justifying the means - part 2
“How’s Elric?”
First words out of Roy’s mouth. No How’s your beautiful daughter? No I hope your lovely wife is well. No I apologize for adding, once again, to your insurmountable backlog of work.
How’s Elric?
“Roy, my friend, you have a problem.”
Roy cast him an irritable sidelong look. “You think I don’t have a right to worry?”
“What does Hawkeye have to say about all this?”
Roy shrugged, letting his eyes drift across his desk until they found Tucker’s file. He pounced on it as a distraction.
And people said he was so subtle.
“Tucker was executed yesterday,” he reported. And there was another candidate for things Maes might have liked to hear before How’s Elric?
“Was he? That’s funny, because I brought a whole team all the way out here to East Nowhere to pick him up.”
Roy gave Maes an inscrutable look. “Administrative error.”
Oh, so that’s how it was. If he was reading Royspeak aright, one of the soldiers had seen what Tucker had done and had shot him in the head. And Roy hadn’t disagreed, hence execution. Ah, the east. No wonder they’d produced Ed. “What exactly did he do?”
Roy closed the file gently and pushed it across the desk to Maes. “The state alchemist examiners found it strange that Tucker’s wife disappeared when he made his first talking chimera. They found it more strange that his daughter disappeared when he made his second. They turned the investigation over to me.”
Maes deeply did not want to touch that file. But he’d done more awful things in the name of duty.
Nina Tucker had been a beautiful girl. Not as beautiful as his Elicia, thank God, but uncomfortably close. “I assume she died?”
“No,” Roy said with the professional coolness that meant he’d like to scream. “No. I suppose you could take her back to Central. But I don’t think you’d be doing her a favor.”
Maes closed the file again. “What would be doing her a favor, Roy?”
“Poison.”
Maes broke eye contact and studied the scarred surface of Roy’s desk. He was familiar with necessity, few more so. But he had a weakness when it came to little girls who looked at all like his daughter.
“Of course,” Roy said carefully, “There’s a very small-vanishingly small-chance that you might find an alchemist who could do something for her.”
Maes looked up at Roy, whose expression wasn’t promising. “Vanishing, eh?”
“Nearly nonexistent, or so I would think. But I haven’t studied much biological alchemy.”
The kid who’d tried to bring his mother back from the dead, on the other hand, had probably studied biological alchemy no one else had ever heard of. Assuming he would be willing to help.
“I’ll take her back with me,” Maes decided. It was worth the chance. “And if it doesn’t work…I’ll take care of it.”
Roy nodded grimly. “I’ll report that she died in custody.”
“I’m stuck in East until the morning train,” Maes went on, deciding that was enough depressing for one conversation. “Get a drink with me and I’ll catch you up on all the Demon kid gossip. And all the other gossip. Though I still haven’t had time to figure out what’s up with the bar.”
“Neither have I,” Roy growled. Oh, Madame was holding out, huh? Uh oh. “I’ll see you here at seven?”
“You’re on,” Maes said, pushing to his feet and telling himself he was too young to feel old.
* * *
When Maes got back to Central, Ed was waiting for him on the platform. The same platform that Gracia and Elicia were waiting on. Apparently someone (Madame Christmas?) had told Ed where Maes had gone and when he was likely to get back. And now here he was, within twenty feet of Gracia and Elicia.
Maes instantly wished he’d never left East.
But no, he was being unfair. As soon as Ed saw that his family was there, he drifted away and lost himself in the crowd. Maes didn’t see him again until the next day just outside the confines of the base, where he got accosted. Ed’s social graces were just as unpredictable as everything else about him.
“While you were gone,” Ed said casually, not bothering with any kind of greeting or mention of the day before, “some guy called Scar blew into town and killed somebody.”
“Scar’s in Central?” Maes tried to work up some panic, but mostly he just felt tired and annoyed. Not least because he’d had to hear this from Ed instead of from his own network. What the hell was he paying them for? “Again? Would it be immoral of me to just ask you to kill him?”
Ed smirked and shot him a surprised, considering look. “Maybe I could take that job,” he said. “But I’m kinda torn. Word is he’s after Kimbley. Word is he’s been chasing Kimbley all over the country for the last month. And shit, if somebody wants to kill Kimbley…I don’t wanna get in his way. Right?”
