A Pocket Full of Posies - lulu_lisbon - Fullmetal Alchemist (2024)

1.

Odd dictatorial choices aside, it isn’t the worst idea to establish a military-based central government when war pervades at every edge of the country. It’s befitting of, well, wartime.

But even then, being shuffled from military nursery to primary to secondary should be some sort of crime. Child services doesn’t seem to be a thing here, which is noted with varying levels of displeasure, because Victorian-style orphanages are where the children with dead parents or ill-suited parents end up. And military-style. Military-run orphanages, with feeder military schooling upon military schooling.

Rosie finds this to be some form of pre-adolescent brainwashing into worshipping the higher powers that be, AKA the almighty Führer, who may or may not be a great leader (historical biases aside, circa twenty-first century post-Internet Earth). But instead of acting sourly and telling her age-peers to revolt against the tyrannical schemes of Amestrian social norms, she goes to class, makes friends, and overall pretends that she isn’t stuck in loony-land. With guns. Lots of guns.

And thus, at the ripe age of (more or less) too young for this, Rosie finds herself enrolled, Gattaca style, in the alchemy course.

Which is not ideal.

She’d fancied herself the boring type, with enough brains to end up as a well paid secretary to some senior official, with the ability to eventually buy a nice house in the suburbs, marry a nice husband, and spend her retirement in a peaceful southern village. Resembool, maybe, if she ever began finding sheep and goats attractive.

Instead of the general course that most military graduates face, someone from the academic staff must’ve flagged her as a potential alchemic talent. It was probably the abundance of independent thinking and mild disdain for authority figures.

Amestris.

A country that must be an alternate look into a vaguely European boundary, of a different dimension, plus a brand new form of science called alchemy. The coal to gold bullsh*t, yes. Except it’s real and f*cking exists here, and as is most forms of science, is militarised beyond means. The fact that Amestris hasn’t discovered uranium is a blessing for the surrounding territories, or else the entire continent would be filled with six-fingered orange babies with three noses. Or, scratch that. Nuclear energy hasn’t been discovered yet, but neither have aeroplanes.

Everything else, although marred by blocky retro designs, exists here.

In fact, Amestris may as well be some Pangea future, counting the divergence from which the new alchemical science was introduced and thus made all future technological advancement slightly in a left direction. Could be worse, honestly.

And then, in the first class, the professor mentions off-handedly how a few alchemists have made loads of money off selling their patents to the private sector. Of course, he’s referring only to the best patents that made some life-changing records to the industry.

Regardless, it’s an excellent idea. Boring, rich, and in the private sector? What a deal.

And she doesn’t even have to feel bad about using military resources for patent research, because they’re using all the orphans they can find to boost their military school numbers, who then, presumably, go straight into the military. Usually as a class or two above private, just for the prestige chasing.

So with this in mind, Rosie thinks so smartly, that nothing can go wrong from here.

And this is where the story begins.

It takes a little while to get a hang of the foreign science, and even more time to suspend her disbelief over the obvious sorcery that it really is. And when she does create her patent, a shiny new thing, with teachers guffawing over the physics of the chemical inbounds and material boundaries, it results in mild ridicule over its true function. As in, this can’t be f*cking real.

Because Amestris doesn’t have planes or blimps.

Which Rosie found to be quite unfortunate, especially for a bloodthirsty military dictatorship, and oh look a gap in the market! Monopolies are evil things, aren’t they? So she looked at wind functions, energy propellants, and weight distribution properties in order to carve a pathetically tiny circle on the base of a broomstick and ordered it to fly.

Wood is easy. Softwood, especially, because all the long stretches of frozen fibre respond delightfully well under a bit of poking and prodding. Wood wants to be easily shaped and manipulated, in its one solid block of earth-given material. Which is why Rosie started with a broom for her flight tinkering, instead of a metal disc or hanger with wings. Metals are made with fusion technology, smelted and welded, recycled from stone to stone, with carbonic elements peppered throughout that can cause insidious explosions from proximity to atmospheric pressure alone.

…Metals are difficult to get a hang of. That’s why the Silver Alchemist is so widely acclaimed.

And armed with the mighty broomstick (possibly stolen from a school broom closet), Rosie finds herself with an escort crew and a bad feeling in her throat.

It takes a while to choke out an answer.

“Is this Willa Rosemary?” A man in uniform asks her headteacher.

There are two soldiers, a man and a woman, with bold stripes and medals adorning the blue of their vests. Both lieutenant colonels. Tall, wide, muscular, and standing straight at attention in the headteacher’s office. Rosie had been quietly pulled out of Amestrian literature class… for a meeting with two highly ranked soldiers.

Rosie prefers to go by Rosie, but there’s a voice in her head telling her not to trust these people. It’s a shocking, itchy kind of feeling, stuck on the back of her neck and the hair on her arms.

“Yessir,” she says.

There’s a rifle slung on the woman’s back. Schools are civilian zones; there is no need for guns here.

“I am Lieutenant Colonel Davis, and my friend right here is Lieutenant Colonel Holloway. We’re here to ask a few questions about Patent 34-BXQ, submitted yesterday at the Central-upon-Rhine patent office.”

All three of them remain standing. The headteacher sits out of the conversation, only here as a technical legal guardian to oversee Rosie. The nervous presence in the corner makes her want to rip her fingernails out with flattened nubs of teeth.

“Yessir,” she echoes, trying not to look terrified out of her wits. “That’s mine.”

He then proceeds to ask her questions about the patent, whilst also making subtle references to academic aptitude, reports on her homelife in the orphanage, and her noted time spent mostly with a gaggle of girlfriends during lunch break. She’s a social creature, and despite the whole reincarnation as an adult into a baby, she barely remembers anything personal from her previous life, and finds herself much better suited as a girly fifteen year old Rosie instead of… whatever she used to be, back then. Hell, she doesn’t even remember her old name.

The amnesia was probably caused from the trauma of being a newborn baby, squeezed out of someone’s birth canal. A whor*’s vagin*, probably. There was a suspicious amount of name-calling about prostitute mothers when she was younger, mostly by the older orphanage kids.

Lieutenant Colonel Davis must think he’s being slick. He’s not making any threats, but there is an undercurrent of general warning in his voice. He’s saying, we know everything about you.

Which, on its own, is a frightening idea. Personal privacy doesn’t exist when a part of a collective hive of battle-ready soldiers. But when combined into the topic at hand, he’s giving her a heads up about what’s about to happen. And what’s about to happen is that the state is much more interested in the patent than she’d ever imagined. Which means one of the wars is going poorly, or needs extra ammunition, and she’s about to get thrown in a research office and be asked to replicate as many broomsticks as possible.

But that isn’t what happens.

What happens is–.

“--Rosemary, I’m sure you’ve heard of the State Alchemist test, yes?”

Pandemonium.

She allows herself one second of silence before it gets to her head. “Yessir,” she says, and swallows. Don’t show fear. Don’t show fear. “Upon my college graduation, I was interested in studying for the exam.”

Studying for the exam, yes. Actually taking it? No.

There’s so much more life to live, outside of military control. So much more to explore, experience, and enjoy. But she can’t exactly tell these people that she doesn’t agree with their ideology that the Führer is the greatest thing in Amestris and dictatorial governing practices don’t lend to high life expectancies (as evidenced by the current death toll in Ishval), so she keeps her mouth shut and eyes peeled downwards. Refuting a senior officer wouldn’t be pretty, in a military society, in a military city, in a military school. Suspension at best. Treason at worst.

“Well then,” The Lieutenant Colonel says, with a practised smile of ivory teeth and chapped lips, “there’s some exciting news for you, Rosemary, if you don’t mind demonstrating your patent, first, for confirmation. Holloway?”

At that, the woman leans backwards against a supply door, bangs it open, and takes out a broomstick. Rosie is pretty sure the headteacher wouldn’t have a broomstick in his own prestigious little office, but the evidence is right in front of her with her own eyes, so might as well accept it.

The broomstick comes with a permanent blue marker in Holloway’s other hand.

She considers flubbing it. Breaking down and scratching out a sh*tty alchemic circle for basic oxygen circulation, and confessing to a big fat lie. There would be disappointment, and probably a mark on her record for being a lying liar who lies, but at least it would save her from what would come next. At least, this is what she would’ve done, if she hadn’t already zoomed around on her broomstick in the patent office yesterday, shocking the wits out of the legal team members.

The wood is nice and cool in her hands. It’s a strong, grainy thing, made from an old hardwood tree. Oak, perhaps.

Rosie uncaps the marker – faint alcoholic scent, non water soluble, felt tip – and begins to draw her circle at the base of the broom, right where the stick meets straw. And as she’s drawing, Davis reveals more and more information about the events that led him here.

After the news of her patent broke out in the private patent firms, the military came snooping by. Not illegally, but to make sure there weren’t any dangers present in this potentially emerging technology. Which would’ve been illegal in Rosie’s old world, most definitely. Anyway, several alchemists came poking by to see if the flight circle was reproducible, and that was the real funny thing – because it wasn’t.

None of the seven alchemists could deconstruct her circle to fly the broomstick.

Thus, the patent office has put the case on hold.

“It’s just circulation redirection, powered by atmospheric transfusion,” Rosie says, when prompted by raised eyebrows. “The– the diffusion theory that Professor Alia taught in the first week of school.”

All of this was explained in the patent notes, which the legal team had said looked sound. It all made sense in theory, all of it.

“Is it reproducible, Rosemary?” The soldier asks.

It’s just a f*cking circle, of course it f*cking is. The alchemy is fueled via the diametric wave, using an input-output system of hydrolysing water vapour in the air for spontaneous miniature thermal combustion as a heat transfer, the energy source, to fuel the rest of the equation of substituting more and more atmospheric space. Movement, at its very essence, is just teleporting through the space-time atomic field of all the molecules in the world, propelled by the energy in one’s body. Flying is the same thing – except the propellent is energy taken from gas, a basic understanding of gravity, and using your own f*cking imagination to understand what flying even is—.

Oh.

There is no flight here. There’s no basis for aeroplanes, hovercrafts, or even jetpacks. The most integral part of alchemy, understanding the alchemy, visualising the goddamn alchemy, is missing in this equation. They know birds, hang gliders, and kites. But no one knows what’s inside Rosie’s mind.

Years and years of ancient memory.

Of a type of bloody public transport that makes you wake up way too early and sit next to crying babies and–.

“No,” she says, and signs her life away.

The best and brightest researchers have already taken a look at this silly little circle, understanding all the advanced scientific thought, but not the actual mechanisms of its magic. Pure imagination.

Lieutenant Colonel Davis sighs. “As suspected. But in that case, then you have been invited to the upcoming State Alchemist test, by personal request of the Führer himself.”

End of the month.

Today is the thirtieth.

“Oh, I’m far too young for such a ranking,” Rosie says, mouth numb, seeing spots where there shouldn’t be.

The Führer. That… that entire thing was just yesterday morning. It’s been only a little over twenty-four hours, and her paperwork has already circulated from suburban Central-upon-Rhine just outside Central City straight to the desk of the head honcho himself. That’s… fast. That has to be unusually fast. Militaries are supposed to be full of mindless bureaucracies. Expedited services are rare. Unless, of course, Amestris has already been secretly searching for flying warcrafts.

They can’t possibly need them that badly. Ever since the Führer decreed for State Alchemists to fight in the front lines, Ishval and their Aerugan back-up have been losing more and more land. The war will probably end in less than a year from now. But there will be future wars to come, especially with the rising tensions in the northern front.

Is it suspicious that there’s been war on every single boundary line in the country? No f*cking allies? Yes. But Rosie shelves that thought for later.

She thinks she’s dissociating. It should be an honour to garner personal attention from the Führer. It should be an honour to gain rank so mightily in the army. It should be a service to become a State Alchemist, for the good of the public. The fact that Rosie feels wrong about everything that’s happening to her is wrong.

These are not loyal Amestrian thoughts.

With little fanfare, Rosie is escorted out of school and driven to Central City. The lieutenant colonels don’t seem to be fans of smalltalk, so she simmers in her own fear and trepidation, looking out the window and hoping, hoping, hoping, that the car doesn’t go any faster. She wants everything to move in slow motion, slow like ooze, slow as her nervous processing.

There’s a written test, which is famously difficult, a whole fifty pages worth.

And once sat down at the testing centre, surrounded by adults much bigger, stronger, and older than her, she relaxes, almost. The truth is, she can’t answer half of these questions, and her hand cramps by the tenth page of writing down f*cked up gibberish. The only alchemy she knows is the school curriculum plus all the research that went into flying technology. Water alchemy? Pathetic. The only liquid she works with is water vapour. Metal alchemy? Practically nonexistent.

Thus, she leaves the test feeling horrible about a failed grade, and relieved that she’s definitely going to fail it. If the examiners feel especially generous, she might get a twenty percent. At best.

But instead of waiting for the examination marks to be released, her name is called in the lobby, just as she’d been mentally preparing herself to leave.

“Willa Rosemary?”

Yessir. She’s supposed to respond immediately with a loud and strong yessir. Respect to command. Yessir, I’m here, sir.

Instead, she’s quiet as quiet can be, standing straight backed and stiff, eyes wide and hoping to god that this isn’t happening. But it is. She quietly follows the soldier down the hall and through a set of doors leading to an outdoor courtyard.

Grey skies with spitting rain. Five officers. A major general at the forefront, and captains on all points. Then, a wispy little girl, at the cusp of youth, more child than adult, with bouncy golden ringlets in loose pigtails and blue-green eyes wavering like the wind. The military academy uniform, a set of black, makes it look like a funeral. The pyre’s already been set in the centrepiece, a set of broomsticks aligned in the fashion of burning the witch.

Except witches don’t come with broomsticks, in the old Amestrian folklore. Witches are just sorcerers, with their evil magic spells and evil magic smiles.

Rosie’s the one with the broom.

The major general introduces himself as a man named Gardner. He looks frail, with pale hair and bespeckled face, but Rosie knows how much power a senior officer wields. He could snap his fingers and all the surrounding captains could have her killed on the spot.

