Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ Committee's Findings ❯ II ( Chapter 2 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

It was well past dawn when Hawkeye and Elysia woke. They looked about the house but failed to find anyone but themselves inhabiting the place. Elysia frowned in concern- she hadn't brought spare tubing and should the material in her arm break she would again be in danger of bleeding to death. At noon Riza called the office in central and asked to be connected to Mr. Elric's office.

“What do you mean he isn't in? Where is he?” Riza said irritably. Evidently things were not going smoothly.

“You don't know? You're his secretary! How do you not know?” Riza kicked the wall. Elysia could almost tangibly see things falling apart. Riza would blow up soon.

“Well what CAN you tell me?” here it came. Riza paused and listened, screamed in frustration, and slammed the phone onto the hook.

“She says they're `somewhere around town.'” Riza muttered. I'm going to go out and find them- wherever they are. Hawkeye opened the door and left for the center of town.

-------Down the street from the orphanage Elysia had lived in was a red brick building with small glass windows covered in wrought iron. Some of the windows had gained a purple tint over time but most were new and free of any distinguishing features such as breaks or cracks in the panes. On the inside of the building was a central staircase that on all levels opened to offices. And in the uniformly designed offices were, on two walls, a shelves of books, on one the windows and on the fourth nothing. Desks were placed in the center equidistant from all walls- a security measure to address the possibility of bomb threats… or something.

The office in the east wing on the fourth floor was, unlike the other offices, occupied. At the desk sat a short, stout, altogether unremarkable man. His hand scribbled across paper after paper, signing on the marked lines.

“Ahh, bureaucracy at work.” He muttered to himself. The door swung open and a thin, lanky, man- around five foot six perhaps- walked in.

“Evening, Fuehrer” said the desk worker.

“Evening, Tim.” Roy addressed the Halfeye Alchemist.

“So, to what do I owe the honor?” Tim inquired.

“Just wondering how your friend in the Interior Ministry was.”

“Really? Since when did you take such interest in how Dan was doing?”

“I dunno, recently I guess.”

“Must be recent, I mean you can't have gotten to know much about him yet, given that he's not named Dan.” Roy groaned. Tim pulled out a chair for Mustang. “So, what do you want to know that you just can't ask the Interior Ministry.”

“Well, to be honest, I want to know what the hell happened to the orphanage up the street.”

Tim paused and narrowed his eyes “Why?”

“I don't know exactly- Hawkeye referred me to it, said there was something about it I'd want to know. Said to look for the roster and to take a look at the rubble. It's only a block away so looking at the rubble is easy enough, but I can't get my hands on the roster- not directly anyway.” Roy stretched in his seat and yawned.

“I'll give him a call.”

“Thanks.”

-------Several hundred miles away was the Staub-Gehirn Institute, a building with a dull cobblestone exterior and even drabber inside walling. The building had a small sitting room, which connected to two wings and a small staff lounge behind the sitting room. In the right wing was a corridor of strong metal doors leading into cramped and Spartan cells. On the left was the same, save that the doors were lighter and the people in the cells quieter. The right wing was reserved for the criminally insane, anyone could be in the left.

The man who entered the Staubgehirn turned left and walked down the line three doors or so- the distance is of no particular importance. There he pulled the door from its hinges and entered the room. In the room was a short woman with rough and shaggy hair, eyes sunk deep into the sockets and ring upon ring beneath them, they had been open for days on end, the things she saw would not let her sleep- even when the things she saw weren't really there. But the man standing in front of her was there and when she saw him she shook her head, and shook it again, trying to get his image to vanish. After hallucination upon hallucination the behavior is understandable, especially when one is seeing a spouse who has been dead for more than five years.

“Honey, where's our daughter” said the husband of Gracia Hughes.

Gracia only kept shaking her head, she had begun blinking and rubbing her eyes as well, as if a person could remove an image by clearing it out of their eyeballs. Patent nonsense of course, but then, Gracia was desperate.

“I'm not going away, dear, where's Elysia?”

More head shaking and eye rubbing, though this time the widow Hughes also softly mumbled an “I don't know.” The affectionate tone Maes Hughes had been using dropped from his voice.