Maes sighed. “Shame about the bystanders, though.”
Ed shrugged. “It was just some army guy,” he said, then apparently realized who he was talking to. “Uh, no offence.”
Maes sighed more pointedly. “I’ve been meaning to ask you a question, Ed.”
“Good for you.”
Apparently he’d used up all of his social grace for the week. “About Madame Christmas.”
Maes had been hoping for a dramatic reaction to the name. Failing that, any reaction would have done. Any reaction except, “Yeah, what about her?” and slightly raised eyebrows, which was what he got.
“You said you didn’t know anyone in Central, and yet you seem to know Madame Christmas. Why is that?”
“I’d never met her. But she’s famous, right? She’s freaky about information, kinda like you. Besides, she was pretty much bound to know me.”
“She was?”
Ed favored him with a pitying look. “Yeah. Like she’d let someone like me that close to Mustang without getting my story. She’s not fucking stupid.” His look said clearly, Unlike some people.
Apparently Ed was of the opinion that Maes had not done a background check on him. Little did Ed know.
“I’d talked to her before,” Ed went on without waiting for a response, “but on the phone. She got hold of me when I got here. So there you go.”
“What do you two talk about?”
“Retirement. Overthrowing the government. Football. Shit, did you seriously think I was gonna answer that?”
Apparently this wasn’t on the need-to-know list. And Madame Christmas wasn’t talking, either. What was more, Maes couldn’t bug her place, because she would find out, and then he would die.
“About homunculi,” Maes tried.
“No,” Ed said.
“This is not the most helpful conversation we’ve ever had, Ed.”
“I already told you what I know. You can kill ‘em. After I do more research, I’ll know more, and then I’ll tell you more. Nothin else to say.”
So Ed didn’t want to talk about the homunculus or about how he’d killed it. But why? Also, unacceptable.
“You said Envy had ‘people’ in him. What did that mean?”
Maes was getting good at recognizing when Ed was uncomfortable. It was the same body language that, in normal people, translated to ‘homicidally enraged.’
“I mean he had people in him,” Ed snapped, leaning aggressively forward, metal hand in a fist, useful for punching or stabbing. “He changed shapes. And in one of ‘em, you could see all the people-like zombies, not working right. Crying out. So that’s why they live so long, cuz they stole a bunch of people. That enough explanation for you? We gotta keep talkin about this? God, you’re such a-”
He broke off and turned away.
This might have been the most impressive thing about young Edward Elric. As off-balance as he was, as violent and unpredictable, he still had this-this ability to notice the edge just before he stepped over it. The ability to pull himself back.
This was probably the ability that went missing when Ed faced a known criminal.
He turned back to Maes abruptly, now looking Edward-standard: irritable, aggressive, and slightly insane, but not actively dangerous. “There anything else?”
Maes hesitated to bring this up after all the drama of the conversation before (shape-changing, quasi-immortal cannibals-it just kept getting better, didn’t it?), but he didn’t feel it could afford to wait. Ed had a habit of disappearing just when Maes would most like to see him.
“One more thing,” he said. “Then I’ll let you research to your heart’s content.”
He led the way away from the base (God help him, he was going to be at least three hours late to work), away from the center of town, down into the more industrial areas. He’d rented a warehouse there, and outfitted it like a girl’s room.
He could see that Ed didn’t approve. “It’s a chimera,” he said flatly.
“True,” Maes agreed.
“He-llo,” said Nina the chimera.
Ed whipped to face Maes. “Chimeras don’t talk.”
“They do if they’re part-human.” That was a horrible look on Ed’s face. “Can you fix her?” Maes asked quickly.
“Fix a chimera?” Ed blinked. “Like pull them back apart? No.”
“You seem very sure. This hack managed to put them together; isn’t there some kind of research you can do on how to separate them?”
“You can stir cream into coffee, Lieutenant Colonel, but you can’t stir it back out. Chaos always wins. It’s not really up for debate.”
“There are ways to separate coffee from cream.”
“Sure, if you take everything back to component parts. But I’m gonna give you some information for free, okay? Living things don’t like being taken back to component parts. Take it from me, cuz I know.”
They both stood in silence for a moment, watching Nina. She’d apparently forgotten all about them, and was pawing through her toys.
That was that, then. Maes had done so little for her, and yet already there was nothing more he could do.