These treasonous thoughts aren’t new to Rosie, but they’re certainly popping up in dangerous quantities recently. She’d never been a fan of her new world, but today of all days is topping the list of f*ck I Should’ve Left Ship Ten Years Ago. But there’s nothing else that she knows in this world except where she was born into, and there are enough roots here to keep her tensed up and at the ready. Boom! Strike one.

She wants to love her home country just as her comrades do. She wants to live and breathe the motherland, pledge her heart to the green flag, and worship the days till worship come. Loyal as loyal is. All her friends are happy as bees to attend the military academy, so why isn’t she? Why can’t she shut her brain off, stop remembering the better times of democracy and free speech, and become a believer? A citizen. She was born here, raised here, and will die here, in the confines of the circle of the country.

Circle, like an alchemic circle.

It’s an odd, ripe, fluttering thought, that wilts away into spiderweb.

One of the brooms in the middle is the one she’d given to the patent office. A school-issued broom, made with cheap plywood and uneven straw brush, tied together in nylon and polyester twine. So after the brief introduction and harmless conversation that goes in one ear and straight out the other, Rosie grabs the broom and breathes in the last scent of freedom.

And she flies.

Legs crossed, hands tight, focused on the alchemic circle under her skin. Properties of wood and lacquer, cross-checked with density and porosity of the broomstick so that it doesn’t explode into a wreck of splinters from incorrect load bearing calculations. The circle, the circle…. No matter how many times the textbooks say that alchemy is just a science, Rosie can never accept that answer. It’s magic, plain and simple. If it really were a real science, Earth would’ve discovered it ages ago, back when the Romans and Ancient Chinese were tinkering around with potions and whatnot. It’s magic, just with the added benefit of needing to know university-level chemistry and physics in order to make it.

There’s something in her that fuels alchemy. Something biologically different in her, in all of the people in this foreign world, that allows them to soar over human peaks. An energy source of some kind, or a godly being, that exchanges one property for another.

She supposes normal Amestrians wouldn’t comprehend this idea. Alchemy is all they’ve ever known. It’s not unnatural to them.

The wind feels nice on her face, after being in that stuffy examination room for hours.

Rosie flies in lazy swoops, up and down, and then into a tight spiral all the way up to the twenty-metre mark of the courtyard walls. Freedom is just beyond that wall. She could fly forever, soaring the skies, reaching out to the setting sun and grasping at invisible boundaries with nary a thought. Flying over the eastern desert, into unknown lands across continental Xing, away from the military that is her home but also fills her with undue trepidation.

Four officers. Armed and ready.

If Rosie flies away, they’d shoot. Can’t go around having foreign intelligence snatch up flying technology. And no one would miss.

When she lands in the confines of the muddy grass and stone columns, she becomes Willa Rosemary, fifteen, dog of the military. State Alchemist.

They’ll probably never tell her her test scores. Maybe they’ll pretend to lose the papers. But either way, someone at the top of the hierarchy has pushed for her to pass no matter what, because a flying machine is needed in the southeast to assist with the current war effort.

Rosie will serve her country.

She’ll serve her country, do the job that everyone does, and climb her way up the corporate ladder like warm, wriggly vermin, and retire with benefits. For her country. This is Amestris. The soft comforts of Earth no longer shield her from the terror of duty.

2.

Child prodigies tend to be a moody, cantankerous lot, with too many brains and not enough societal pressures. They say that Rosie’s the youngest State Alchemist in history, which is a total trip, because she failed the written exam and the only reason why she’s in the military is because the essence of the Führer himself aimed an M16 rifle barrel at her head and told her to jump.

So, Rosie’s not exactly the moody type. She’s more just generally terrified of everything and upsettingly depressed.

Understandably so. This military business isn’t for the faint of heart, and Rosie is just that.

They’re still letting her finish her schoolwork, though. On the battlefield. How charming. But even if she doesn’t mail her homework back during the weekly shipment rotas, she’s near positive that someone will pull strings (out of respect and honour for her position) and do some handwavey legal sh*t to make her graduate from secondary school anyway.

On paper, Major Rosemary is a qualified member of the Amestrian Forces, fit to lead battalions in Ishval. But in reality, nobody’s letting a wimpy teenager do anything but follow orders from a vaguely sad*stic officer.

She’s at that stage in puberty where her limbs are still awkwardly growing out and her baby fat hasn’t fully settled, so she looks, at most, thirteen years old. There’s a reddish splotch on her cheekbone that’s either a new pimple or a rash (it’s hard to tell sometimes), and her period is still an irregular occurrence. Her hair – beautiful, big, bouncy golden blonde curls – is misbehaving on the day of deployment, and she’s forced to tie it up. And because she’s feeling particularly rebellious and depressed at her girlhood years being cut short, she ties it into cute pigtails with pink ribbons.

Maybe if everyone feels guilty enough after looking at her pretty pigtails, the war will end.

Think of the children!

But no, this stupid war began because some idiot shot a f*cking child. Like her.

The government ships the new wave of soldiers by train, using the southern rail line to South City and then via the hastily made new road to the pinnacle of the fighting front – the three-way point between Amestris, Aerugo, and Ishval. All the while, the other soldiers (relief crew, medics, returning soldiers discharged after leave) openly avoid sitting next to Rosie.

She can’t exactly blame them. What kind of demonic entity willingly signed up to become a State Alchemist in the midst of this war? Apparently her, is what they must be thinking.

Rosie wants to leave. But to leave is treason, and treason is death. And honestly, where would she go? She doesn’t speak any foreign languages (English isn’t a foreign language here, it’s extraterrestrial), so she’d get shot on sight by any of the neighbouring countries.

Amestris is all she knows, and all she has.

I’ll fight for my country, she thinks bitterly, and then I’ll request psychiatric leave from child soldier related PTSD.

Then her life will be okay. Back to the peaceful suburbs of Central-upon-Rhine, graduating college, going to university in Central City, and generally f*cking around at a slow pace. The only bad thing about this place is the excessively militant governing body, but everything else in Amestris is pretty great. Gender equality. Subsidised housing. Cheap public transport. Clearly, the governmental system can’t be all that bad (minus the literal child soldier part).

In the meantime…

Desert.

Ishval is a hot, dry place, with hostile flora and fauna. The geography of Amestris is a little confusing, given that there are about five different biomes in the one country. It’s a big country, yes, but the stark differences in environments is also due to the minor mountain chains dividing everything up into individual weather conditions. There’s a huge, craggy cliffside marking the entrance to Ishvalan territory, and the introduction into the worst f*cking boiling hot wind currents.

It’s supposed to be monsoon season soon. Hopefully.

“Welcome to base camp, new recruits and old!” The driver yells, sounding all too gleeful to be here. “Pack your sh*t up and report to duty!”

Rosie fumbles along, struggling to hold her rucksack that weighs approximately a third of her bodyweight. The awkward gait is multiplied by the fact that the women’s small size uniform is still somewhat baggy on her spindly, growing frame. She manages to get in line, not last like a loser, and stands in the attention pose whilst waiting for her designation.

The soldier at base falters upon seeing her, but quickly recovers. “Name?”

“Rosemary, Willa.”

The soldier’s eyes go down to examine his clipboard, and widen when he finds her. Ah, yes, a child State Alchemist. Also a Major, which means she probably outranks him, because he looks a little green behind the ears as well.

“You’re in Camp A,” he says, and makes a little checkmark on his clipboard.

Well. That doesn’t bode well. The first letter of the alphabet implies primary significance, implies front lines.

Before she says something silly like waaaa let me out of here, Rosie nods and finds the caravan for the Camp A recruits. There’s more weird looks, but the shiny Major stripe on her oversized jacket is enough, and they begin the journey to the battlefield.

“Hello there,” the soldier sitting next to her on the bumpy ride says. He has a mild voice, in contrast to his tall, muscular figure and masculine stubble. Dark hair, brown eyes, glasses. Why the glasses? A front line soldier would wear vision-corrected goggles, which means he’s not primarily a fighter.

Oh. He’s talking to her.

“Hello,” Rosie says quietly.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” he says. “I’m Intelligence, so I’m supposed to know all of our recruits.”

There’s a casual quality in his tone, making it impossible to be offended by anything he says.

He’s fishing for a name.

Rosie’s not a real child prodigy with stunted emotional intelligence or whatever, so she catches onto the conversation cue quickly enough. “I’m Willa Rosemary,” she says.

“Rosemary,” the soldier repeats gently. “I’m Captain Maes Hughes.”

He seems like a nice person. Nice for a soldier, at least. Rosie learns that he took a two week medical leave after his encampment was electrocuted via the radio lines they were trying to reassemble in the middle of the night during a power outage. It was probably a deliberate attack, goes unsaid, because the thin lightning shaped scars peeking out from his wrists can only come from heavy-duty electrical attacks.

Or maybe he was tortured, and he’s in his make up sh*t and lie phase of the healing process.

Hughes does his best to get information out of Rosie. But the fishing isn’t subtle at all, which means he’s underestimating the general intelligence of teenagers or he’s simply not trying hard at all for reasons unknown. Mostly, who are you and what the f*ck did you do to get sent here?

“Ishval isn’t a nice place right now,” Hughes says with a grimace. “Why’d you sign up, Rosemary?”

Telling him, and the rest of the eavesdropping caravan, the real reason would make all of them shun her. Because no matter how morally wrong it is, saying that she never wanted to be here, and she got the highly coveted ‘top alchemist’ title due to corruption-based cheating, would create a few enemies. War isn’t a place to profess her lack of loyalty and honour. Someone would probably shoot her out of stress.

“I passed the test,” she says.

Which is a big fat lie, but whatever.

Hughes doesn’t make a face or show any tells, but he does say, gravelly, “Wrong time to take the test.”

No sh*t.

The most striking feature of Camp A is how quiet it is. So close to the enemy, yet such little fanfare. It must be a protection detail, making sure the closest camp is not yet spotted by the enemy for counterattacks. Everyone speaks in a hushed, low voice, and even the vehicles slow down to a crawling pace during the day time when the winds are flat.

According to a scheduler, she’s moved into a meeting in an off-white tent in the back of the encampment. There’s a chance to check out the women’s barracks, drop her stuff off in a locker and examine her home for the next few months (indescribably stinky, dry, and unpleasant) before the Meeting of Doom, however. Rosie takes the chance to breathe in fresh outside air before ducking down into the tent flaps, to be now forever commemorated as a living, breathing human weapon.

Rosie’s about five steps in and several heartbeats behind when everyone turns to look at her and cast their own opinions on her. There’s a fantastically muscular macho man with an unfortunate case of male pattern baldness, a twink pretty boy, a walking skeleton, a man with the most ridiculous moustache she’s ever seen, and a grumpy grandfather.

At the head of the meeting is a tall, greying woman with a general’s stripes on her uniform jacket.

Maybe if she were an actual soldier and not a fifteen year old, she’d know these people on sight. But as it is, the only person she recognises is General Eagle because the woman had done a presentation at her school a few years ago.

The presentation topic had been, dealing with death and other grievous injury.

“Just in time, Major Rosemary,” The general says. “We’ll be needing your assistance with the countdown event.”

Rosie walks to an open spot next to Skeletor, who openly glares at her. “Permission to speak, general?” He asks, with a surprisingly soft, slithering voice.

Oily long black hair, brown almost red eyes, white skin – the resemblance to the undead is uncanny.

General Eagle wears a hard face. “Permission denied, Crimson. Moving on with the plan.” And then she turns her gaze to Rosie. “Rosemary. Do you have a codename yet?”

Due to the rush of moving her into the battlefield, there hadn’t been time to choose any fieldnames for her, so the office had hurried her into submitting her own proposal.

“Witch,” she says.

And then doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the meeting.

Courtesy of the general informing the State Alchemist committee of Camp A, Rosie learns everyone else’s codenames (but not their actual human names). And the formation for the sunset countdown event, where the Ishvalans tend to worship in family groups in their homes or temples. The architecture of the Holy Lands is spectacularly ruined, but Intelligence reported various underground tunnel systems hidden underneath the buried mounds of limestone rock. With the oncoming darkness, the civilians will be temporarily distracted whilst the soldiers will be on guard. That’s when the attack will come from the sky.

“Crimson and Iron Blood will work on the front-line coming from the northern cliffs, reporting to command in Camp U,” General Eagle says, callused hands moving the token pieces on the engraved table. “Strong Arm, Silver – work with the command group in Camp B to block off Aerugan support. General Micah wants you to disrupt the trench line coming down the slope in these dunes here. Flame… just sit in the line of fire and look pretty for the enemy. You’ll be scare tactics, but a battalion will be there as back-up. But don’t do anything until Witch takes command.”

They all turn to Rosie, silent as a mouse.

The hard lines on the general’s mouth are set in stone. “Witch, we’re handing you five packs of nitroglycerin shells. We need you right over the Aerugan tunnel line in Sector B-14. Report to Intelligence to get fitted with the barium trackers and radio so they can fine-tune your position.”

There’s silence over the table.

“We’re trusting a child with our most powerful bombs?” Strong Arm says. His voice is thick and heavy with pity.

General Eagle frowns. “Dismissed, soldiers. Report to your stations and wait till countdown.”

The State Alchemists all file out of the tent in single file, just like primary school. Rosie doesn’t want to deal with the horrible looks Crimson had been sending her the entire meeting, or the frowns of appalled righteousness from Strong Arm and Iron Blood, so she rushes off to the women’s dorm to pick up her supplies before reporting to Intelligence. And for the most part, the others don’t seem to want to deal with her either, out of self-preservation or genuine disinterest, so she tries not to take it to heart.

There’s a lot of mucking around in the dormitory, trying not to pass out from heat and stress, before Rosie finds the nerves to finally report to Intelligence.

War, as it seems, is a lot of waiting.

It makes sense. It’d be stupid to let loose a torrent of men without any plan for their continued survival. But that does mean the quiet wait of oncoming horror is a major cause of everyone’s anxiety, as Rosie notices more than a few women doing repetitive movements in the dorms before the moonlit battle.

Mental, the lot of them.

Nutcases.

The Intelligence team suits her up with a string-release backpack and wind goggles. They’re eerily reminiscent of early twentieth century Earth goggles, but then someone explains that they modified a motorbike windshield into goggle form, expecting the weather in the cloud cover to be treacherous for her sight.