“Bullshit.” At this Gracia began to whimper, though we ought not judge her too harshly, it is hard to defend oneself in a straightjacket. The pseudo-Hughes gave a warped grin- the kind a frog sees before a delinquent lights the firecracker strapped to its back.

“Where is Elysia?”

All Gracia did was look down and shrug. Her husband snarled and lunged forward.

In the hallway a guard stationed in the wing took out a set of earplugs to muffle the screams coming from the third room down. “Keep it down, will ya?” he shouted; then he walked away. “Schizophrenics…” he muttered under his breath.

-------“Ed, come here! Com'ere! Com'ere! Com'ere! You just have to see this!”

Edward Elric groaned. “What tin can is it now?”

“They're not tin cans! It's a new kind of metal, it's finally available commercially- aluminum. Well, sorta, it wasn't until the turn of the century it was cheap enough to use when the patent on electrolyitic refining expired.”

“And in the fifteen years between now and the turn of the century?”

Winry blushed, “I just didn't have the profits to be able to afford aluminum.”

Ed nodded. “Nothing to be embarrassed about, your business headquarters is in the middle of nowhere.”

Winry paused. “To be honest, that never occurred to me.” Ed smiled.

“And how do you plan to deal with that?” To this, Winry simply frowned. The parasite of inspiration had latched to her brain, and as is natural- it had begun to consume her attention. “I'll think about it, find a solution,” she said.

Ed smiled again, he had a hunch what the solution might be. It would be nice to have Winry move her headquarters to Central- a tad selfish of him, but nice.

“Done with your shopping?” He inquired. Winry glanced back at her several-bag load.

“I think so.”

“So, home then?”

“Yep, you wanna join me there for lunch?” She inquired.

“Do I ever not want to?”

“That time you had a stomach virus and couldn't keep anything down.”

“Oh, right.” Ed followed this with a rather breathy `heh-heh' and a grin.

The ride back to Winry Rockbell's house was pleasant, if not a little dull, and the automobile performed spectacularly. Ed remarked that he couldn't recall when it had ever drove so smoothly. On the whole it was uneventful. The two rode up the dirt road as they had hundreds of times before and got out the same doors as always. Winry took her keys from her purse and pushed them into the lock, turned them and opened the door. She sighed as she entered “Ah, home ag-who the hell are you?” Ed looked in to see a pair of girls sitting on the sofa staring into space. He squinted and then his face changed to one of equal incomprehension. “Riza?”

“So, you want me to, essentially, adopt her?” Ed sat at the coffee table with the others and nibbled on a piece of bred and jam. Hawkeye frowned, she wouldn't win her case if she were to be perfectly honest and say “yes” but it would be damn hard to convince him otherwise, she could take the approach of Elysia being a student much as Ed had been to the Sewing Life Alchemist Shou Tucker- except, Ed didn't have particularly fond memories of Tucker. The angle was better than adoption though, and Elysia needed a home.

“No, just prepare her for the entrance exam to the State Alchemists. She does need a home and she'll only be with you for a few months or so.” The look in Ed's eyes wasn't reassuring for Hawkeye at all, but there was hope yet. Something resembling sympathy had begun to occupy the pupils of the Rockbell girl's eyes. Hawkeye smiled, she had Ed by proxy, it was just a matter of time.

“So, I prepare her for the entrance exam, does she want to be a State Alchemist, or is this your idea, Riza?” Ed was suspicious, and rightly so, because the exam was of course Riza's idea- though Elysia showed interest for purposes of perhaps getting her arm back. Speaking of which…

“We can return to the issue, I also came for another reason, Ms. Rockbell, we need an automail set. Considering the parts of the arm missing, it'll need to be a custom one.” Rude as it was, Winry beamed with enthusiasm.

“This means I can use some of the aluminum I bought today!” In a moment the contents of every bag Winry had brought home from shopping were out on the floor.

“So we're agreed then?” Hawkeye inquired. Winry waved a hand in a dismissive motion.

“That's something like a `fuck yes'” Ed translated.

The carriage moved down the street at what had come to be regarded as a “slow pace” though automobile distribution nationally was rather slim- few people had ever seen one before in the country side- it was concentrated in the cities and the buggies had become outdated, drivers routinely honking when they found themselves stuck behind them.