“What is she?” Ed asked, flat and cold.
“A little girl and the family dog.”
Ed snarled, but got himself under control when Nina jumped and looked their way. “Who did this to her?” he demanded.
“Her father,” Maes answered, unsurprised to find his voice sounding as cold as Ed’s.
“Shit. Fathers.”
Ah. Roy had mentioned daddy issues. “I’m a father.”
“Yeah?” Ed cast him a cool, considering look that gave Maes plenty of time to regret having mentioned his family at all. “Well, try not to be a fuck-up. But you’ve got long odds, cuz I’d say this is typical.”
“Not typical, Ed.”
“Not unusual, though.”
Maes was too tired to deal with Ed’s psychoses at the moment. “I’ll take care of this. I’m sorry for bringing you all the way out here.”
“Yeah, you should be sorry. You’re gonna take care of it how?”
“It isn’t your problem.”
“The hell it isn’t. You can’t show me this and then just expect me to fuck off!”
The chimera made a small distressed noise; apparently she didn’t like angry voices. Ed stepped back and leaned against the wall behind him, folding his arms across his chest and tucking his head down slightly. It was the most human Maes had ever seen him look.
“Only one thing you can do for her now, isn’t there?” Ed said, quiet, flat, and low. Then, “Why’d you bring her to me? I can’t save anybody.”
“I’m betting that no one could have saved her. I didn’t really expect anything from you, Ed. It just seemed worth the chance, with your history of human transmutation.”
Before Ed could respond to that, Nina shuffled over to him, sniffed him, and decided he was her new best friend. And they said animals were decent judges of character.
Or maybe it was the girl who liked Ed.
“Play,” she said.
“How’re you gonna do it?” Ed asked.
“Roy suggested poison,” Maes said, noting distantly the emptiness of his own voice. He himself had been thinking a quick, well-placed knife rather than poison. It seemed cleaner. It wasn’t a thought he was going to share with Ed or Roy, though.
“You don’t have to poison her, for fuck’s sake,” Ed muttered, trying not to upset Nina. “And he’s supposed to be the smooth one. But you can’t…you can’t let her go to a lab, and you can’t keep her here forever. In this cage. Someone would find her, and it’d turn out the same.”
“Wanna…play…” whispered the chimera, bumping her head against his knee.
“Yeah,” Ed said to her, so softly, so kindly. So utterly unlike himself. He knelt down to scratch her behind the ears. “I can’t fix her,” he murmured after a pause. “But I can do better than poison.”
And to Nina, he said, “We can play as much as you want after your nap, okay?”
“Wanna…play,” she insisted.
“I think you’re tired.” Ed pressed his hands together under his chin gently, like praying. He reached out to pet her, and Maes could see the faint spark of alchemy. “You are, right? Take a nap, then we’ll play.”
The chimera made a childishly grumpy noise, but wobbled a little.
“Yeah, just put your head down,” Ed murmured. “I’ll be here. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Nina sank to the floor. She put her head in Ed’s lap while he petted her, whispering nothing, reassurances, what anyone would whisper to a tired child. What Maes would whisper to Elicia.
She looked so peaceful there. So peaceful that it seemed only natural for her breathing to slow, to gradually stop, natural for her to lie completely still.
“There,” Ed said after a long silence, staring down at her, voice rough as if the previous softness had scraped his throat raw. “Dirty work done.”
It was easy to forget how horrifying alchemists could be. “How?”
“Just messed with her blood chemistry.” Ed said it casually, but he didn’t look up from the body. “Death by oxygen deprivation. It’s supposed to be painless.” He hesitated, wiped his sleeve across his face. “It looked painless.”
“It looked peaceful.” Maes could give him that much. He’d taken this horrible job from Maes; he was owed that much. “Much better than poison.” Or a knife.
“Ha, yeah.” Ed set Nina’s head gently on the floor, stood, brushed off his pants. “Stick to what you’re good at, right. Well, I’m out. Sorry to ditch you with the body, but. Got shit to do.”
Maes watched him walk to the door, called out before he went through it. “Ed.”
“What?” Ed snapped, back tense, refusing to turn around.
“Thank you.”
Ed reached out and grabbed the doorframe, gave one harsh bark of laughter. “Yeah,” he said. Then he was gone.