“Thank you,” Rosie says, because she really means it. Now she can cosplay Amelia Earheart, except this time with bombs.

Another soldier attaches a metal clasp on the base of her broom – a barium tracker.

“We’ve got a triangulation system for barium radiation,” Hughes says. He seems to pop up out of nowhere, and the two soldiers working on Rosie’s gear stand up straight to salute him. He waves them off, and they get back to the fittings. “Hello, Rosemary. So you’re the new flying technology sent by Central?”

She nods.

He hums, seemingly lost in thought (she doesn’t trust that for a second), and examines his soldiers’ work. “My team and I will be locating you via the radiation sensors. In small doses, barium won’t harm you, but as soon as you report back to base, we’ll have to remove the capsule.”

Then Hughes sits her down and walks her through the entire mission. A long distance radio clicker, with a code for directions. The Ishvalans have their own technology to intercept radio waves, so they’ll only be communicating in cardinal points to get her in the proper section. Then she gets wool gloves and a head protector in case of wind chill. The paper tag on the gloves, not yet ripped out by the financiers, says Kids Large Size, which must’ve been a depressing purchase for them.

He’s matter-of-fact throughout the entire process. Rosie’s grateful for the lack of outward pity or trepidation, and how he’s talking to her like a normal soldier who knows what they’re doing.

A real people person, this guy.

There isn’t much to do except wait for sundown, and she doesn’t want to sit by the loonies in the barracks, so she aimlessly listens to Hughes give her a tour of Intelligence. Smart computers that she remembers from Earth don’t quite exist yet, but there are multiple giant screens with fuzzy squiggly lines connected to radars connected to miles and miles of spiralling wires. Several of them have a grid pattern as an inlay, and an automated typewriter being fed data points, under careful observation of a team of cryptographers. Once Amestris figures out how to manufacture a CPU and wifi transmissions, it’s game over for all the other countries.

According to this high tech sh*t, they’re maybe… thirty years away?

That is, of course, if they’re solely focussed on technological research instead of more and more warcraft. All these tumultuous battles and extremely high death rates can’t be good for a population’s brain power.

And then it’s sunset.

Bright red horizon. Orange-gold flickering through the sky. Wisps of dusky violet threaten to emerge. Soft tendrils of the last of the sun wither away. It’s a beautiful view, of vivid, vibrant colours clashing and emerging all at once. She sees the end and the beginning of it all. An explosion. The sun, the star of all fate and being, God’s gift to humanity and his final goodbye, trails down, down, down into the line of the beyond.

Darkness falls.

The skies are navy blue and grey, and then they’re a burning crimson of the loudest noise she’s ever heard.

“That’s the distraction from Camp U,” she hears from a nondescript, shouting voice. It’s suddenly so loud. Where did the quiet go? “Witch, go, go, go!”

Rosie grabs her broom and flies up. Twenty metres a second, fifty, one hundred, two hundred… and then cloud cover. There’s a constant dull beep in her ear from the Intelligence team keeping her on track to the southeastern sector. She can barely see, even with the goggles, and icy winds prick her exposed cheeks and wrists as her uniform flaps aimlessly in the high speed. There’s nothing on her mind, nothing at all, except the mission on hand. Ishval, Amestris, Aerugo… none of it’s real. The war doesn’t matter. It’s just her and the sky.

Her and the sky.

The cold, brisk pain of freedom. Caw caw.

The beeping quickens as she gets closer to position. And when the beeping turns into a smooth line of constant noise, she knows she’s in place.

Strings. Tugging. Dropping.

The backpack goes down. Drops down, down, down. Just an empty husk of nothing. Empty barrel. School backpack. A dark little figure that disappears into the unknown, below the clouds, into lands she can’t even see. The dirt beneath her isn’t real.

And then…

BOOM.

There’s red. Red and orange and yellow. Someone’s painted a collage of colours below.

Intelligence haven’t withdrawn her yet, and one of her orders was to check for damages to report back to base, if the coast is clear. The coast is bloody and thirsty. So she flies down, slowly, checking for enemies, to the ground. Her feet touch soiled dirt and rocks, and she nearly trips when loose soil gives way to reveal a dismembered hand.

Rosie stands in the graveyard of her making. Bodies, bodies everywhere. The air’s all ashy, soot from the explosives still shading the battlefield, as if shielding the sky from the ground’s horrors.

It is the spring of 1908, in the midst of the worst of the war. And she’s right in it, making it all so much worse.

The radio in her ear beeps.

A transmission starts.

“Witch, do you read me? Over.”

Rosie tries to squeak words out, but nothing does. She tries again, but the soot and smoke is too thick and her eyes are burning despite the protective goggles. And then the third time’s the charm, because she chokes and coughs and sniffles like a baby, which is enough for the disembodied voice of Captain Hughes.

There’s so much ash. Distant fire light erupts from afar, alighting the familiar figures of back-up support.

“Redirection mission command,” Hughes orders. “Can you retrieve the empty nitroglycerin canisters? Central’s asking to cover your tracks. Over.”

Yes. She can. The empty shells are exploded into bits and bobs along with the bodies, but the major fragments are in sight. She can see them, despite the haze and smog. Bright, burning wonder. Shells, like shellfish on the beach. Twirly bits of pretty mother-of-pearl and glimmering rock.

“Witch, do you read me? Over.”

There’s more urgency in his voice. Rosie thinks she’s crying, but she can’t be because there’s no debris in her eyes, so she pushes her goggles up to wipe her eyes, and finds out that yes, she is actually crying. She’s crying and she can’t stop and everyone is dead.

Her back-up is arriving.

The Flame Alchemist fits right into the rubble and fire. He’s riding on an open dirt-road truck, with four soldiers propping up rotary machine guns on the back of the truck.

“Witch!” He shouts, because it’s loud and the gunfire in other sectors is distracting. He hops off the truck and walks right up to her, pointing at his ear – her earpiece radio. “Obey commands from Intelligence or f*cking resign.”

He’s pretty. He has a young face, early twenties, with a slight Xingan look to his eyes, a sharp nose, and ruffled black hair. And he’s in her face and yelling at her. There’s anger. Lots of anger. Not all of it at her, but enough that Rosie can’t stop crying.

“You’re fit for duty, soldier, you chose this, and you killed these enemies. Never disobey Intelligence again, they’re trying to keep you alive, Witch! Go back to base and report!”

Resign.

Like she has a choice.

The tears stop, mostly out of fear, but the pain in her throat and head persist. She hates everything. She wants a time machine to go back an hour and desert while she had the chance. Then she’d get shot down and die in the desert, but then these people wouldn’t be dead because of her.

“I can’t resign!” She says back, but yelling is a bad idea because Flame glares straight into her soul, simply daring her to be burnt into a crisp like all the others. And he could. He could snap her skinny little neck and no one would know. So she snivels out something pathetic, half-strung together sentences to make him less angry, but it doesn’t work. He just gets madder and madder, like a school teacher raging at a dumb troublemaker making useless excuses. “I didn’t want to kill them– I can’t resign, they won’t me, I can’t I can’t I can’t–.”

He lifts a hand to slap her.

It doesn’t fully hit her cheek, only braises against a soft part of her jaw, with most of the stroke going into her earpiece. The little radio falls, splits open, and dies on the ground.

Flame eases the might of his glare to adjust his own earpiece. “Report. Witch is with me. Her radio is damaged from the explosion’s backlash. Delete the last part of the audio or else Intelligence will just be hearing a bunch of annoying feedback. I’m making her ride in the truck. Over.”

The pain from the slap stifles the remaining tears and sniffles. Even though it wasn’t a full-force punch in the face, the hollow of her cheek and bits of her ear feel tender and sore. There may be a yellow-green bruise forming tomorrow.

The Flame Alchemist. Major Mustang. Or, Captain Mustang, because the stripes on his uniform tell of a promotion. Rosie’s heard of him in particular from the newspaper. Captain Mustang the Flame, the hero. He’s one of the more famous State Alchemists, for being so young, handsome, and scary.

And, apparently, mysterious.

Hiding her cowardice on the battlefield may have been a sign of compassion, but who knows really. It might be blackmail. But it’s woken her up enough to shake out of the self-induced panic to trudge over to the truck, broomstick in trembling hands, and ride in the front with all the ammo and rucksacks.

Stupid. She can’t go blubbering around now about this kind of stuff. If Crimson were here – the particularly pious type to his precious battlefield, psychopath style – he’d probably kill her on the spot for real. Not just smack her out of it.

Before Flame rides with them, he faces the horrors of Rosie’s creation. The cemetery. Then he snaps his fingers and flames erupt before them to light the field on fire, all shell evidence cremated. If anyone from the enemy checks on what happened here, all they’ll think about is the Flame Alchemist. He’s covering her tracks. Protecting.

It makes her want to cry all over again, but she can’t because all she feels inside is empty numbness. Tears would take too much effort over the tranquillity of apathy.

It’s best not to think of the enemy and their land as actual people and their home country. Ishvalans aren’t Amestrian. Once she begins actualising the severity of her actions, turning these people into individual persons with hopes, dreams, and wishes, there’s no turning back. It’s best to sweep Ishvalans into a convenient box of dirty stereotypes of government fueled propaganda images. Else she’d never recover.

Then Flame joins the retinue and they drive off, back to camp.

They arrive in camp.

Intelligence makes her report as they take off the barium tracker. Hughes talks to her like there’s nothing wrong and her radio earpiece definitely had broken from normal means. Then she’s dismissed and sent to General Eagle for an official report. Eagle takes one look at her and sneers, and tells her to write up the official report to hand in to her commanding team as soon as possible. Then she’s dismissed for the night, and goes to the women’s barracks to sleep.

On her bed – the top bunk in the corner, next to a leaky dehumidifier – a courier had given her an early shipment. An orange envelope with crisp white papers inside. Maths homework. A note from her headteacher and house prefects to graduate on time.

Hopeless normalcy.

The next morning is more of the same waiting and doing nothing. There’s a free desk somewhere in the Intelligence tent, where Rosie writes her report. Her Amestrian language skills appear to have gone downhill, because she writes the barebones of basic structure.

Flew at cloud cover level. Estimated 1.8 km. Three minutes after sundown. Released K-19 nitroglycerin explosives, 5 count. 30 seconds to land to explosion. Entire B-14 district completed.

And so on and so forth.

Someone in Central will appreciate her report. It’s easy to read, at least.

Then someone waves in front of her. Captain Hughes smiles and it looks genuine and kind. There are purple bruises under his eyes from a sleepless night. He must be just getting off his shift rota.

“Heyo, kiddo,” he says, sounding warmer than usual. “Walk with me?”

Sudden personality shift. Suspicious. He’d been nice yesterday, but not this nice. But it would be difficult to say no, because she’s already finished her report. No, I don’t want to entertain you or your militaristic delusions about my mental wellbeing.

“Yessir,” she says obediently, and trails on after him.

3.

Roy had told Maes what the kid had said last night. Her audio had been cutting in and out during her sobbing fest – the feedback really had been pretty sh*tty, but there were a few words here and then that could be decipherable to anyone paying attention – so it was an interesting situation created when Roy asked to delete her audio record.

They were smart men. Roy wouldn’t do that without a good reason, so Maes did so without any fuss. His team was too busy with the maps to pay attention.

She follows behind him, head ducked down, curls bobbing in the breeze. An angel halo. God, she’s so young. Who the hell sent her here? Surely her alchemy could’ve been deciphered by some other smart alchemist, right? There are research teams dedicated to this kind of stuff for a reason.

A shy little thing. She didn’t say much when he did a soft interrogation on her in the caravan, so he dug up her new files as soon as he got in the encampment. Fifteen. Willa Rosemary. She looks like a classic poster child for the youth of Amestris, with that blonde hair and blue-green eyes.

They end up pacing just behind the canteen.

The winds will pitch their voices away from camp, away from curious listeners. Maes created enough of a cover as a caring figure yesterday, being a constant presence around her, that no one should be too suspicious about a twenty-three year old man with a teenage girl. God no. Hopefully nobody labels him as a creep.

“Are you in trouble?” He asks.

She flinches.

Last night, Roy mentioned that she was worried about being in trouble. That she didn’t want to join the war effort, but she didn’t have a choice. That means that she used the military to escape something worse than an actual battlefield, or someone’s masterminding her position. A teacher from her school, maybe? There weren’t any parents or siblings on file. An older boyfriend?

“That’s an odd thing to ask, Captain,” she says hesitantly.

“At ease,” he says. “You can call me by name when we’re off duty. Can I call you Willa?”

The kid shakes her head. “I prefer Rosie.”

Rosie. A little girl’s nickname. It makes him want to hurl, but he manages to suppress the bile crawling up his throat.

“Rosie,” he says calmly, looking at her avoiding him. “Are you in trouble? I’m friends with Captain Mustang, and he mentioned that you seemed distressed last night.”

If anything, Rosie shrinks more into herself. “Oh. No, I’m alright, thank you. I was simply adjusting to the battlefield.”

It’s obvious to him that she doesn’t want to be here. Didn’t choose to be here. Some other force pushed her here. But she’s too smart and scared to open up, and is keeping the cards close to her chest. It’s what Maes would do, if he were in her position. Thus, getting her to trust him will take time.

Maes smiles, bright and happy. “If that’s the case, sorry about dragging you back here. Roy – that’s Mustang – and I are here to talk to you if need be, though, alright? I know it’s a huge adjustment, from school to here. Do you know how to get back?”

And her words ring true.

Over the next few weeks, into the dregs of summer, Rosie behaves as the perfect little soldier. Much needed aerial support to the Amestrian Forces.

Then there’s a point, in the middle of the night, several weeks into this current deployment, when things go wrong. Central had been suspicious of Ishval figuring out about Amestris’ new flying technology, and they’re right to worry. Little Rosie’s in the sky one night when Ishvalans start going on a rampage during a guerilla battle over the trenches, and one of the enemy keeps making wild shots out of nowhere, aiming for the skies instead of over the line. Then Maes keeps trying to signal Rosie to stop flying so north, she needs to keep on track with her mission, but she only responds in gasps and panicked gulps.

