Fic: Untold lives
Title: Untold lives
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist manga
Characters:Sheshka, Gracia, Elysia. Possible Sheshka/Furey and Sheshka/Winry
Rating: G
Summary: My chpt 104 fic. A piece of Sheshka's life
Warnings: spoilers for chpt 104
Chapter Length: 1500+
Crossposted tofma_fiction
When every book she had clung to was its own proud world, Private Sheshka had little trouble accepting that the Hughes’ lived in a different world from her. A family saga full of comforting friends and unbreakable bonds. Still, they made her feel like they had no one else, she knew deep down she had no one like them, and if she had no proper place in their lives, neither did murder, or grief.
Of course, she wished General Hughes hadn’t been shot. But if he had lived, Gracia would have been another vanishing acquaintance. There would still have been a storybook on Sheshka’s lap-but never even another woman’s child.
“Oh, erm....next Tuesday? I’ll definitely watch; unless I forget or something! The last one we had was 1564-I mean, er, the last one visible in Central...”
“Bookworm lady remembers everything!”
“Haha, only sometimes I forget to! Elysia, how about some more painting? Maybe the knight and the hydra in the story-yes!-I’ll come and see, then we’ll read the last chapter.” Elysia hopped down, and trotted to the kitchen.
“Have you been well, Sheshka?” Even prostrate on the sofa after a hard day at the flowershop, Gracia’s easy manner inspired affectionate envy.
“Oh yes-uh, we’ve had lots of paperwork after the Drachman and Cretan incursions, and I’m reading this wonderful 12th century fantasy and, er, some other books...I started going out with the girls from work, sometimes, if I’m not working too late…Um, so, I meant to ask, if you’d heard anything of the Elric brothers...and their friend-wasn’t it Winry-who visited with them...?”
“Oh, Winry? Heavens, she wrote, but she always had her work in Rush Valley; I suppose she must still be there. I didn’t know you were friends.”
“Not really, I only met her here once....I remember it perfectly. I mean, like I always remember...”
“I’d certainly love to see her again as well. Perhaps she’ll finally have made Edward confess.” Sheshka’s eyes rested on the frames of her glasses. Gracia smiled impishly, “How are you getting on with Sergeant Furey, Sheshka?”
“Eh? No, no, we’re only penpals because we chatted sometimes and I, we, we were worried about his posting to the South-”
“So you’re waiting for him to come home safe. Just like Maes and I.”
“Uh, goodness! But, Mrs Gracia, I’m in the army too.”
Gracia implied with her eyes that female genre conventions weren’t so easily reversed. Sheshka couldn’t get out that Kain hadn’t replied to her last letter. Her previous irregularly posted scrawls had all been answered within a week, and she couldn’t imagine that he’d been killed, so that probably just made it another untold story without the energy to conclude itself.
He was a nice boy. Along with her willingness to listen to radio-talk, that had probably been the only reason he’d kept sitting with her. He was organised, irreconcilably more so than her, and read the books she’d lent him only very slowly. He was as different from Winry as a technical manual from a modern adventure.
“Does Winry make Automail in Rush Valley? Her own proper work...I, um, feel like I can only dream about such confidence, Mrs Gracia.”
“Just hold your head up, darling. Don’t act like you’re ashamed of your own breasts.”
Sheshka’s embarrassed splutter was cut off by a splat from the kitchen. As Sheshka peered in, Elysia buried herself in the young woman’s skirt. Green paint dripped from a chair besides the paper-covered table.
“Bookworm ladeee! Looks horrible, I messed up, Mummy’s gonna be so cross...”
Sheshka looked at the painting of the knight and the hydra. Elysia was a good draughtsgirl; the knight looked truly heroic with his thin black beard and unruffled smile. A stray pink smudge covered his chest, as if something had frightened the artist.
The hydra frightened Sheshka. The bulging limbs, tombstone teeth, the hair-like crest. All the flat, wailing faces. The alien intentions that clawed their share from the tiny life Sheshka had dared to hold. Thinking to grub her little share of warmth, without the courage to stand with a child against the dark otherworld
People can reach from other worlds, but not a picture by itself; Sheskha repeated it as she passed over a silent panic, and stroked Elysia’s back.