* * *
“Roy, take Ed back to East.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“That’s just it. In this case, he only did what I set him up to do.”
“…Tell me.”
“Ed didn’t approve of poison.”
“He killed it.”
“He held her head and petted her and talked to her and pulled the oxygen out of her blood. She went to sleep.”
“He…”
“It really isn’t a goal of mine to make him more crazy than he already is.”
“Where is he?”
“And I know this because he’s so forthcoming about his plans?”
“Maes, don’t-I was the one who told you to-”
“And we were both thinking that I would be the one to handle it if Ed couldn’t change her back. I know. We were thinking of him as a real boy, which he isn’t. It was stupid. He saw through me in ten seconds flat, told me I was an incompetent when it came to killing people, and did it himself.”
“…Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.”
“Bringing him back to East won’t keep him from trying to destroy himself, Maes.”
“Is that what you think this was?”
“In part. Most likely.”
“God, Roy.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Well, that’s at least three of us.”
* * *
Ed didn’t find Maes until after work the next day. Maes had been beginning to worry that he wouldn’t see Ed for weeks, or possibly ever again.
But Ed showed up in time to walk Maes most of the way home, acting like someone who had never so much as heard of a chimera called Nina. Maes wondered how many things like this he’d had to forget in his short life. Just another day in Amestris.
“So, Scar,” Ed said, all business. “You were right. He is a fucking psycho.”
Maes cleared his throat and silently vowed to be at least as professional as the broken teenager. “Well, he’s a serial killer.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ed said dismissively. Maes supposed that being a serial killer yourself would give you an unusual perspective on this kind of thing. “But I thought he was just after the military. Shit, that’d be like a holy crusade.”
So Maes wasn’t going to go entirely unpunished for yesterday.
“But he’s takin’ down bystanders,” Ed went on without so much as a sideways glance. “Innocent ones, I mean. Just random people. And he’s sorry about it, but not sorry enough to stop doin’ it. So I’d better wipe him out. I can take down Kimbley myself, after.”
Maes digested that in silence.
“Unless you got another job for me,” Ed muttered bitterly.
This was only going to get worse the longer Maes let it go on. “Ed, I’m sorry about yesterday.” No reason for both of them to dance around the subject. “I didn’t call you there to kill her. If I’d known the alchemy was impossible, I wouldn’t have brought her back to Central at all.”
“Shit, you know, I do kill people,” Ed snarled, turning to face Maes, eyes blazing. “It’s what I do. That is what I do. Makes total sense to have me kill people, it’s my fucking job.”
“No,” Maes insisted quietly. “You kill the dregs of society. It’s not your job to kill little girls, and that’s not what you do.” Killing innocents wasn’t something he’d ever done. Maes had made sure of that when Roy started becoming disturbingly fond of him.
Ed shrugged, but some of the hysterical tension left his shoulders, and he stopped attacking passerby with his eyes. “Whatever. All too fuckin late now. I want to get into First Branch-I wanna see what they’ve got on human transmutation.”
Maes took a breath, feeling he’d narrowly avoided a tornado. For the moment. “Isn’t that illegal?”
“Yeah. But it’ll be there anyway.” He visibly considered a slur against the military, but restrained himself. “So can you get me in?”
Had Maes actually fixed things that easily? Was an apology all Ed had wanted?
Did he really have to be depressing as well as scary?
“I can get you in,” Maes said, “as long as you act like an informer.”
Ed snorted. “You can get an informer in, but not somebody who minds their own goddamn business? Fuck, that’s the military for you.”
“You don’t mind your own business, Ed.”
“No. But you didn’t tell me to pretend like I do.”
He had a point.
* * *
Edward Elric in a library was a sight to behold.
A little of the tension eased, the movements became somewhat less abrupt, the eyes a bit less wild. It was almost as if he believed, at a subconscious level, that the books would protect him. That he was safe in a library.
Which meant, when you reversed the reasoning, that he must never feel safe anywhere else. Oh, Ed.
After some wandering-because, at ease or not, Ed clearly had no intention of asking anyone for directions, and Maes generally sent his minions to fetch him books instead of coming to the library himself-they found the alchemy section.
“So you said you were planning to look up human transmutation?” Maes asked, partly because he was curious, partly because Ed had been quiet for so long that it was making him nervous.