It was a cool night, no moon, a light drizzle; nothing to bother a person on a midnight stroll or someone running an errand. It was a humidity that sat suspended in the air, stagnant, like a guest that just wouldn't go away or the person next to you on a bus ride who didn't take the hint that you didn't feel like talking, that ruined the evening. With a yawn the passenger in the carriage stepped out onto the curb and paid the driver.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Anytime,” said the driver before signaling the horse to walk on. The carriage went off in the distance and Sciezka turned her attention away from the street and to her small, apartment-sized house. It had been a tiring day, and the guest waiting at her dinner table was far from a welcome surprise. All the same, she steeled herself and spoke in her normal, welcoming, voice.

“Mr. Brod, what can I do for you?”

“Oh, please no need to be so formal- we've known each other since `24 and I've always come to you when publishing Franz's works.”

“Oh alright then, but what can I do for you?”

“Well, to be honest I simply want to make back up copies of most of Franz's documents. Just in the event that-“

“Yes, of course, you can leave them with me and I'll copy them.” Sciezka was thrilled; her dinner might be only five or ten minutes late, after all!

“Thank you, thanks so much- you haven't any idea what good news this is to me.”

“No trouble- I'm not really publishing anything in this case so I won't charge.” Again Brod beamed.

“You're far too kind, how do you make a profit?” in response Sciezka merely smiled, perhaps a bit too eagerly, as Brod went out the front door and she was once again free. Sciezka sat down to her dinner (cabbage soup with rotten cabbage) and began to eat. She had found in the mail several anthologies of poems that assorted authors were hoping she would publish. After skimming through the poems she had sent them back with the traditional “Dear ____, we appreciate your submission, however we are sad to say that your piece does not suit the current needs of this company…” rejection letter. She missed her old job, but then again her old job, when compounded with risk of cabbage poisoning, left a less than desirable life expectancy.

Sciezka went through the paper, no interesting articles, coverage of the orphanage fire that happened three miles up the street. Her eye stopped on the name “Elysia Hughes,” the one child missing from the orphanage. Officials from the building said they had seen her at least once since the fire, but couldn't recall what had happened to her, never a good thing to say when you were in the public eye. Sciezka continued reading, finding that the night before (three nights after the fire) Elysia's mother Gracia had somehow managed to kill herself in her cell at a distant insane asylum. Suddenly the paper became much less boring.

Elysia grimaced in pain as Ms. Rockbell placed thin filaments of aluminum in every tiny indentation in her arm, many times having to use a microscope-like device attached to a set of glasses to see where to properly put the piece. Each piece was hollow so that it could replace the missing veins arteries and capillaries. Each of the parts had been dipped in some substance that encouraged angiogenesis- whatever the hell that was.

The larger passageways in the bloodstream couldn't have been filled with simple thin tubes. At that size they would have lost their flexibility and either snapped inside her or inhibited movement, instead Winry placed a series of parts of a ring, around eighteen degrees of the circumference each and between them put a flexible substance of boron and some kind of silicon-based polyatomic ion. Silicate maybe? Ah well, damned if she knew.

When she was done she held up a mirror for Elysia so that she could look at her arm. It had, where the large veins and arteries were, a bright silvery metallic shine running down her limb. The linings were against a more or less black backdrop where the smaller aluminum filaments for capillaries and such, being in a the mind boggling abundance and concentration that is common when dealing with microscopic parts of the human body, were layered one on top of another to the point of literally millions in only a few inches. Elysia smiled, she couldn't say she didn't like the general aesthetic effect.

The young girl lifted her new arm testing it slowly and then more rapidly. She touched her fingers to one another; everything was as good as new. Winry looked on in fascination, she was growing to adore the child more by the second. Ed, though not remotely in any kind of paternal mood had grown to respect the girl from a distance- she had guts to go through the operation without anesthesia. He had warmed up to teaching her, maybe not thrilled with the idea, but it seemed tolerable. He stared at Elysia in thought until his eyes went out of focus. He was so absorbed in thought he didn't even notice when she moved from her chair and went up to bed.

“Ed?” Winry tapped him on the shoulder.

“Huh?”

“I asked if you'd like some tea.” Winry replied, continuing their inside tradition of offering tea when they wanted to talk about something serious.

“Oh, yes, yes please.” Ed wondered, somewhat stupidly, if what Winry had to say was about the girl. Mentally incapacitated from shock as he was at the time, the answer to the question fell into his lap as Winry poured the tea.

