gods. We are monsters. We create to devour."
The layered voices of the Transcriber, Translator, and Riza were like a chorus of fury that burned Roy to his bones. The fire turned to ice as the anger twisting Riza's face melted into despair.
"Look what I've become. Look at what you've done."
Then the ice evaporated into something that wasn't quite flames, a scalding vapor of apathy that turned the anguish on her face into, of all things, amusement.
"But she's a small price to pay. After all, what's a life worth in the end?"
No one dared move in the silence that followed.
Roy didn't dare to breathe.
There was no transition, no clear moment of ending, that prompted the Conduit to lift the Translator's hand from the Transcriber's chest.
The hand pulled away leisurely, sliding off the Transcriber's ribs like an empty sleeve. When the tips of the fingers left the skin, Riza seemed to drain, like her soul had been punctured and the excess was free to escape.
Riza's eyes blinked, once, twice – and that was her, staring at Roy, and she was breathing and trembling as if her blood had been frozen inside her veins.
"You have crossed the bridge."
Riza's attention snapped back to the Conduit, as did Roy's, and to his shock, the expression on the Translator's face was a sorrowful pride, as if it was impressed with the terrible choice she had made.
"May you never live to regret it."
The double-meaning of the words was not lost on either of them as Riza, queued by some signal known only to her, lifted her hand from the Transcriber's head.
The Transcriber made a gasping sound, as if he mourned the loss of the warmth of Riza's hand, the his empty eyes slid closed and he lay peacefully on the table, the rise and fall of his chest the only differentiation between sleep and death.
Footsteps sounded and Roy would have thought it was Raven if he hadn't spotted Colonel Dorsey, walking backwards and shaking her head, loathing contorting her face into something ugly. She mouthed something – Roy couldn't hear it or read it on her lips, but he guessed the intent behind it – and turned on her heels, stomping through the arch in the wall.
"Behold," the Light-Bringer said in the echo of her receding steps, "your Mother."
XXX
There were so many things – so many things – to explain to the rest of the team.
Mustang knew he should go to them, do his best to catch them up and inevitably fail, but he couldn't bring himself to move as Tucker pulled the symbol-covered sheet over the Transcriber's head, as if he was a piece of furniture that needed putting away.
"Why did it say my name?"
"Hmm?" Tucker asked as he made sure the sheet covered the entirety of the table and boy upon it. Before Roy could repeat his question, Tucker answered. "Oh, he says the most random things after a reconstruction. It's proof that the procedure is successful. It's not at all uncommon for him to say others' names. He's said my own name after more than one reconstruction."
Roy tried to picture what the Transcriber's face would look like as he spoke the name of the man who had torn him open and then put him back together.
"Sometimes we can trace the word he says to something obvious – you, for example," Tucker continued and Roy fought the urge to cringe. "Sometimes the word he chooses leaves us scratching our heads. One of his favorites seems to be 'strawberries,' though we have no clue as to why. Dorsey thinks it's meaningless sparks of reactivating nerves in the brain - sleep taking, if you will."
Strawberries.
The word echoed in Roy's head as Envy escorted them out of the sanctum, out of High Command, and snarled at them to keep their mouths shut about what they'd seen and heard.
It needn't have bothered.
With Riza gone and Maes stone-faced, he didn't have anyone to talk to.
XXX
"What does that mean?"
Riza's voice trembled and she didn't care if the Translator – Alphonse – heard it.
Alphonse had, after all, been a part of her less than an hour ago.
He hadn't been a part of her like a finger or an ear. He'd been a part of her like her lungs, her heart – an essential piece that she rarely, if ever, thought about, couldn't imagine being without because its existence was dependent on her existence, as well as the reverse.
And just like how a coroner could see the tar in the lungs, Alphonse had seen the stained parts of her inner self, flaws and growths she hadn't known were there until someone had gone looking.
Riza could no longer hide anything from the Conduit because she had nothing left to hide.
When Alphonse didn't answer right away, she thought he had perhaps misunderstood the question. When he finally looked up from where he sat in her lap, Riza sitting on the sleeping bag on the floor, the light in his gaze was a color she couldn't quite make out.
"It means this is your home now. Forever."
As the cold ball of stone in her stomach became ice, as thoughts of Rebecca, of Hayate, of Roy, flashed through her mind, the light in the boy's eyes shifted and she recognized it.
"It also means you are now one of the most powerful people in Amestris."
As the guilty relief swam in Alphonse's eyes, she debated on whether or not to tell him that he had nothing to be guilty for because this had been her choice.
Hers and Roy's.
Then, seemingly completely from nowhere, Alphonse pressed his sun-forgotten head of hair to her so that his head was resting just underneath her chin, and asked her what her favorite food was.
It took Riza a moment to realize what he had said. When she did, she answered with her own question.
"What?"
"What's your favorite food?" Alphonse repeated, then elaborated. "If you're going to be stuck here and you can have almost anything you want, you might as well make the best of it."
Riza thought for a moment, debating whether or not she should fight the urge to laugh at this sudden characteristic childish behavior.
She decided to compromise with herself.
"What's your favorite food?" she asked him, letting her chin lower to rest on the crown of his head.
Alphonse huffed in amusement, as if it was Riza was being childish.
"Beef stew. With carrots and milk," then, unprompted, "it's what we ate at home."
Home.
A house on a grassy hill in front of a clear summer sky, the smell of growing crops and the sound of bleating sheep.
It was her fault, if only partially, that he would never see it again.
The thought made the reality of her situation more bearable. She was not a prisoner, this was justice.
A life for a life, a home for a home.
She closed her eyes, a black and white dog swimming in her mind's eye.
"Beef stew, then. With milk and carrots."
XXX
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Everyone Loves A Villain