“That and some other stuff.” Ed reached out to touch the spines of the books and looked…wistful. “Haven’t done real research for years,” he muttered, likely more to himself than to Maes. “Got all kinds of catching up to do,” he added with a scowl. “Dunno about any new research. Mostly did biological stuff back when, much good it did me. Haven’t even looked into rumors about the Philosopher’s Stone-just saw it in passing and thought it was bullshit.”
“So this will take you a while,” Maes said.
“Take me freakin months, and by then, probably the world will’ve ended. Shit.”
For all that, though, Maes noticed that he didn’t look too upset by the prospect of months in the library. At this moment, it was hard to imagine that Ed and the Demon kid were the same person.
Of course, most of the time it was all too easy.
* * *
“Well?”
“Things have been shockingly smooth since…shortly after I came back from East. Research, research, research. I’ve been carefully not introducing him to Major Armstrong.”
“You don’t think the Major would approve?”
“I think the Major might try to hug Ed, and then everyone would die. However, he does say he needs another alchemist around to bounce ideas off of.”
“As long as you explain to the Major that Elric was beaten as a child and is afraid to be touched, I think he should be able to keep himself under control.”
“…I don’t believe you just said that.”
“Maes. It will work.”
“You’re not even a general yet, and already you’ve got a diseased mind.”
“It hardly takes a diseased mind. That story isn’t far from the truth.”
“Hm. Speaking of disease, how secure is your phone line?”
“It’s a payphone.”
“…How close to HQ is this payphone?”
“There’s paranoid and then there’s just plain crazy, Hughes.”
“This is very worthy of just plain crazy. Actually, I should be having this conversation in person, this is not at all a phone conversation, how secure is your line?”
“It’s nowhere near the base. Halfway across town, the one outside Melissa’s.”
“…Melissa’s? It’s the middle of the day, Roy. Does your First Lieutenant know where you are?”
“Yes, actually. Did you need a secure line to harass me?”
“No. Thanks to Ed, I’ve been doing some digging of my own. In my copious spare time.”
“Oh, of course.”
“The fuhrer…had a very mysterious early life.”
“Mysterious?”
“I can’t find any information on it whatsoever. Mysterious. He abruptly appeared after Academy, and there is no record of his life before that.”
“Was the record wiped after he became fuhrer?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it never existed in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ed’s conspiracy theories are contagious. And talk of them really is in-person only. But this much…you should keep in mind. It’s so depressing, Roy. So depressing. Unlike my beautiful Elicia!”
“I have work to do, Maes.”
“Really? At Melissa’s? Did I tell you Elicia can add now?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I am horrified by your doubt. Horrified! My beautiful daughter is a mathematical genius! Also beautiful! And did I tell you about the wonderful cake she baked? Beyond description! I’ll send you a picture!”
“Don’t think I won’t hang up on you.”
* * *
Maes took to visiting Ed during his library phase. Maes could bring work and stay for an hour, and there was no guarantee that Ed would even acknowledge his existence apart from the initial suspicious glare.
It was fun, in a strange, Eddish sort of way. But it went on and on and on. Weeks. Months. Progress was not being made. The homunculi were running around loose. Scar was running around loose. Chaos, madness, despair.
“Not that I mean to question the value of your research, Ed, but are you really planning to hunt down Scar? Because if you’re too busy, I need to step up my investigation.”
Maes reflected on the deeper meaning of the words that had just come out of his mouth. Had he really just asked Ed why he hadn’t gotten on the ball and murdered somebody?
Yes. Yes, he had. Did this mean he was internalizing Ed’s moral code? “Wait. Can we pretend I didn’t say any of that?”
Ed smirked at him. Things that Ed would find amusing were highly unpredictable. “I’m gonna tell Mustang.”
“Do not-”
“Gonna say, ‘Shit, you sent me to a psycho.’”
“I just wasn’t think-”
“‘Man’s got a hitlist.’”
Maes heaved a sigh and rubbed his face and God, the stress was getting to him.
“Scar’s not in Central anymore, anyway,” Ed informed him. “He went off north someplace. The hell have you been?”
“When I’m not slaving at my desk, spending a fleeting moment with my gorgeous wife and daughter, or indulging in far too little sleep, I am…in the library, Ed.”