Was it an accidental misfire? He doesn’t know. What he does know, and the rest of the Intelligence team, is that one of the wild shots exploded in the air and stuck her ribcage full of shrapnel shards.

She’s forced to land, and Maes can only direct her to Roy, because he’s got sight coverage and closer to a transportation vehicle.

“How is she, Roy? Over.”

It’s not looking too good, Roy says. The shrapnel hit a blood vessel. Rosie’s bleeding out. And they both know what Roy has to do now, because the nearest vehicle was just hit with a shower of bullets and there’s not enough time to get her stitched up with the medic camp because they’re twenty minutes away and the entire place is a hellhole.

Maes has to listen to the sharp, crisp sound of snapping fingers, and the unforgettable screams of a child being burned alive. Cauterise the wound, stop the bleeding. She’ll have a permanent burn scar on her stomach and she’ll hate Roy for a long time, but she’ll be alive.

And she stays alive for the next battle the next day.

During her down time, she holes up at the spare desk in the Intelligence tent, tapping away at paperwork with a pencil. Maes passes by every now and then to keep an eye on her, thinking she’s just a diligent report writer, until he actually reads over her shoulder to see what she’s doing.

Homework.

Biology homework. Human anatomy and chromatography.

It hits him in the face again, that’s she’s just a child, barely knowing anything about the world yet thrust face first into war.

It makes him want to scream, cry, and throw up, in that order.

“Hey kid,” he says, and she jumps, twisting around to see that it’s just him being nosy. There’s flecks of rubber on her lips from chewing the back of the pencil. “You’re doing the chart wrong.”

She’s mixing up meiosis and mitosis. And getting the stages wrong.

Well. It’s not exactly her fault. She’s missing school by being here, and the lack of educational guidance (and textbooks) on a war camp is noted. But then a brilliant idea hatches forth.

“You know, I know a guy who did his university course in biology,” Maes says.

It seems like a weird choice for someone like Alex, but if one really thinks about it, it’s perfect. The Armstrong alchemy relies heavily on understanding the limits of the human body in conjunction with weaponry, so Alex excelled in his course at Central University. Roy majored in Military Tactics, and Maes did a dual course in Communications and Intelligence, so their understanding of biology is mostly limited to oh sh*t he got stabbed in the femoral artery! Roy’s knowledge of chemistry and atmospheric sciences is second to none, however, but that’s not on any Year 10 curriculum.

Rosie doesn’t seem to mind getting a tutor. And Alex is ecstatic to teach the youth about things related to not-war.

What’s weirder is that Rosie seems to really like Alex, for all his craziness.

“She reminds me of Catherine,” Alex confesses to Roy on the battlefield, who tries not to interact much with the girl anymore, after their last entanglement. He’s even a little snippy to her. Maes listens in on their earpiece comms. It’s in the dark of the night, and he knows that they’re looking up in the sky, waiting for her to report back to the ground.

That’s when it all falls down.

An alarm blares, and the signal goes haywire. Information attack. Someone’s destroying their comms to get their data. And right now, the current Intelligence team is focused on Rosie’s position in the air. The radiation tracker screen is glitching in and out. The shrill screeeeeeee from the jumbled signal in the monitor means Ishval or Aerugo has successfully jumbled up her coordinates.

“Captain!” His subordinates yell, panicked. “We can’t reach Witch!”

f*ck.

“Command to second,” he orders, finding his lieutenant captain. “Fix the transmissions, now! I’m going to the field to send a visual!”

Maes races outside. He flags down a truck, and luckily it’s an experienced driver who knows where to go without radio or map. They find Roy and Alex, tapping away impatiently at their earpieces with the rest of an anxiously shifting battalion.

“Flame!” Maes shouts. Roy immediately stands at attention. “Three fires, fifty metres in the air, straight lines!”

Three long lines. Basic Amestrian code for get out.

It’s ill timed.

This was a late night mission, as the attack timings are meant to confuse the enemy. Roy shoots out his first wrath of fire, arm raised high in the air, just as the cloud cover breaks with the sunrise. The sky turns a dusky grey and pink. Second fire, and the sun is going up so fast that he has to order half the battalion to retreat back to base. Third fire, and it’s suddenly light enough to see at a distance. A half second later, and a sliver of a shadow is visible from the broken morning fog. Tiny blue speck of a military uniform, and if Maes squints hard enough, the golden glow of doll hair.

“She’s too slow,” Maes realises.

“Intelligence had her in the sky for two hours,” Alex says, sounding unlike himself. It’s a gritty, angry voice. A proper Armstrong fury. “Doesn’t have enough meat on her to keep warm.”

One minute. It’s slow, but it’s only one minute. She’s flying downstream, downwards. Gravity will help her fly faster.

Intelligence had her position all night. And now the enemy has it. Still has it, if his second and third officers don’t act fast enough.

Then there’s a mighty bang of a gunshot.

Ishval scores a hit. They must’ve deciphered the code for an aerial soldier a while back. This has to be a calculated attempt to decimate the force behind the shellings. The gunshot snaps the broom in half, and Rosie, still a dot in the air, spirals in tight loops. Someone yells in Maes’ ears. It must be Alex, because he’s the emotional sort. Then another loud bang from the distance, and Rosie teeters off the broken broomstick and falls.

The radios go back online.

“Half a kilometre,” Roy says immediately. “She landed in E-4. That’s a known civilian zone. Olive trees in the south, soft sand in the north.”

The only people who survive a five hundred metre drop are those who suffer massive brain haemorrhages and cracked skulls, then go on to die about an hour later, still writhing and choking on their own blood. It’s never pretty to be a massive splat on the ground.

It’s moments like these that Maes wishes Roy wasn’t an idealist. The kid is dead. There’s no way she survived a drop like that, not even counting that one of those gunshots definitely went straight through her.

He takes a moment to sort out his throat, lest he stutters out his next few words. “Raid on E-5 at sixteen hundred. Report back to the command structure, Flame, Strong Arm.”

Roy turns around, decidedly less composed. “E-5?”

“Her broom landed in E-5,” Maes says. “Command won’t want Ishval or Aerugo getting ahold of her alchemy circles, when we can’t even decipher them yet.”

There’s a moment when the other soldiers take a tense step backwards, when it looks like Roy’s about to combust. But then he gathers himself and offers a tight nod, and then everyone goes back to base in an orderly manner.

Captains aren’t meant to sit next to each other in transportation. If one car gets hit, then at least there’s another captain in the other. But nobody wants to sit with the Flame Alchemist at the moment, with the air simmering around him palpably, so Roy gets to sit next to Maes. And because regulation has already been tampered, and Strong Arm also looks murderous (at the thought of more child deaths, likely), Alex sits in the same seat row.

There’s silence.

“She wasn’t meant to be here,” Alex says quietly. His large shoulders are hunched forward. Everyone pretends not to hear. “The enlistment age is eighteen.”

Without a body, it’s hard to mourn her. It doesn’t feel real yet. The last anyone saw of her was just a fuzzy speck in the distance. And then that little tiny thing falling off like a catapult, down, down, down. A broken body falling down from the heavens.

And if Maes’ conclusions are correct, she didn’t want to be in the military either. Someone forced her to join. But, well… It hardly matters now. When this is all over, he’ll go home to Central and do his own research behind her early enlistment. But now, all there is left to do is fight the enemy and get them out of here.

There’s a mail courier asking for Rosemary.

“Killed-in-action,” he says, and the mail courier pales. The documents flop listlessly to the floor, and a diploma slips out. Congratulations on graduating from Rhine Secondary School–.

Dead.

4.

Rosie is decidedly not dead.

Yet.

Everything hurts. She remembers falling, and the sensation of tipping off a flimsy piece of wood keeping her aloft and then the splintering of wood and the lack of control over her movements, falling in the sky, is a thing of nightmares. She must’ve dreamed about falling off her broom during this entire deployment, fearful of all gunshots, and now that it’s happened, it’s scarier than anything her brain could’ve conjured up.

She blinks open and sees red eyes.

An Ishvalan woman curses at her (Rosie speaks zero Ishvalan, but getting cursed at is a universal language, understandable by all) and leaves the room. Tent. Place. The walls are made from patterned rugs, which means she can’t tell if she’s above ground in a tent or below ground in some covered tunnel. Her headache and body pains means she can’t focus on the ambient noise long enough to tell her surroundings.

Body pains. Ow. Her right arm is in a thick cotton cast and tied to her chest. It feels like her neck is broken, but she can still wiggle her toes, so it can’t be that bad. But there’s a massive, aching pain coming from between her legs, and sudden fear grips her chest and she can’t breath. She slowly, very slowly moves her right leg, and quickly identifies the source of pain as somewhere in an awkward place on the inner thigh. Well. Alright, then. The bullet that broke her broomstick tore through a weird crook in the fat of her thigh.

At least the bullet didn’t go through her ass. That would be embarrassing.

And she’d be face-down, ass-up during her interrogation session with the Ishvalans, instead of sitting down perfectly still the way she is right now. The small kindness of treating her wounds is not forgotten, however much she wishes it would be. Discovering an Ishvalan as an actual person is a bad thing to an Amestrian soldier’s worldview and inner peace.

“You’re lucky, child,” someone says. The deep voice of a man. Behind the curtain-rug-wall over there. The door-thing flaps open, and hints of light seeps through. She’s outside. “You fell through a tree and then a cloth-roof of the sheep farmer. The sheep sh*t cushioned your fall.”

Lovely.

But she doesn’t smell bad, which means someone bathed her. And dressed her wounds. And dressed her in lavender coloured robes.

The man is tall, dark-skinned, white of hair and red eyed, just like the rest of his race. But there are tattoos peeking out under each sleeve and up to his neck, which doesn’t seem very holy and Ishvalan of him.

“And you’re also lucky, because I found your body first, before my people could finish you off,” he says.

Rosie swallows. Her throat doesn’t feel particularly dry, which means someone’s been deep-throating a bottle of water down her throat or it hasn’t been that long since her fall. “Thank you.”

Being thankful is something she’s taken for granted. Sure, she wouldn’t be in this f*cking mess if it weren’t for a corrupt and power-addicted dictatorship keen on destroying everyone on the borders of this thrice-damned circle, but she can be thankful for the small mercies along the way. Strong Arm being a nice tutor friend. Captain Hughes being a kind paternal figure. Flame for being… mildly antagonistic but overall looking out for her wellbeing. And now this strange enemy who wishes her well.

Not well.

He’s still an enemy. He just wants her alive for whatever nefarious reasons.

“It wasn’t too difficult to convince my people not to kill a child,” he says, and there’s a hint of bitterness there.

Ouch. Because the whole reason this war started is because an Amestrian killed an Ishvalan child. At least revenge isn’t top priority yet. But the most likely scenario is that they’ve agreed to keep her alive to sell her back in exchange for their own prisoners of war (which Amestris doesn’t keep for very long, once all the information’s been tortured out of them), or to use her as bait in their own battle tactics.

The options aren’t very good.

But this man is showing basic kindness. She can exploit that. The other men in this camp may not be so nice.

“I didn’t want to fight,” she says, and tries to sound pathetic. It’s working, because the man looks sympathetic. “But I did, and I killed your people. I can’t say sorry, because my apologies won’t bring back all of those lives.”

He sighs and bows his head. “That’s true. How old are you, child?”

Rosie turned sixteen last week.

“Twelve,” she says immediately. Her growth spurt still hasn’t hit, so she’s still quite shrimpy at five foot nothing. And the younger she goes, the more pity she’ll get. Hopefully.

The tattooed man makes a dark face and says something foul in his language. He’s sad. “A child. Not even old enough to buy a goat. Has Amestris fallen so deeply to bring children to war?”

Despite how much Rosie dislikes her current government, she feels compelled to defend it from badmouthing foreigners. It must be the pre-pubescent brainwashing. “No,” she says. “Just me. I’m the– exception.”

For a good reason. For all intents and purposes, she’s sixteen, but y’know, technically, she’s like a billion times older, depending on what kind of reincarnation card she got. Of all child soldiers to pick from, Amestris chose the right one. She’s not telling this to anyone, though. Nuclear fusion and Minecraft lore can stay right in her head, thank you very much.

“And why is that, child?”

He still looks sad. Good. It’s working.

But then she realises that the best way to endear herself is to tell the truth. The full, honest truth, that she hasn’t even told her friends yet. Not Hughes, who’s been so kind to her this whole time. Or Strong Arm, who diligently tries time and again to hammer the Kreps cycle into her thick skull.

“I–.” And she hesitates. This is wrong. Amestris is flawed, yes, but how dare she pledge to an enemy of the state instead of her loyal comrades. The short truth, then. She can’t– yes, she can. She has a voice, and she is her own independent person. Nobody can control her over the border. She is, in some messed up way, freer here as a kidnapped child than in her own home. “I learned how to make the flying tools by myself, because I wanted to fly like the birds.” Freedom in the sky and into the beyond. “And when I tried to patent the information for the people, the military found out.”

She swallows. Her mouth feels dry. The man stares intently.

“That day, soldiers led me into a centre for the State Alchemist test. I didn’t know what was going on, and I failed most of the questions. But they told me I passed, and within the week I was sent to Ishval to be used as a weapon.”

This is her apology.

“I’m not good at alchemy,” she confesses quietly. The words let loose, flowing like the river from her mouth. She’s crying on the inside. “I don’t know a lot of things, I should’ve failed that test. I only know how to fly, but the Führer wanted me for his stupid circle country and stupid circle war. I wanted to fly in the sky and have fun and finish school and get married and live in a forest and–.” She’s going too far. Too fast. Slow down, Rosemary, before it all comes tumbling down.

Her throat clamps.

No more words.

Instead, she’s killed so many people. Hundreds, if not thousands. This is a genocide beyond magnitude. She values her own life so much that she’s willing to kill all these people and turn a blind eye to her own atrocities. A terrible human being.

“I see,” the man – her saviour and her doom – says. He heads closer to her cot and sits right next to her. Even though he’s the enemy, the scum beneath her boot according to all the textbooks, she appreciates the hint of warmth from his human skin and human eyes. “Why do you say that? The circles?”

She blinks. “The what?”