“Elysia...I believe you’ve got a magical gate inside you. If you look through, you can see another world, that’s just as you want it to be.”
“Uh...that’s just imagining...”
“Sometimes, you can’t go through the gate, Elysia. But you can always, always, look at the world you want to see, and not anything else. Um...should we finish reading the story, and see what happens?”
They sat under the table, and Sheshka finished telling how the knight stabbed the hydra through the heart, and rescued the princess. By the end, Elysia was making wet, hiccuppy laughs.
“It’s just like going through a magic gate when you read stories, Miss Sheshka!”
“Well, your mother says I look through the gate, even when I could really walk through-”
“-or when there’s paint to clear up before it dries?” Gracia, who had already snuck into the kitchen and cleaned most of the paint, put her arms around both girls’ necks. Sheshka’s face almost burnt away.
“I’m sorry, mummy.”
“I’m not angry, Elysia, I love you too much.” Her arm softly tightened around Sheshka, who let out a tiny sigh.
Elysia never said where her idea for the strange painting had come from. Sheshka and Gracia both wanted to throw the picture of the monster struggling with the knight away, but she decided herself to keep it.
* * *
The next week dissolved under work; until Sheshka could finally pull Childe Harold out of a stack, and read. Only her eyes and her breath moved; now slowly, then quickening.
In paper-drowned nights, Sheshka sometimes believed she was living someone else’s life. She’d never expected to become a fileclerk-but it was a safe career where every choice naturally issued from every previous page, like a classic structuralist romance. After the pulp page of a murder tale had fallen between two leaves, however, Sheshka had imagined a girl who found and finished that other story. How the daily role of her life might appear to a Sheshka outside the books, in a role that excited and terrified.
Closing her book with a cat-like sigh, Sheshka hauled a pile of records onto her desk, calculating the reading time she would have after her work. She switched on the surplus military radio Kain had given her, for a more manageable distraction than her new Artugean playscript.
Thirty minutes later, Lieutenant Breda finished speaking.
She was going to lose her job-where was Kain?-Colonel Mustang had killed Lieutenant Ross, and never visited the Hughes’ again-the government hadn’t saved General Hughes from dying-if Kain had followed his hero, they would shoot him.
Sheshka kept writing.
The High Command Meeting on the response to Ishbalan terrorism, Weds 16th March, 1915. Maybe the schedule she wrote would bear no relation to what was said. Maybe the meeting would never happen at all. Lieutenant Breda was frightened of dogs, Colonel Mustang dozed in his chair every warm afternoon-her pen was shaking-she could remember Kain’s smile. Her memory cried out that the story she had been dreaming could not end with death.
Dear Winry.
What have you been doing? I’m sure you’ve been saving lives, or doing something heroic, or not just sitting at home. Elysia’s well-she’d love to see you again. Give my thanks again to the Elrics-they were really like wizards, magicking a timid bookworm like me among so many wonderful people. Wish you were here. We never even properly met, we’re so different as well, but I know we could know each other, you could help me understand what to do with all my feelings, because I think everything that makes a woman good is in you, Winry-I can’t write it, and nobody could.
Sheshka stared at what she had written. It could be sent. She stared at her wall of books, the heaped worlds that roared in her perfect memory. From outside, every word was unchangeable, each story self-sufficient in its cover. It was easy to live like that, until there was red around Gracia’s eyes or blood on your mother’s sheets, until you had to know why General Hughes had been murdered, if Colonel Mustang had really been looking for that, and found it. You needed someone to hold you and be more than a stranger. Because stories could be scary, when you were alone, and people did things you didn’t understand.
How late was it…? No, the eclipse. Springing out of her chair-falling, books crashing down. The pressure.
“Cuh..cuh...Kain.”
On the day Armestris would count its future years from, Sheshka felt nothing of Winry, the Hughes or Kain Furey in the howling mass of souls. But she would never regret the memory, because she knew that for an hour she had been one with all of them.