Ed didn’t seem to have registered the accusation in that statement. Of course not. His head was tipped to the side, and Maes could tell just by looking at him that he was thinking about something Maes didn’t want him thinking about. He said, “A daughter, huh?”
Maes had never said anything about his family to Ed. Very unusual for Maes, to treat a potential ally as an enemy. A potential ally he’d researched at length, and allowed to get quite close to Roy.
But trusting Ed with Roy’s life was not quite the same thing as trusting him with Elicia’s life or Gracia’s. There was a depth of irrational, protective panic between the two.
If he wanted Ed to trust him, though, he was going to have to give a little. At least now it seemed he had a chance of earning Ed’s trust. There had been times when that particular goal had seemed like shooting for the moon.
“A perfect daughter,” he said, and refused, refused to remember Ed’s Barry the Chopper face. “A beautiful, fabulous, amazing daughter. But why take my word for it? I have pictures!”
Hughes whipped out a stack of photos, and only then did he allow himself to check on Ed.
Yes. He’d been right, thank God. Ed wasn’t looking at those pictures like someone planning to use them against Maes. He was looking at them like they might catch fire, and then at Maes with an expression indicative of his belief that Maes was actually an alien.
“You’re showing me pictures of your family.” Incredulous.
“Ed,” Maes said gravely. “It will make you a better man.”
“You carry around pictures of your family?”
“I can only survive the day by gazing at their beauty!” Maes cried, then studied Ed’s uncomprehending face. “This isn’t the way you feel about your loved ones?”
“Uh, my loved ones are mostly dead.” Ed blinked. “Besides, if they were alive, I definitely wouldn’t carry pictures of them. What if somebody saw the pictures and then killed ‘em because they knew-”
“Please try to be less insane,” Maes interrupted. “Just a little less.”
Ed huffed and hunched over the book Maes had distracted him from. “Do whatever the fuck you want. Not my problem.”
“On another topic, how goes the search?”
“Pointless. Everybody keeps sayin the Philosopher’s Stone doesn’t freakin exist.”
“So it’s not just Roy.”
“Yeah,” Ed murmured, running affectionate fingers down the spine of his latest eight hundred page treatise on obscure alchemy. “But people been trying to make ‘em for forever. So why isn’t there any research on ‘em? Why does everybody think they’re a myth when actually they’re real?”
Maes propped his chin in his hand and gazed at Ed in some fascination. This side of him never got less entertaining. Researcher Ed. The Demon Philosopher. “What’s your theory?”
Ed made a wavy gesture with his left hand. “I’m makin shit up.”
“So share. I promise not to tell the academics.”
Ed snorted. “You want the bad thought or the really bad thought?”
“Let’s work up to really bad.”
“Right. The bad thought is, they weren’t actually Philosopher’s Stones in the homunculi. They were some other fuckin weird thing made of dead people, and they just called ‘em Philosopher’s Stones to screw with me. In that case, there aren’t Philosopher’s Stones, and this’d be somethin’ new.”
“You have a worse thought?”
“Can always get worse. The worse thought is…I told you I’m makin this up, right?”
“Ed.”
“Okay, so. Like. If someone’s been making sure that nobody figured out how make Philosopher’s Stones, then nobody’d know about ‘em. Because they’d kill people who knew too much. Those books’d never get written.”
For a guy who claimed not to believe in conspiracies, Ed had an awful lot of conspiracy theories. And they were getting steadily more bizarre with time. “Well,” Maes said diplomatically. “That’s true.”
“Don’t act like you don’t think I’m crazy when I know full fuckin well that you think I’m crazy,” Ed sighed, pulling the book closer and trying to push Maes away by ignoring him very hard.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Maes said. It was…occasionally true.
“Fuck you. Like you even got a right to an opinion-you’re no alchemist.” He huffed and tucked his book even closer, like a comfort blanket. “I should be so lucky.”
“Ah. Actually, that is the reason I came to see you today.” Before he’d been sidetracked by research and Scar and conspiracies and the madness in general that always surrounded Ed.
“You don’t make any goddamn sense,” Ed informed the book. “You better do somethin’ about that.”
“So…you’ve been saying you’d like another alchemist around.”
Ed’s eyes flicked suspiciously to Maes’s. “…Yeah.”