Ah, yes. Circles. The circle country in a circle war. It’s the strangest thing to ask about, in the context of everything else she’s just said. “It’s silly. The country’s a big fat circle like an alchemy circle. I don’t know why nobody else talks about it. It’s just so stupid.”

Everyone’s so used to Amestris being their home country that they don’t step back and see the bigger picture. What the f*ck kind of country is this perfectly circular? That’s got to be on purpose. Did the dictator from the founding years, three hundred years ago, just really like circles? That is when alchemy was discovered, yes, so that might be the answer. A huge f*cking nerd causing all of this geopolitical tension and usurping territories, how terribly humorous.

Well. Stupid question or not, it’s cleared her head a little.

“Yes, the country is an alchemy circle,” he says.

It’s the last thing she expected him to say. Him, an Ishvalan. A member of a religious ethnic group who shuns alchemy and other unnatural sciences. Who would not sound so matter-of-fact about this exact kind of science.

What the f*ck. What kind of alchemic circle?

“It is silly, how no one’s noticed,” he adds, and there’s a twitch to his lips. “Although, probably for good reason. I imagine the secret behind the circle is a very severe one. But if you are to discover the truth, child, then please find a way to stop this war as well. I will give you my name before I leave.”

Because the plan is to use her as bait. A human shield, tied up in the rafters in the back, to get the women, children, and elderly out of Ishval and into the desert lands. That is the only way for the remains of these people to flee from Amestrian terrors.

His name is Azka.

“Rosie,” she whispers, right before he leaves. “My name is Rosie.”

Azka hears her, the ghost of her words, and he nods slightly, a sad smile on his face, and that’s the last she ever sees of him.

Azka apparently has a lot of sway in this community, because the next person to enter the tent isn’t too rough with her. It’s an older Ishvalan man, with a full white beard and a turban, muttering obscenities under his breath, but all he does is slip her free hand into a chain and drag her along. That tattoo man must be some kind of doctor around here, to be so invested in the sciences. Which means Azka treated her wounds. Her thigh wound, barely two inches below the panty line, meaning he definitely saw right up her vagin* in order to stitch the wound up.

Hmmmm. On second thought, the image of her saviour might be a little soured.

It’s painful to walk, but nothing feels misaligned. Her legs are still working, even though her neck hurts like a bitch and there’s a pounding in the base of her skull that’s ruining her concentration. If it’s a concussion, she’s screwed, because if that doesn’t get looked at by the end of the day, she might end up with permanent brain damage. Her right arm suffered a clean break, miraculously, and might actually be the healthiest (injured) part of her body at the moment.

The tree that saved her life did some damage, though. There’s thin whip slices all over her body (which probably tore her uniform to shreds, to think of it, explaining her brand new clothes), and one on her forehead. There’s no mirror, but she can smell the stinging herbal gauze and the wince of pain going from forehead to right eyebrow.

Well, geez, the right side of her body is all kinds of f*cked up. She hopes that she at least ends up with a cool eyebrow scar instead of an ugly one.

The guy dragging her around on a chain is considerate enough to walk slowly. He doesn’t look like he’s having a fun time, however. Then again, Ishval literally tried to kill her via two f*cking gunshots, and when that didn’t work, they got a shovel from the sheep manure and tried to stab her to death. The only reason why she’s still living and breathing is because someone convinced a whole lot of angry men that she’s more useful as bait.

For now.

After they get their women and children out, they’re probably going to decapitate her, Riddick-inspired. It’s not a good look to release an enemy that’s the equivalent of an attack helicopter.

Or not. Who knows. Small mercies for children. Maybe they’ll just chop her limbs off and let her crawl back home like a worm, to be a useless cripple for the rest of her life. But automail exists here. Very high tech prosthetics in Amestris. Way better than Earth’s versions. What fun. She’d make for an amazing flying cyborg.

She tries to blink the bad thoughts out. It doesn’t work. Her brain feels like sludge. She can hardly think.

Oh no, a little voice in her head goes. I think I have a concussion.

Azka treated all of her physical wounds, but there isn’t any equipment in shoddy, run-down camps to do X-ray level brain scans. And she was lucid enough during waking that he didn’t suspect anything. But now that she’s moving around and using up precious energy, the full effects of a brain injury are coming down on her. But she can’t complain because they would just sneer and tell her to quit lying. Or they might not respond at all, because not everyone here speaks Amestrian.

Then someone has the grand idea to carry her on their back. She’s small enough that it’s not uncomfortable for them, but she’s injured enough that it’s uncomfortable for her. It makes sense to keep her close, because if the Amestrian forces spot their group, then they wouldn’t be able to shoot their way through without shooting through her body.

Very respectable tactics.

The way the runner holds her makes her sore neck twinge and her cramped broken arm ache, so she lets out a tinny whine every so often from the pain. He ignores her, of course, and Rosie just has to deal with it.

The group leaves in the chaos of battle. They’d planned on leaving at nightfall, in the safety of the dark, but the encampment about a kilometre south receives heavy fire in the late afternoon. So they run and run, Rosie jolting all the way and trying not to scream from the spine-tingling amount of hurt in her neck and skull, until they reach a hidden cave system. The fact that they aren’t blindfolding her means that they’re definitely going to off her later, which is not a comforting thought.

She hears her codename in the distance.

An old man. Familiar. She can’t move her neck very well (or at all), but she doesn’t need to, because the runner carrying her turns around to see who’s found them.

The Silver Alchemist.

There’s a measure of surprise on his face (surprise! Rosie’s still alive, unfortunately!) at her appearance, and then consternation at the group’s escape and her status as a tied-up shrew. Silver’s alchemy isn’t the most accurate and he knows this, because if he tries to attack, then it’s likely he’d kill her along with the rest of the merry crew.

One last look, and the runner darts into the cave.

They run for hours. Probably not hours, but it feels like hours. For a split second, Rosie thinks she’s gone blind from her undiagnosed head injury, but then she realises she’s been closing her eyes the entire time.

Critical thinking at an all time low.

That’s a bad sign.

There’s a cave river here, which is spooky and something straight out of the Goonies, and Rosie’s unceremoniously shoved into a boat with a bunch of terrified women clutching their scarves and children.

The rest of the day goes like this: pain, river journey, more pain, passing out, being woken up by a foot nudging her rib cage, sudden desert, dragged by chain, eventually passing out again, waking up to be carried bridal-style, and then night time.

She wakes up, possibly for the last time, with such excruciating grogginess that it’s near torture to make herself lucid. She’s upright, at least, which she’s thankful for because she doesn’t doubt that she wouldn’t have been able to get up by herself at this point. Someone threw a blanket over her for the night, which resembles more of a rug than a blanket. It’s thick and warm at least, which is all she needs.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Pounding headache.

She breathes, one, two, three, and swallows the bile down. Her throat is wet, again, so someone was kind enough to force water down her throat during her bout of unconsciousness. These people aren’t demons at all. They’re just people. And she’s known that all along, because war is a repeated history topic on Earth that everyone knows about. All those A-level history class projects were meant to teach how war is bad, bad, bad, and to always remember that there are two sides to a conflict.

That’s not taught in Amestris. Amestrians are taught to win no matter what, and the enemy is the enemy.

The people who rebel against this kind of thinking don’t end up too well.

It’s dark. They’re in the desert. Her back is against a stone wall. A desert ruin? Some old Ishvalan territory, before that environmental upheaval a few centuries ago that threw them out of inhospitable lands. Just like what happened in Mesopotamia, when it used to be green and fertile, and is now just barren desert.

Is. Was. Not on Earth anymore. Doesn’t matter.

Rosie needs to focus on escape. Medical attention. She needs a doctor, or she’s going to die. Apparently falling from the sky, from who knows how high, is bad for the body.

No broom.

Broken right arm against her chest, wrapped safely. Left hand in a tight single cuff on a chain. The man holding a chain is next to her, sleeping. There’s a guard in front of her, awake, but not paying attention. He’s doing something else, paper in his hands. Sudoku? Sketching? His visibility must be real sh*tty.

The only thing she has is a rug.

A rug isn’t a broom. Her alchemy circle accounted for wood type and geometric features. What is this rug? Wool? It’s got to be pure wool, because Ishvalans don’t use synthetic materials. Okay, checkmark. How big is it? It covers her legs and arms, but it doesn’t drape too loosely into the sand. Approximately five foot by five foot. Ideally, she’d have the exact measurements, but there’s no way she can eyeball it like this.

No pencil.

She can’t scratch a circle into wool with her fingernails. She needs ink of some kind.

Blood.

None of her wounds are actively bleeding. And the only wound big enough to support enough blood to draw an alchemy circle is her thigh wound, which is bandaged up with sticky gauze. But it’s been less than a day (hopefully), which means it couldn’t have fully clotted yet.

Both arms are confined. Constrained. Useless.

No. Left arm works fine. Dislocate the thumb, and her hand will pop out of the cuff without a sound.

She pulls her left hand out and only begins to feel the pain once her left arm is tucked safely under the rug-blanket. She could howl. It hurts so f*cking bad, worse than the broken arm. Her left hand must be on fire, submerged in lava, for how bad it hurts. She can’t write with this hand. How can a dislocated thumb hurt this much? Before the pain gets worse, she uses the pinky finger to tug open the tight cloths supporting her right arm. The broken arm will write better than this. The right arm has a dull, bone-deep ache, like earthquake tremors. The left hand is needle-sharp pricks of screams and sorrows.

Pull the gauze off. Wince at the scratchiness and tug of skin and exposed tissue. Pause to make sure the guard hasn’t noticed all this movement underneath the blanket.

He doesn’t.

Still focused on his stupid sudoku game. How can that idiot even read, in the sparse moonlight?

Dip fingers into the bullet wound. God, she wants the scream so badly. She might be breaking a few teeth from how hard she’s clenching her jaw. Dip into bullet wound, open wound back up. Blood seeps out. New inkwell.

On the spot, Rosie adjusts her broom equations for a rug. Assessing general size, shape, and materials. The flat bottom of the rug will have to be the propeller space, and the increase of surface area makes it difficult to be precise with her movements in the sky. Displacement also increases with more surface area. And rugs aren’t solid objects, so the shape of her body will leave an indent on the bottom surface. How much does she weigh again? How big will her body lump be against the rug?

She might have to draw from other atoms to keep her afloat. Break open oxygen atoms to get to hydrogen ions. Miniature explosions keeping her afloat. The bottom of the rug might get very warm. Oh no. She might need helium. Helium is good for floating. How does she make helium again? Two electrons, two protons, two neutrons. She can steal atoms from oxygen, destroy the electron bond, split molecules open to create her own helium. This is molecular fission. Bad. Very bad. Very advanced, high level chemistry, that isn’t good to apply to alchemy.

Except she needs the helium to get this massive rug afloat.

It hurts to think. Every thought takes ages to coax out of her sorry state, and is filled with nonsense fluff and television screen static. Helium. She needs to make her own helium or else she’s going to die. There’s something wrong with her brain.

Flying is just atmospheric sciences. Atmosphere alchemy. Molecular fission should be right up her ballpark. Of course, if she were actually a gifted alchemist and not some one-gift party horse. Oh wait. That’s not what it’s called. One trick pony. Right, that’s it.

Too late. She’s already drawn the circle on the rug. It’s now or never, and she can feel herself drifting away. Her mind is so, so hazy. So sleepy. Closing eyes, three, two…

Rosie jumps up, shocking the guard in front of her, and several other women and children who apparently are light sleepers. She races down the desert, flattening out the rug as much as she can against the wind, her legs slow and weak, and then jumps onto the rug and fuels the alchemy circle. She falls for a second, back on the sands, and then there’s a burning smell from a misplaced something, and then she’s off into the skies.

They’re going to shoot her.

That guard had a gun. He’ll shoot her, and she’ll be even more injured, but she might make it out. She might. She might survive and get back home. Going by the stars, the big star up there, Amestris is just due west.

He doesn’t shoot.

She flies away even more. So slow. Flying so slow and not even that high.

Still no shot.

This time, she finally lets out a sob. Not from just the pain, but from the confusion. He’s not shooting her. He’s not. He’s letting her go. He’s a big bad enemy Ishvalan, and she’s a big bad Amestrian, and he’s a merciful human man.

Rosie screams into the desert night, and the wind accepts her voice.

Eventually, just before sunrise, she sees the Amestrian camp. Camp Y is the closest to her, because she’d been accidentally flying at a snail’s pace in a slightly north-western direction. But now she’s very big and visible with her flying magic carpet, so of course she gets shot. Again. The luck of all luck has it, it doesn’t hit her, but it tears a fat hole through the rug, and she falls through the sky yet again.

She’s close to the ground this time. Probably won’t die.

A series of iron-metal chains shoot up from the ground and capture her delicately. Well, not that delicately, but at least there’s no whiplash. Then chains lower her to the ground as a giant metal shield raises to make sure no more bullets hit. Then the chains unravel to toss her into the strong embrace of Iron Blood.

“You’re a tenacious little thing, aren’t you,” he says.

Rosie says something like “guh” and “uhbwbuwbuh” so Iron Blood frowns with his mighty moustache and barks orders to the nearest infantrymen to get her on a truck immediately to base camp.

He stares down at her sternly. “I forbid you to die,” he proclaims, and then carries her into a truck and off they race to the med team. Or her cremation site. Who knows, really, because she winks in and out of consciousness, all out of f*cks to give because Iron Blood is so warm and friendly and safe (yes, that is her concussion speaking).

5.

There’s a map in the field hospital room. She’s not special enough to warrant a private room, so she gets to share with an entire crowd of sixteen beds, everyone in a state of sorry decay. Again, there’s a map in the room. It’s right across from her. A map of Amestris. The circle.

Azka didn’t seem insane enough to be schizophrenic. The country is a circle. But is the circle an alchemy circle?

What kind of data points would be used? What locking methods, and inputs and outputs? With which elemental base? What does a country offer? People?

Oh. Maybe that. Population density, sure.

Central City sits squarely (or circularly) in the middle of the country. But the four satellite cities in each district don’t form a perfect square. Not population density, then. Not cities.

It’s a thought for another time. Rosie doesn’t have nearly enough brain cells for this.