“I've been thinking about Elysia,” she said. Ed hung his head.

“I can't do it. I'm not a parent, have no idea what to do, and- as you well know- I'm always having to travel back and forth between here and Central. How the hell am I supposed to do this?”

“Well, maybe you can't do it twenty four hours a day…” She let the statement set in the air, waiting for Ed to absorb what she was hinting at. It was a very long pause, and in the moments spent waiting Winry realized just how fatigued Ed was from his work. The constant travel had taken a toll on him beyond what she had ever suspected and, now that she stopped to think about it, been a barrier to something she dreamed of having since the age of twelve: a relationship where they were more than friends. What else Winry might have discovered about Ed's work is uncertain because at the moment of her realization, Ed spoke.

“You're implying that you'd be willing to help, aren't you? I mean, you'd split the raising and teaching with me, we'd work as a team as, well… parents.” Winry smiled thinly and nodded her head. Another thought crossed Ed's mind. “But, we're not … I mean the two of us aren't- well, in a conventional parent situation. Not married, not romantically involved- not living together, come to think of it we couldn't even feasibly live together, I'm always whisked off to Central when anything comes up. ” He looked down at the floor, what Winry had only just come to realize was a matter of fact for Ed, and now it was out in the open.

Knowledge is a curious thing. When one says what is on one's mind it can suddenly become much lighter or much a graver matter. That one idle, lingering thought, which held the earth, the sun the moon and even the stars under its jurisdiction is suddenly pointless- and that which is just some tiny string of loosely collected ideas can, once expressed and exposed to the tiny molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the air we breath, accumulate and become something that governs the actions of people for the rest of their lives. What's more, once an idea is revealed it cannot be taken back, as a journalist put it: “toothpaste out of the tube.” And Ed had just squeezed out a large amount of toothpaste.

Riza had elected to stay at the Rockbell house as it would be much less awkward than sleeping in a house owned by a coworker of the opposite sex. Regardless of the age difference and no pre-existing, outside-the-workplace ties some things were just plain taboo. For this reason both she and Elysia slept in the room that used to belong to Winry's Grandmother. Pinako. Hawkeye had no idea what time it was when she woke, maybe one or two in the morning, nor did she stop to check. Her mind was consumed by the ringing of the damned phone next to her bed. She fumbled for a moment or two before finding where the receiver was.

“Hello? Rockbell residence, Riza Hawkeye speaking.” she said groggily.

“Lieutenant Hawkeye! What are you doing…Rockbell? I'm trying to reach the Elric boy.”

“Who is this?” Hawkeye was agitated- though at this hour she did have an excuse- and very much would have liked the caller to just identify themselves when they said hello- even if it was a wrong number it was still common courtesy.

“Sciezka. It's Sciezka I used to work for the State Alchemy Department, but this is a wrong number so-”

Hawkeye cut her off. “This is Brigadier-General Riza Hawkeye, why are you trying to find Elric?”

“It's about an old colleague of his, Maes Hughes.” Riza gripped the phone much more tightly. “I want to know what happened to his daughter, the one in the orphanage, if she's alright. Since no one knows where she is I'm working more or less exclusively off old contacts of Mr. Hughes that might know something, odds are against it sure, but it's all I could think of. I mean, I'm not really able to ask her mother or anything now that she's dead.”

“Dead?” Riza clenched the phone so hard her knuckles turned white.

“It ran in the paper yesterday, the investigators think she committed suicide in her cell.”

“Elysia's fine. I've got to go now, I need to see to business.” Hawkeye spoke quickly and devoid of tone, still reeling from shock from the news. Sciezka was more collected and protested violently as Hawkeye let the mouthpiece drop onto the hook and end the call.

Hawkeye needed to talk to Elric. It was breaking and entering, a crime, socially taboo given that they were opposite genders, and it absolutely had to be done: go figure. Grumbling about her luck, Hawkeye got out of bed and left the house. She walked the short distance to where Ed was and hurriedly knocked on the door. There was, understandably, no answer. She knocked a little louder, nothing from inside but the sound of light snoring. Hawkeye paused before yelling out Ed's name. This time Hawkeye heard a yawn and a rather cross “Who the hell is that?”