“I’ve found you another alchemist. And Roy approves! His name is Major Alex Armstrong. He’s a good guy. He hasn’t, ah. Obsessed. Over alchemy the way you have. Still, Roy promises he’s a good alchemist.”
“There’s a ‘but’ somewhere,” Ed said suspiciously. “Spit it out.”
“The Major is a good man,” Maes said.
“Don’t make me throw a fucking book at your head,” Ed snapped.
“He’s a big innocent,” Maes went on, gesturing at random. “He’s very…delicate. Look. Just don’t make him cry.”
There was a weighty pause. “Did you say cry?” Ed asked incredulously. “I’m not gonna fuckin make anybody cry!”
“You say that,” Maes said, “because you don’t know the Major. Sometimes he bursts into tears and there’s nothing anyone can do about it-it is what it is. But if you could avoid, oh, being disturbing. That would be best.”
Ed stared. “What. The fuck.”
* * *
“Edward Elric!” Armstrong boomed. “I have heard so much about you!” And promptly burst into tears.
“What the hell just happened?” Ed asked Maes. “You want me to work with this guy? How the fuck is that gonna happen if he’s gonna be like this all the time?”
“It won’t be all the time,” Maes said.
“Oh, Edward Elric!” wailed Armstrong. “So young! So abused! So traumatized!”
Luckily sobs drowned out anything else he might have said. Or maybe the sobs came too late. Ed was already giving Maes a look of enraged betrayal.
“And what all did you tell him about me?” he asked with false calm. Maes hated Ed’s false calm very much. He’d seen it segue into killing rage once, which was definitely one time too many.
“Hardly anything,” Maes insisted. “And we’d better discuss it later.”
“I think we’d better discuss it now.”
“Edward Elric!” Armstrong cried, quite possibly saving Maes’s life. “If there is any way in which I might be of use to you, please let me know!”
Ed hesitated for a moment, clearly torn between murdering Maes and having a good, long, alchemy-geek conversation with the Major.
Alchemy won.
“You ever seen a transmutation circle like this?” Ed asked abruptly, sketching a circle-and-pentagon thing on a paper and sliding it over to the Major.
Armstrong studied it for a moment, then shook his head, looking somewhat crushed. “No. It seems simple.”
“It is and it isn’t,” Ed explained, pulling it back and tipping his head at it. “Basically, it’s a life for a life.”
“…A life for a life?”
Maybe Armstrong was going to spend all of his time with Ed crying. Maes wondered if he should bring in water to ward off dehydration.
“If that guy was telling the truth, then I think this is how they make Philosopher’s Stones. Which is whatever. The question is, what kind of scale are we talking? Like, how big could you make this? Could you rework it to do other things for you? And-here’s the big one-can you undo it?”
“Reverse the transmutation?”
“Yeah. Like if, say, you have a homunculus-”
“Edward Elric, homunculi do not exist.”
“Funny how I killed one, then.”
Armstrong cast an alarmed look at Maes, who really couldn’t do better for him than a helpless shrug. Armstrong, bless him, tried hard to take this in stride. “I see.”
What Maes knew, and what Armstrong didn’t know, was that Ed was trying equally hard to go easy on Armstrong. So far he hadn’t screamed, glared death, or even used especially menacing body language. He must have taken the crying thing more deeply to heart than Maes had realized.
Then, too, he was an exceptional geek, and he clearly didn’t want to frighten away his best shot at a research partner.
“So if you fight a homunculus,” Ed was saying, “do you really hafta kill them a thousand or whatever times, or can you just…unmake them?”
Maes had wondered what Ed was taking all this time to research apart from the mythical Philosopher’s Stone. He really ought to have guessed mass destruction.
“And if you did unmake them,” Ed went on enthusiastically, “where would the energy go? Because that’s a freakin lot of energy. I don’t want to kill one and have the world blow up in my face. Can you channel life energy somewhere? Has anybody even researched that? Cuz, I mean, who the fuck would, right?”
Armstrong blinked slowly at Ed, then plucked one of the scattered books off the table and read the title. “Physical alchemy,” he said. “Have you looked into biological alchemy?”
“Not yet,” Ed said with shocking brightness. “You wanna do it?”
Maes crept away and let the alchemy freaks be. At last, something he was looking forward to telling Roy.
* * *
This was not to say that Ed found no time between research projects to be really creepy.