Everyone else agrees. About the brain cells part. Or maybe she’s suffering from PTSD and this is how it feels, because she can read, write, talk, and do all the cognitive tests just fine. Her chart should have the answers at least.

Rosie leans down carefully, mindful of the cast on her neck, and grabs her chart. There’s everything she expects to see – neck fracture, broken arm, dislocated thumb, several skin contusions, gunshot wound – but the brain part is concerning. What’s the difference between a normal concussion and a severe concussion? Apparently hers is extra bad. But it really can’t be that bad because she managed to split open ions without accidentally creating a hydrogen bomb with her brain literally bleeding into her skull.

That’s a scary thought. Everyone’s tiptoeing around her. Has she changed? Is she different now? Everything feels fine, but concussions can cause serious damage. Personality changes. Differences in demeanour, likes and dislikes. Her mind is her sense of being – the potential that she’s now a different person is…

Unthinkable.

Hughes was very gentle when he visited. Treated her like a little girl. A daughter of sorts, even though he’s only seven years older than her. According to him and the nurse, Iron Blood sat by her side the entire time the doctors treated her, and only had to leave once General Eagle called for him.

She decides she likes Iron Blood.

She doesn’t really like the Crystal Alchemist, though, because he looks like a dodgy figure, going in and out of hospital rooms. Is he even injured? Is he a doctor of some sort?

Four months of war is enough for her. And her doctors seem to agree, because her next few tests say that she’ll need at least six months off-duty to fully heal her brain. Six months minimum. Recommended up to two years, with the chance that the concussion will leave lasting effects anyhow. The neck fracture will take about six weeks, and her arm will take eight weeks. Her scars will fade because none of them got infected.

No cool eyebrow scar for her.

The thigh scar will remain, because it was a more severe injury, and she agitated the healing process by stabbing her dirty fingers into it. Which means all future sex partners will need to be warned about an ugly bullet wound about two inches south of puss*.

Urgh.

Flame and Strong Arm are too busy on the field to visit her before she’s honourably discharged from field duty, but both manage to send nice letters. And her diploma from secondary school, which had been rotting in a locker for a while.

Eventually, the field medic team at base camp tell her that she’s fit for travel, and she gets carted off to join the rest of the invalids in the return train to Central.

Rosie dithers around in a barracks for a few weeks, waiting for her neck brace to come off, before she braves the outside world with people and friends. It’s late summer, almost college season, and she hasn’t a clue how to socialise with normal people. She must’ve lost it, alongside her morals, in Ishval.

It takes adjusting.

A lot of adjusting. Apparently she’s become a national celebrity of sorts, just for being a hero in the Ishval war. Luckily her discharge was for a good reason (medical injury) instead of something horrible (other valid reason to quit, to preserve life). She no longer lives in Central-upon-Rhine, having moved to a military barracks in Central. Yeah, maybe sixteen isn’t the legal age of adulthood, but the fact that the military put her through war means they can shut the f*ck up when it comes to things like adult independence.

So she lives in a military barracks, in a room of four, where the three other women don’t bother her and don’t really care about each other. It works out great, because they can still coexist peacefully and everyone’s clean and tidy about their space.

Despite the discharge, she’s still in the military ranks. Still a State Alchemist. Can’t escape that no matter how hard she tries, but this time she can get away with delaying a lot of duties simply by attending a two-year college. And then she can delay even more with a four-year university. The military pays her a stipend throughout this educational pursuit, and her rent and school is completely paid off. All she has to do is send a monthly report about how to decipher the broomstick, you fool nincompoop researchers, and they leave her alone. Doctor’s orders.

It’s a great deal. Someone in the highest chain of command must be crying over the loss of her presence in the battlefield, but whatever. Suck it, dumbass. Rosie’s got a note from the doctor. She’s invincible.

Almost worth the four months of irreparable trauma and life-long nightmares about falling from the sky.

Yeah, totally worth it.

At the end of 1908, the Ishval Civil War comes to a close. After seven long years of battle, the war is finally over. There are celebrations in the streets, crowds in all the bars and restaurants, and fireworks in the sky. Rosie spends most of it with earplugs in and being face-down in her pillow.

The next week, her building manager retrieves her from her room.

“There’s a phone call for you, Witch,” the old lady says tiredly.

For her?

Rosie goes to the old rotary phone station and picks up the hold. Immediately, a friendly voice comes through from the other line.

“Rosie!”

It’s Hughes. She doesn’t ask how he found her (what kind of Intelligence officer would he be if he couldn’t?), and listens away to his jovial charm. Dinners every wednesday night. Sure. That’s doable. He’s got a nice flat downtown from his new salary as a lieutenant colonel, having been promoted two ranks in the aftermath of the war. Well deserved. He’d been an amazing soldier.

Several months after her discharge, Rosie meets Maes Hughes again. He’s aged since the last time she saw him, because the last stretch of war was a dire one, and he’s grown out his stubble into a rather handsome goatee. She’s also done a bit of developing, with her growth spurt finally having hit. The women’s small size uniform is a touch too tight now, and she’s well on her way to growing into a medium. She looks her age, and Maes notices.

He doesn’t talk to her like a girl anymore. But their first Wednesday dinner is censored and light, gauging her presence of mind.

Rosie’s gotten better. That’s what the neurologist says. But it’s always “you’re getting better” and not “you’re completely back to normal now.” She loses concentration more easily, slipping away into her own mind more often than not, and sometimes she feels detached from reality – very much just not there.

Then it’s 1909, and the years pass by so quickly.

Maes gets a girlfriend. Rosie is witness to their heartwarming, ooey-gooey romance. She passes Year 11 and moves on to her final year at college. Her brain keeps getting better, but never perfect. Never back to normal. Central City is eating her alive. There’s something wrong about this place, this country, this circle in circle in circle. Azka’s final words are driving her mad. She dreams of falling over and over and over again. She studies alchemy so intensively to make sure she’ll never be in such horrible situations ever again, and to back up her own State Alchemist certification.

Now, if she really really tries, she can write out simple equations for metal alchemy. She repairs a faulty radiator at school this way.

And then it’s 1910 and it’s time to choose a university.

Rosie receives a strongly worded letter from Major General Gardner to choose Central University, because the research facilities in Central are the best, and the research branch is thinking of building a hanger for new flying technology blueprints. She’d sent in a rough blueprint of a blimp, talking nonsense about hot air balloons and how they work (apparently hot air balloons aren’t even a thing in Amestris yet, which is fantastically wild because they’re so f*cking easy to reverse engineer), and he’d been proud of the design. And the rest of the military had been proud as well. In about five years’ time, they’re thinking of launching a flight department, managed by her.

It’s a lot to deal with.

Rosie wants to go to sleep and never wake up, and suicidal thoughts are very, very bad, so it’s about time to come clean to Maes.

The next Wednesday night, Maes and his girlfriend Gracia make a lovely roast dinner. Steak, mash peas, honey glazed potatoes and carrots. Once everyone finishes eating, Rosie clears her throat and looks Maes straight in the eyes.

“When I was fifteen, I was ordered to join the military by the Führer.”

Maes calmly turns to Gracia. “Would you be so dear as to check on the shutters? I think it might rain soon.”

“Oh my,” Gracia says, and hurries upstairs. She doesn’t come down the rest of the night, so that means they’d already planned out a code for these types of situations. A smart couple.

“It wasn’t a direct order, of course,” she says, and taps her fingers on the table. It’s nice wood. Must’ve been expensive. “I wanted to fly for fun, so I submitted a patent to the legal office about my broomstick. Twenty-four hours later, two fully outfitted officers arrived at my school to ask about my patent. Once they ascertained that it could not be replicated, they told me that they’d like to escort me to Central City for the State Alchemist test.”

Rosie doesn’t like recalling this. It’s not her best memory, for sure.

“And at the testing centre, I failed the written exam. I barely knew anything except atmospheric sciences. I was fifteen, you see. My grades in school were good, but not that good. I wasn’t some prodigy. But instead of failing the exam, they passed me. Major General Gardner oversaw my physical exam with four fully outfitted officers, all wielding heavy duty rifle artillery. Five days later, I was shipped to Ishval.”

Then she retrieves her latest letter from her pocket, all crumpled up from the tight space. Maes flattens it out and reads it slowly. His eyebrows knit together.

Her soul is being laid bare in front of this man, her friend. One of her only real friends in this world.

After a long pause, he says, “I’ll handle this.”

Rosie melts into the table and cries.

After that, it’s smooth sailing. She does her best to finish the last semester of college, coming around to Maes’ flat more than once a week just to talk to Gracia, who lives full time with her boyfriend now, or to randomly do some chores in their home for the heck of it. They feed her, so she might as well sporadically pay the favour back somehow. And they feed her quite well, because by the time the summer rolls around and she turns eighteen, she’s grown into a women’s medium size uniform dress and shot up a few inches in height. She’s still a bit peaky, but overall much better. More human than before. She’s grown into her adult face more, with a strong aquiline nose and almond shaped eyes. Her hair’s also gotten lighter, less golden and more blonde.

She still needs to eat more. Still thin. Eat. Food.

One of these days, she’ll finally get strong enough to develop some wicked upper body strength. But for now, she’ll be a wimpy eighteen year old.

Maes’ plan comes to fruition in the summer, just before university applications are due. It’s a combination of Maes and Flame plotting together over the phone, apparently, and it reeks of some hilarious inside joke.

“This is the best way?” Rosie asks for the third time, just making sure. “Are you sure?”

Maes pretends to be put-out with a huge sigh. “Unfortunately, if we want you to leave Central, yes. To contest your rights within the government, you’ll need something with a lot of governmental protections behind it. One of the most difficult rules to break in the entire country, for better or for worse.”

Rosie supposes she doesn’t mind too much. It can’t be that bad, really. So she ends up signing the legal form with her name, signature, and national identification number, before letting Maes get his grimy hands all over it to ship it back to Colonel Mustang in East City. Then she goes home to submit her application for the University of East City, and a letter to her higher-ups in the research department explaining her brand new complication that requires her to be outside of Central.

Flame runs his own tight ship in Eastern command. He wields enough power, evidently, to veto a few things, and get other things up and running. Part of the aerial research department relocates to the more spacious UEC instead of CU, through his own smooth talking. Which in turn allows Major General Gardner not to blow a gasket at Rosie moving to a new city. But the whole part binding her to the new city entirely and legally, is the spouse rule.

Military spouses have their own special rules. Rosie isn’t considered active duty anymore, but if her spouse is active duty, then she has to follow him around under his current assignment. And given how well Colonel Mustang’s doing at East City, nobody’s going to move him or his subordinates anywhere just yet.

Not for a few years, at least. But that’s enough time for Rosie to decompress and fix her brain. Fingers crossed.

She’d thought, when Maes first proposed the idea, that she’d be marrying the Flame Alchemist. Which was – blegh. Yuck. He’s a handsome man, but they share too much trauma together in the war. He also knew her as a kid, and that’s just gross. Maybe Flame’s perverted enough to be into that, but Rosie isn’t.

Instead, one of his subordinates was proposed. Apparently Mustang increased his salary bonus and pension high enough for him to agree. And there’s a clause in their fake-marriage contract that says that if one of them finds an actual partner, they can divorce and Rosie will start again with a different member of Mustang’s crew.

She hopes it doesn’t get to that point, because getting passed around like a used bicycle would probably raise a few eyebrows. But then she feels bad at the notion of suppressing some random soldier’s dating scene by pretending to be his wife, so it’s sort of a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Regardless, the plan commences.

Rosie takes a train to East City in the sweltering late summer of 1910 to meet her husband for the first time.

There’s a cardboard sign with her name on it at the station, held up by a man in uniform. His hair is dark blond, spiky, and cut in a way that suggests he’s too stingy for a barber and prefers manscaping in the blacklight of his own bathroom. His face is long with a strong jaw, a hint of a five o’clock shadow, and worn with bright blue eyes against a sunny tan. Together with the popped collar and desirable face, Jean Havoc looks a lot like a scarecrow walked into a gay bar. The numerous sharpied in hearts around her name on the sign doesn’t help.

Oh no, he’s pretty, she thinks to herself.

But then she walks up to him with her suitcase and has to crane her neck. Damn. He’s at least a foot taller. She doesn’t like him anymore.

“Hello Willa darlin’,” he says, with an easy smile. Lustful country accent.

This might be a match of opposites. Rosie grew up in a well to-do neighbourhood street in one of the fancier suburbs of Central, so her accent is quite posh. It’s really a hit or miss with orphanages, but sometimes you hit the jackpot and end up in the high-end CFO towns with lakeside parks and sh*t.

“I don’t use my first name,” she says, clipped. It’s an automatic response, but she’s rubbed him off the wrong way because the smile drops and turns into a grimace. Oops.

“Rosemary,” he amends. “You can call me Havoc.”

Well. This is a bad start.

He’s gentlemanly enough to carry her suitcase in the car, and Rosie awkwardly stands there with her broomstick until she has enough sense to open the back seat to prop it up in there. She’d wrapped her broomstick in bedsheets and gaffer tape, making it look more like an illegal weapon than just a cleaning tool. Well. The train attendants didn’t say anything to her face, at least, because her shiny new military uniform helps distract from any potential foul activity such as gun smuggling and don’t look at me I’ll arrest you!

Then they get into the car. It’s his own personal car, all black and sleek as most military models are, with the smell of cigarette smoke absolutely everywhere. There’s an old coffee cup in a holster on his side, but other than that, there’s no trash in the car. Clean as can be, at least. Lots of women have probably been in this car, giggling over the same nice things and their handsome new boytoy.

Rosie starts to feel a little worse than usual. Mustang better be paying this man a whole lot.

“There’s a bus station down the street from where I live,” Havoc begins speaking, not looking at her. He sounds disgruntled. Was he expecting a well-adjusted, pleasant female flatmate? Rosie’s already memorised the phone numbers for the local shrinks in the area. “You can take the thirty-three bus to get to the main UEC campus, and fifty-seven goes straight to Eastern Command headquarters.”