“Riza. I'm here on business.”

“I'll talk about it tomorrow.”

“Now.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Now, you dwarf,” as expected the door swung open.

“Who the hell are you calling a -” Ed shouted before stopping and turning a beet red. He paused for several moments, trying to find a way to break it to the General without endangering his job. After much deliberation he finally settled on the humorous approach. “So, General,” he began in a casual voice not indicating anything of alarm, “do you usually forget to get dressed after sleeping in the nude or is this sort of thing a rare occasion?” Hawkeye looked down and then bolted inside the house and hid under a table.

“This never happened, Ed.”

“Of course it didn't,” he replied, taking a seat on a sofa facing away from Hawkeye. “So, what was so urgent that you forgot to get dressed to tell me?”

“Ask you, actually, you seemed like the natural person to go to with your experiences. Ed, what's the connection between human alchemy and those- things we dealt with?”

The false cheer Ed had been exuding a moment before so that Hawkeye might get over her embarrassment vanished, an air of fear, and perhaps even a bit of anger, flooded in to take its place. “What happened?”

“Gracia Hughes died. This was three days after the fire that burned down Elysia's orphanage. Elysia was performing human alchemy, trying to bring back her father. They think Gracia killed herself, would there be a connection?”

“No, none that I can think of.” Ed sighed in relief.

“What if I said Gracia wasn't killed? They think it's suicide. But, after looking at the paper, they also think that she stabbed herself with a knife. I've never known someone who could do that in a straight jacket. She was murdered, Ed, I may not be part of an investigative team, but I have enough brain cells to put something like that together.”

“So why didn't they?” Ed asked the natural question.

“They're stupid?” she offered. Ed shrugged- investigative teams that couldn't get things done right would be the second priority here. He rose up in his chair and spoke.

“If she was murdered then there may be a connection, the homunculai are false people in the image of whoever was trying to be transmuted. It could be that the homunculus Elysia created killed Gracia.” Ed had given up looking at the wall and was now talking to Hawkeye face to face, the circumstances had removed all inhibitions and concern for privacy- awkward social situations took a backseat to potential crises. Hawkeye had closed her eyes and her hands shook.

“So then, if Gracia was killed, chances are…”

“The homunculus is on the loose somewhere.”

Ed and Hawkeye tried not to let the knowledge effect them over the next few days, or at least, not show around other people. Of course, they failed miserably. For their benefit Winry and Elysia pretended no to notice, as did the plethora of people there on business: several alchemists (Alex Armstrong among them) multiple researchers trying to reconcile the contradiction of alchemy and the more recent field of quantum mechanics and American journalist Henry Louis Mencken to name a few. Eventually, as was routine, Ed cracked and told Winry. Shortly after Hawkeye did the same and informed Roy Mustang- omitting, of course, the part where she was naked.

Winry and Mustang had the same reaction. “Why he hell wasn't I informed immediately?”

“Sorry-” “-commander,” Hawkeye and Elric said. From here the conversations diverged. Hawkeye and Mustang discussed what would be done, Elric would be called up of course, as would most other alchemists off duty. Funds would be stuffed into a project to find how homunculai could function when actual humans couldn't be transmuted, a daunting task with no actual homunculai to work with. And the investigation into Gracia's death would be taken over by the military.

Winry and Ed, on the other hand discussed the impact of Ed being called to Central again, he hadn't received orders yet but it was a virtual certainty. The call to duty would be different this time given that the pair had just entered into what might be considered one of the world's most bizarre parenting situations.

“This won't work, neither of us will be able to take care of Elysia alone- hell we're not even sure if we can do it together.” Winry looked at the coaster and tea she was drinking. Across the table Ed sighed.

“What choice do we have? There's no way I can get time off. And there's no one we who we can put in care of Elysia.”

“What about that Hawkeye lady?”

“She'll be called up as well, and there's not really much chance that Hawkeye would take her anyway. No living relatives of the girl, I'm out of ideas.” Elric slumped over on the table and a look of utter defeat and regret clouded his still boyish face. Winry hadn't seen him like this since Al had taken a torch and crowbar and broken the transmutation circle on his armour. Repressing tears she took Ed's hand and drew him into a hug.

“Elysia and I can come with you.”

“You-” Ed didn't try to argue, “Thanks.”