“Ed?” Maes whispered so that Armstrong wouldn’t hear.
“What?” Ed whispered back, widening his eyes in his patented are you stupid look.
“You’ve got blood on your sleeve.”
Ed blinked, then inspected his sleeves. The left one was indeed caked in dried blood from the elbow down. It hadn’t been immediately obvious on black cloth, but Maes had been looking at it for a while, and he was quite sure.
“You should see the other guy,” Ed murmured, then stood and headed for the toilet. Maes sighed and put his head down on the table. How had this become his life? How? War, conspiracy, mayhem. Edward Elric. It wasn’t fair.
And Amestris was surely the only country that could produce all of these things at once. It was so absurdly war-torn. Sure, Drachma had its problems, Aerugo got slammed on two fronts, but Amestris? Nothing but war. Nothing but war on all sides.
On all sides but not in the center, now Maes thought on it. Central had never seen any action-just the occasional crazed murderer, and all cities had those. Edward Elric was the most exciting thing to happen to Central in a while. Wasn’t that strange?
Of course, there was Lab 5. Research into Lab 5 had turned up so classified that Maes’s men doubted the fuhrer himself was allowed to know. But executions did seem to come in clumps. Twenty executions over two months, none over the next six. Thirty executions over the two months after that.
Rinse and repeat.
And then there was the personal history of the fuhrer, or lack thereof. Maes tried hard not to sound like Ed in the privacy of his own mind, but it was becoming increasingly difficult. And that was without getting into the investigation of alchemy and warfare.
It hadn’t been a particularly productive line of investigation, but it had been incredibly disturbing. Alchemists had been at the center of almost every clash in Amestris since its inception, which meant that Amestrian alchemy was focused on killing people to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Alchemy and war, in Amestris, were all but synonymous.
This was at least in part because all of the warfare and every petty battle that didn’t get such a lofty name had been state-sanctioned, and the state did love to use its alchemists. Seemed the military couldn’t see blood being shed without wanting a piece of it. War was what Amestris did. First the battle of Riviere in 1558. Then there had been Cameron in 1661. Then Fisk. Then, then…
Well, why was he straining his brain on this when he had untold generations of noble Armstrong family ability to remember random historical facts sitting right next to him?
“Major, do you remember where the really bloody battles in Amestris have been?”
Poor Armstrong. After all these weeks of Ed, he didn’t even seem surprised by the question. He just set down his book and answered it. “Well. In 1835, General Augustus Armstrong led the defense of South City. In 1811, Lieutenant Anne Armstrong died while battling the rebels in Wellesley. In 1799-”
The Armstrong family’s version of history. Yikes.
And yet…and yet there was something about these towns. All around the edge of Amestris. The edge, never the interior. It made a certain sense with the border wars, but it was as often civil strife as not. Like Liore, most recently, which had been local strife between two competing cults. Now Maes thought back, he was sure Liore had once been one big cult town, but the Demon Alchemist had killed the leader, hadn’t he?
He’d never thought to ask Ed about it. He kept forgetting Ed was the Demon Alchemist, despite the bloodstained sleeves. Dangerous.
“Major,” Maes said, cutting into the litany. “Do you have a map of Amestris handy?”
He did not, but he drew one. Maes often wondered what Alex’s childhood had been like. Whether it had involved beating lessons into him with sticks, that sort of thing.
Ed came back while Maes and Armstrong were consulting a history book and circling Amestris’s most famously bloody towns. It only took ten minutes or so.
“Oh, shit,” said Ed. Maes could not find it in him to disagree.
They stared down at those equidistant dots circling Amestris for a long time. One city on the border, one slightly back from it, alternating all the way around. Nine cities total, and one suspicious gap.
It had been one thing to suspect a government conspiracy. It was another thing entirely to suspect that all of Amestris had been founded as part of an incomprehensibly huge plot.
Another, far more terrifying thing.
Ed jerked his head up abruptly and checked every visible corner of the library. He slammed the books closed, hid the map in his shirt, and dashed frantically around the shelves, slamming books into their places. As soon as he finished, he spun to face them and snapped, “Let’s get out of here.”
“What…?”
Ed leaned close and hissed into Maes’s face, “Is it or is it not a safe bet to figure they’re fucking everywhere?”
It was. It really was.
Part 3
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