He rattles off other basics about his neighbourhood, his building, and his expected work schedule. Mostly just killing time in the car so it’s not an awkward drive, which Rosie appreciates. Havoc must also be a people-person, like Maes. She wonders how the hell some nimwit like Mustang got himself surrounded with these lovely folk.

Maybe not that lovely. Havoc looks like an ex-frat boy who only recently discovered daily showers.

Still charming enough.

“Thank you,” she says, and tries not to stir uncomfortably in her seat. “For doing this.”

Havoc makes a left turn and pulls into a quiet neighbourhood block. “It’s not a permanent deal. It’ll last at most a few years, and if I find a woman I really like then the contract says I can pursue her. Besides, the colonel doubled my pay, so getting a new flatmate is worth it.”

He sounds like he’s convincing himself instead of her.

It’s just… awkward.

So awkward.

He recently got a new flat, so there are still some boxes in the living room, but it’s otherwise fresh and clean. Havoc doesn’t seem to know what to do with a flatmate, or with an eligible young woman that he’s not actively pursuing, so he gives her a lot of space and just fumbles around in the halls not doing anything.

Rosie gets the ensuite, which is kind of him, so she closes the door behind her and creates a space for herself. There’s a desk and a bed already set up, but everything is barebones bachelor-style living, so she organises her stuff into shelves and tries to turn this room into a home.

Then it’s dinner time.

She’s used to quietly eating alone, but Havoc isn’t. He gets all full-on country bumpkin about meal time and says some nonsense about people aren’t meant to be eating by themselves. It raises a few questions about what he does without guests over.

And the day finishes like that.

Rosie tucks herself into bed, wondering what horrors this next chapter of life will bring.

6.

There’s a pattern in the next few months. Rosie gets up before sunrise, makes breakfast, and darts off to class in the early grey-skied morning, right as Havoc emerges from his room for coffee. She spends most of the day on campus, being a boring hermit in the library, attempting friendships with the newly posted aerial research team, and then comes home in time for dinner and then quiet alone time in her room.

It’s not a particularly exciting schedule, but it’s safe. Constant. Forgiving.

She doesn’t see Havoc too often. Rosie begins to suspect one of the reasons Havoc even agreed to this whole thing in the first place is because he’s too busy to date anyway, and wanted to have at least some feminine companionship when he could.

But between the two of them, he’s definitely the girly one.

Rosie grew up in an orphanage, straight into a feeder academy system. She was born into terrible cafeteria style food, and as a result, may be lacking in the tastebuds category. On the other hand, Havoc grew up in a loving home in the countryside, where he fetched eggs from his hens every morning, swept the floors to make sure farm mice didn’t start spawning everywhere, and is apparently an only child to a couple who wanted a girl. Which explains… a lot.

The morning after her last day of the semester, Rosie wakes up later than usual. There’s no class today, so she doesn’t have to catch the early bus.

“That cannot taste good.”

Rosie stirs her oats in the saucepan once more before putting the lid on. “Porridge?”

It’s the first time they’re in the kitchen together. Havoc puts his coffee down in abject horror. “That’s not porridge,” he says, and he looks so miserable and disappointed that it’s almost funny (but mostly insulting). “That’s just oats and hot water. You’re gonna end up with gloop.”

Rosie feels defensive about her gloop. “It tastes fine.”

It has a nice oaty, earthy flavour. The texture is oddly gelatinous, yes, and it dries into a crumbly mess when she takes too long to eat, but it’s otherwise edible. Better than most cafeteria porridges anyway.

Havoc gets antsy and commandeers the kitchen. She gets pushed to the side while he rummages around for his superior breakfast items, so she decides to sit on the counter and watch him do his sorcery. He lowers the heat on the saucepan, adds more oats, a dash of milk and cream, a sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon, and then ends it with a giant glob of peanut butter and crushed walnuts. Then he puts the lid on and sets the saucepan to the side to fry up four eggs.

The plates are in the cabinet above her head, but Rosie’s too entranced to move, and Havoc ends up standing right in front of her. He looks sleepy (as always), with mussed up bedhead hair looking like a pile of straw. The skin-tight shirt is new, though. Or maybe it’s not new and that’s what he always wears for bed. Distracting. She can see every outline of hard-earned muscle on that tall, toned body. His shoulders flex to get the plates in the cabinet, and suddenly he’s very close and she can smell his coffee breath.

Havoc sneaks a peek down at her, and she’s reminded that he’s a hotblooded young man, positioned before her, with her wearing only a tight f*cking tank top and pyjama shorts. Thighs and cleavage on full display. Like a slu*t.

Well. He’s looking awfully slu*tty, too. That shirt is way too small.

There’s a moment there, a spark of something bubbling and boiling, as Havoc stands there for a second too long, glancing at her thighs, speechless, before he turns away to plate their meal at the table.

It smells better than restaurant food. Actual, tasty goodness. Homemade wonder, crafted with love from Maes and Gracia.

“This is delightful,” Rosie says, after the first bite. “Thank you.”

He says something dismissive, that’s it’s no big deal and wow Rosie really needs to learn how to cook, and that he’ll teach her sometime. He already makes dinner for them both, so she feels a little bad about putting all this pressure on him to feed her. Then he speeds up his meal with gusto, having to go to work soon, and she’s left with the dishes and a very full stomach. If she keeps eating like this she’ll finally gain enough weight to build some proper womanly musculature.

The rest of the day is spent organising her university work and setting a goal for the hot air balloon production. She takes a nap, because she’s an old, withered soul, and then it’s dinner time and Havoc gets back home.

She thinks they’re becoming friends now. They’re no longer weird flatmates, but actual friends. It only took… four months and some minor sexual tension.

With the friendship and easier conversation-going, she learns more about Jean Havoc outside of the surface level topics. Mostly that he looks and acts like a womanising manwhor*, but he’s a thirteen year old farmboy at heart and has never really held onto a long term girlfriend before. Very much a young adult bachelor surviving off the occasional Nat-20 charisma rolls. And devious good looks.

There’s also the fact that he’s actually incredibly dangerous. Mustang only surrounds himself with competent people, and Havoc must’ve been the skilled assassin-for-hire, hiding deadly ninja skills behind that dumb face. This isn’t said out loud, but Rosie’s slowly noticing more and more about how Havoc’s every move is carefully controlled, constantly aware of his surroundings, and quiet on his feet.

Too quiet. He accidentally jumpscares her now and then.

And she realises how much she enjoys being his flatmate (and fake-married) when she goes back to Central to attend Maes’ wedding in the early spring of 1911.

Oh my f*cking god, she thinks privately, upon seeing Gracia.

Because either she got fat or that’s a baby bump.

“Goodness, Rosie, you’ve grown!” Gracia says, with her nice soft voice and beautiful smile and radiant pregnancy glow. Because that woman is definitely with child. Not fat. They hug, and they’re around the same height now, so Rosie feels the baby bump collide with her own stomach. “East City must be good for your health.”

“It’s nice,” Rosie says, ignoring the giant f*cking elephant in the room.

“And I’ve been doing some growing as well,” Gracia says, sly, and thank goodness she’s mentioned it. Rosie doesn’t think she has enough social manoeuvrability to bring up something like oh so that’s why you’re getting hitched.

They’re in Maes’ flat, with Maes away with his guy friends (and Roy, who tagged along on Rosie’s train ride, and they spent a very silent trip together doing paperwork and homework). Rosie’s busying herself getting reacquainted with the bride-to-be, with general chitchat and gossip. Also to sequester herself in someplace safe and warm in this hellhole of a city, where it feels like ants are crawling under her skin and rosaries are lit on fire for the fun of it. Central City is unnerving now, after a long healthy break outside of it. It’s becoming clearer that there is something deeply wrong with this place, something that she can’t quite put a finger on.

Eyes, everywhere. Every shadow, watching her.

The wedding is the next day. It’s a touch rude to spend the night in someone’s house right before their nuptials (and because Rosie is a thousand percent sure they’ll be f*cking all night long), so she spends the night in an open-booking military barrack. Colonel Mustang’s a special nutcase who needs silk pillowcases or foreign princesses massaging his feet with diamond guashas before bedtime, so he gets a hotel near the venue. Too good for the dorms, where she’s slumming it up.

Except it’s an off-season week, so the twelve-bed women’s dorm is completely empty except for her that night. Literally no one. No soft breaths or quiet snores of the neighbours to lull her to sleep.

Rosie’s never lived alone before. Orphanages are communal style living. The barracks in Ishval always had people on different shifts in them, sleeping when they could. And even in her own ensuite room in Havoc’s flat, the knowledge that he’d be right next door helps her sleep at night. But this– this building is devoid of life. Empty. Soulless. It makes her miss the simple domesticity of eating dinner with Havoc and bumping into him in the hallway and talking about the latest news on the radio.

And it does make her wonder if he’s thinking the same thing right now, in the dead of night. If he misses the smell of her lilac perfume, the faint audio of orchestral music coming from the radio in her room, or the way she leaves stray blonde hairs everywhere on the couch.

Eventually, Rosie falls asleep. It’s not a nice sleep, but the adrenaline on the day of the wedding makes up for any fatigue.

It’s a quaint affair in a cute party venue. Gracia wears a big ballroom-style wedding gown with an empire waistline and layers and layers of tulle. It hides the baby bump, so none of the elderly relatives in attendance can point fingers at her and froth at the mouth at their obvious sign of pre-marital sex. And Maes wears a handsome white suit with the biggest grin on his face. They look at each other with undying devotion, and several tears are shed at the sweet vows exchanged during the ceremony.

Everyone’s happy for the happy couple. Rosie is especially happy for Maes. She knows why they rushed into their relationship so quickly (the baby probably wasn’t planned, oops), as do most veterans of the Ishval War. In war, you learn how short and fleeting life really is, so you better do your damned best to grab what you love and never let it go. If Maes found the love of his life already, then there’s no point in waiting five, ten, fifteen years to date and engage and eventually marry and settle down. He’s going to live his life to the fullest, knowing just how easily happiness can be snatched away.

It’s an ideology that Rosie ought to adopt.

The wedding ends quietly. Maes and Gracia aren’t the type to throw lavish all-nighter events, and are seemingly obsessed with becoming sappy old people doing boring things at home together instead of a proper party. Well. Maybe not. There’s an after-party for the military friends at a local pub, which Rosie politely attends the first hour of before deciding she hates piss-tasting beer and loud noises, and takes the night train back to East City.

It was nice seeing everyone, though. It’d been a while since she’d seen Alex Armstrong, and he’d been particularly lovely to her. Even the mild conversations with Colonel Mustang had been decent. Despite both living in East City, she’s not under his direct command so she actually never sees him. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be extremely close to him, considering that she’s terrified of him as an alchemist (fire is bad and ouch bad war memories) and as a politicking Colonel (that dafty airheaded facade of his is somehow even more frightening than the memories of seeing him burn people alive). But hey, relationship building. Solid.

So Rosie ends up back home half past midnight, still wearing a baby pink sheath dress from the wedding and shiny lip gloss.

Havoc is awake.

He’s in the living room with a cigarette and a beer because he’s a loveless twenty-three year old man, reading yesterday’s newspaper because he’s a poser and doesn’t have a life outside of doing military things.

“Rosemary. You’re back early.”

Rosie takes her shoes off (no heels, because her poor feet could never) and trots on to the living room, to lean a hip against the opposing sofa chair to Havoc. “Central doesn’t agree with me,” she says.

He would know. The whole point of their marriage contract is because she needed an escape from that sh*t.

“Yeah,” he says, and the full country brawl is back, elongating the vowels with the deep, low tones of his voice. He stares for a second too long again at her figure, of the soft satin hugging her body and the pop of colour on her lips, before quickly diverting his eyes back into the newspaper. “That’s the big city for you.”

Indeed.

She falls asleep easily that night, with the soft glow of the living room light peeking under the bedroom door.

7.

Elicia Hughes is born in the early summer of 1911, a few days after Rosie’s nineteenth birthday. She’s a tiny, tenacious thing, with fat sausage arms and a fuzzy down of Gracia’s brown hair. It coincides with the launch of UEC’s aerial unit hot air balloon testing launch, so Rosie has an excuse to not spend too much time in Central.

Babies are fun. But they’re also loud, gross, and confusing, and Rosie isn’t emotionally or physically equipped to handle that, so she leaves the new family to their own privacy and starts planning her week-long trip to western Amestris, where the launch will take place. The west, not the east, because UWC is doing a partnership programme with the aerial department in preparation for border tensions with Creta.

Apparently there have been a few minor political skirmishes as of late in that region.

But the UEC team’s launch site will be in Pendleton, a very safe city with a strong military presence, decently far away enough from the actual Amestris-Creta border that there shouldn’t be any problems affecting Rosie’s schedule. And Pendleton is a nice town in a rainforest, surrounded by popular jungle resorts, so Rosie asks Havoc if he’d like to attend this trip with her. Not in a military bodyguarding capacity for the research team, but in a… friendship way. As friends. Going on vacation.

“Pendleton?” He asks. “Yeah, why not. The Colonel’s due any day now to get me my vacation days, and I’ve got some old academy buddies down there.”

It’s a lazy Saturday morning. They’re eating sourdough rolls with cheese and an assortment of jams (orange marmalade, lemon curd, and blueberry preserves made by his mother, which he notes with a stammering blush on his cheeks), when Rosie brings this up.

She spends the rest of her weekend with her research team, finalising the material builds, and approving the last of the materials to be sent out with the shipping trucks. They could’ve rented a cargo hold in a commuter train… but that’s expensive. She also informs the team lead, Professor Grace, a middle-aged woman with a somewhat nasty personality, that her husband will be tagging along, but the team lead doesn’t care and waves her off. He’s a high enough military rank that he can be privy to all their information, anyway, so it doesn’t matter too much if he comes for the ride.

Havoc has a late night on Sunday, spending time with friends at a bar, so Rosie wakes up bright and early to prepare for the long train haul for the both of them. She’s not the best chef, but all of her food is edible and nutritious. His metabolism will appreciate this, if not his tastebuds.

She makes a packed lunch of very odd sandwiches. Rye bread for carbs, sliced gruyere for calcium and fats, pomegranate mash for vitamins and sugar, pickles because they taste good, leftover steak for protein, and rocket for fibre. And a lot of mayonnaise because Havoc mentioned something a while back about moisture being an important part of a good sandwich.

Well.

Would this be enough food for a giant man like him? He’s edging well past the six foot mark.

By the time Havoc crawls out of bed and into the wild, Rosie’s packing a few apples and boiled eggs in the lunch containers. There. That should feed him. Or maybe she should pack more cheese. How much calcium does he need? Tall people have bigger bones, right? Does that equate to needing more dairy?

“I’m pretty sure the trains serve lunch and dinner,” Havoc drawls out in a sleepy voice.

He’s wearing his ridiculously tight shirt again. He might as well not be wearing one at all, really. The fabric clings to him like black magic. Honestly, just ridiculous.

“Only dinner. We’re switching stations at Central-upon-Danube, right before the lunch rush for the eastern rail and boarding right after it for the western rail,” Rosie says, packing one more apple for good measure. “Might get hungry.”

Rosie hasn’t worn a military uniform in years, because “researcher” and “student” aren’t titles that require a dress code. So she’s in her usual outfit of typical female Amestrian wear. A practical blouse and skirt set, stockings, and walkable shoes. Amestris highly values being able to run and fight for any able-bodied citizen, so it’s actually a skort and her blouse is durable enough to fatally bludgeon a small child. Small mercies for feminism in this country. And then Havoc is on vacation, so he’s not wearing his uniform for the first time she’s laid eyes on him (pyjamas don’t count!) and goodness gracious, god damn. Turtleneck manufacturers ought to sponsor him.

It’s a damn mystery why that man is still single. Even with a (fake) shiny ring on his finger, that shouldn’t be stopping the women from drooling.

There’s probably a huge personality deterrent radiating from his character that Rosie isn’t endowed enough to catch on to. Or he’s really picky about choosing a woman and all his complaints about his struggles (which have petered off recently) is his own fault.

Actually, it’s most likely the military profession. Why date a guy when he’s probably going to die by the end of the week? The average life expectancy here is shocking.

They meet the UEC team at the train station.

Rosie thinks they’re all friends. For the most part, at least. Professor Grace doesn’t like anyone, but the rest of the team, composed of mostly graduate students and scientists from the research board, are all friendly enough. Of course, there’s a chance that they all secretly despise each other and Rosie would be none the wiser. Ever since her concussion, she’s had more difficulty with social situations requiring delicate nuance. But it might not have been from the concussion – PTSD from other child soldier related activities might’ve flipped a switch in her head and changed her irrevocably as a person.

“So this is your husband?” Jessica says, looping arms with Rosie and staring at Havoc like he’s eye candy. Which he is, but… hmmm.

Jessica is a graduate student with a focus on material sciences. She’s the brains behind the physical production of the hot air balloon, testing most of the engineering factors with stress, strain, durability, elasticity, and whatnot. She’s also fairly attractive in the nerdy way, with a slender and petite form, wire-rim glasses, sleek black hair, and an assortment of frumpy jumpers. Nice, soft looking hair. Very nice. Rosie always feels self-conscious of her massive head of curls (down to armpit length now, that has broken more than one hairbrush) whenever Jessica’s within sightline.

“Second lieutenant Jean Havoc, East Command,” Havoc says, in general introduction to the group.

The train journey is anticlimactic. Everyone’s on the introvert spectrum, so it’s a quiet ride, with the occasional chatting between Jessica (whom Rosie is beginning to dislike, for reasons she can’t ping) and another graduate student, Raul.

Havoc likes the sandwiches.

He thinks he won’t, at first, when Rosie unwraps them for the first time and lists off the ingredients. He stares at her like she’s insane, but hunger eventually wins over and he takes a bite out of the humongous sandwich (on second thought, the one-inch slices of bread may have been too much). And enjoys it.

“This is witchcraft,” he hisses, and then compliments the flavour profile.

The arrival time is late at night, so the launch is set for Tuesday morning. The hotel in Pendleton is nothing noteworthy, but the fact that Rosie listed Havoc as her spouse comes to bite her in the ass.

Or not.

“I’m so sorry about the couple, but we’ve only got two single beds in the last private room,” the hotel clerk says, nearly snot-nosed and dripping with tears. “I can get the staff to push them together.”

“Oh no, that’s fine,” Rosie says.

If Maes and Colonel Mustang were here, there would probably be a lot of lecherous winking involved. But as it were, the UEC team has no reason to suspect that the couple isn’t actually a couple, so the night is uneventful. Havoc does a lot of mindless stuttering when they’re alone in the room together, but he gets over the immaturity quickly enough. Grown men. Ugh.

There’s only one towel, which is awkward because Rosie’s showering first, which means Havoc’s going to be drying his body with someone else’s used towel (gross). But they make it work.

Grown-ups. Adults. Mature.

She’s not even his type anyway, so it shouldn’t matter.

The next morning arrives with all the drama and fanfare befitting of the 1957 Sputnik 1 launch, except not internationally televised on the big screen and actually kind of a small audience of only western military troop leaders and various scientists from the University of West City.

Professor Grace and a celebrated Brigadier General from West City are in the pioneer launch boat. It’s a wooden contraption, distinctly pirate ship-esque, with metal fittings and triple-enforced wires weaved into the balloon tarp. Rosie flies in lazy loops in the air with a cheap broom, acting as emergency back-up in case something needs tinkering up in the air or the entire thing explodes and the two people inside the basket need rescuing. But they’re also fitted with parachutes and all kinds of hydraulic fluid shock-absorbent vests.

Totally overkill.

The launch is a complete success. The gas system behaves perfectly, the wind conditions are fantastic, and the hot air balloon soars high in the sky, a whole kilometre, before Professor Grace gently manoeuvres it back down to the ground in the specified location. And with this, now Amestris can commercialise flight.

Rosie better be getting a damn good raise.

It’s a few years away from militarisation, because any half-decent sharpshooter can put a bullet into the tarp and tear it all down, but eventually it’ll get there. Maybe it’s not the morally good thing to hand a new potential weapon of destruction to an active military dictatorship seeking out methods to brutally murder all of its neighbours before the end of the millenia, but. Well. Actually, there’s no argument against that. Rosie should’ve known better.

There’s more testing, newspapers and journalists going crazy, and the hot summer day ends with Rosie picking Havoc up from his Pendleton adventures and telling him about the big party on the nearby military base camp.

“They’re celebrating,” she says. “If you brought your uniform, I’m sure they’ll let you in.”

She doesn’t want any part of that whole mess. Her days of base camp and being way too close to foreign borders are f*cking over.

Then he says something wholly unexpected, just–.

“Wanna give me a lift, darlin’?”

There’s that country accent again, that damned sexy voice that makes her lose all sense. Country boy in the sweltering heat.

“Country boy wants to fly?” Rosie says, before realising that she’s flirting back.

Havoc smirks, easygoing and sugary. “This one might.”

The local townspeople gawk at them in the sky, but whatever. She’s gotten used to ignoring the loud gasps and mild hero worship. Better to pretend it’s not there than acknowledge it, or else she’d end up with a head so big she’d no longer be able to fit through doors.

They soar. Havoc’s arms are wrapped around her waist and her back is very warm from his body heat, but not in a good way because if she keeps getting flustered from his presence, then she’s going to end up with a disgustingly sweaty back. But nothing really happens the entire journey in the air, except Havoc whooping and being a boyish nuisance. To make him shut up, she swerves higher into the atmosphere, all the way to the wintery cloud cover, then barrels down to the face of the earth in tight spirals.

“That’s the base!” He yells in her ear. Or, that’s what she thinks he says because the wind muffles sound.

Anyway, the sentiment is understandable, so she flies down slowly into the rainforest emergent layer, right above the canopy. There’s a huge military base of various tents and deconstructable buildings, with most everyone partying and cheering in the large mess hall. Rosie knows Jessica is in there (she has a military sibling or something, and was subsequently invited), and there’s a sour taste in her mouth.

The rest of the aerial team is resting in town from the day’s events. Not everyone has the stamina for military parties, which is understandable.

“Wait, actually,” Havoc says, and there’s a sternness to him that wasn’t there before, in the happy-go-lucky laughter in the midnight-blue skies. “Stop here. There’s something wrong.”

Rosie keeps the broom in place, hovering in the treetops, as they look through the thick green foliage. What? Everything seems fine.

There’s one Amestrian soldier, the Brigadier General from the launch, fumbling about outside at the back of the mess hall building. Which is odd, because the only people who go back there are the lowly privates forced to do clean-up duty. A man of his status would be nowhere near the back of anything. And he’s lugging a red gas tank over his shoulder, a rather heavy one for his age. Then he plunks it down on the ground by the back vents, backs up a few metres, and stops.

“Get us down on the ground, quietly,” Havoc whispers.

She can barely hear him even though he’s right on top of her; he’s so still and quiet. Acting like a true knight, an assassin.

There is something wrong here. She can sense it. This man doesn’t belong here, and the border’s too close for comfort for anyone to be committing any suspicious acts. Havoc’s keen eye caught on, and now Rosie can’t focus on anything else but whatever the f*ck is going on now. They’re on the forest floor, in the shrub layer, and Havoc is pulling out a handgun that she didn’t even know he had.

That’s when the situation goes into the left field.

The Brigadier General warps into a completely new person. Blink! One second passes, blink-blink, and his face has changed completely – as well as the colour of his skin and even his clothes. They’re now the olive green Cretan uniform, with a Creta badge and stripes.

The shapeshifter shoots the gas canister, and the next thing Rosie knows is fire.

Boom.

Gunshot. Blaze. The deep, ground-breaking bass of all too familiar explosives. She can name them in her sleep. Gas explosion. Chemical. Rosie’s university major is Chemistry. She knows chemistry like the back of her hand. She knows this sound. That’s not just gas. That’s ammonium nitrate. It’ll never stop burning until it burns every last f*cking piece of evidence down in that camp, and there’s no stopping it. A mixture of nitrogen based bombs with fuel oil, because the fuel docks are parked nearby due to a truck layover, preparing the camps along the border for imminent but minor border skirmishes.

Not now. This calls for war. Everyone’s dead. Even poor Jessica, who only wanted to have a bit of fun.

Pain. Ow. Burning. Blood. Bloody.

Rosie opens her eyes and the sky is still dark. Good. Not too much time could have passed, then. There’s a dull, rolling headache behind her eyes, but she manages to sit up and there’s no whiplash or nausea, so she can rule out any major head injury, thankfully. If she got another concussion, she’d probably live in a ward for the rest of her life.

The time it takes to stand up is painfully long. One or two minutes to fully get on her feet. Then another minute of standing in the haze, breathing in too much smoke and blinking stars out of her eyes. Off in the distance, maybe thirty kilometres to the west, she sees another huge plumage of smoke and fire.

Oh no, Rosie thinks. Oh no oh no. That’s the border line.

This isn’t her jurisdiction. She’s under Eastern Command, officially, so she has no part in the mobilisation of troops in this region. If she sticks around too long, then someone or other will draft her in this war. She needs to leave. She needs to–.

Havoc.

“Havoc!” She screams. “Havoc, where are you!”

The force of the explosion blew them both away. She’d landed in the soft underbrush of the jungle, cushioned by fallen leaves and moss. He was standing ahead of her, closer to the explosion. He must be terribly injured.

The worst part about war isn’t the fighting. It’s the silence. It’s the long stretches of utter silence when the anticipation for something horrible just builds and builds and you know that the next thing you find is going to be the worst time of your entire f*cking life but there’s no stopping that inevitable drawing suspense of ugly silence. The waiting. The fact that Rosie can’t hear Havoc at all makes her chest hurt from tension and her heart’s in her ears and she can’t find him, he’s not answering, he’s not–.

And she steps on him.

He’s not saying Rosemary with his low tones and lazy smiles, he’s laying there on the burnt up charcoal ground, a violet-black bruise on his hairline and pink all over from the shock of heat. But he’s breathing and sort of blinking awake, not quite conscious but alive. A bit aways from him, there’s the remains of the broomstick, most of the wood burnt to a crisp.

Even if the broomstick were functional, she wouldn’t be able to lug a terribly injured full-grown adult man on her back. He’d keep falling off.

“Come on, stay with me Havoc. Stay with me.”

Rosie uses all of her strength to turn him on his side and hook his arm over her shoulder. She feels his muscles squeeze, and he’s now awake enough to hold on, but not healthy enough to stand or walk by himself. Her thigh muscles ache and ache as she lifts a bulk of his weight up and up to make him stand up, leaning on her, and there’s a drip-drip of hot blood from his head staining her shoulder.

“Come on,” she repeats, and then coughs, because the smoke is worsening. “Walk with me, Havoc. Walk with me. You can do it.”

He groans, but that’s a good sign because it means consciousness is coming back. He groans again, with a hint of desperation in there, and he takes a single step forward as Rosie supports his weight. And then another, and another, and more blood keeps dripping from his hairline down his ear and onto her shoulder.

Pendleton is four kilometres away.

There’s got to be people seeing the massive mushroom. The main road. There’s got to be cars and military men running down to check on the base. So Rosie drags Havoc to the main road, and every stumble and trip costs them precious time for him to get to the hospital, and she could cry from frustration at just how weak she is. Even after all this time, she’s f*cking useless and pathetic and she can’t even help the people in her life when all they’ve done is take care of her.

Eventually, she hears the rush of stomping boots and fat tyres against dirt, and the emergency troops find them, covered in blood and ash.

“Name and identification number,” the responding corporal barks at them, with his car right f*cking there and help so close.

The smart thing to do would be to comply, but Rosie is so out of f*cks to give she grunts out a monster shriek and aggressively whips out her State Alchemist watch, never so happy to own this sh*tty piece of silver just to make the lowly corporal piss himself.

“Get him a doctor, you insubordinate piece of sh*t!” She says, handling her emotions very well. “I’m the f*cking Witch, you idiot! I’m Major Rosemary! Get him in the f*cking car or I’ll demote you back to private.”

She very nearly hits the corporal with the hefty watch, but the other soldiers in the car wisen up quickly, a few of them recognising her (and Havoc’s crispy blue uniform, underneath all that blood), and they’re escorted inside and carted back to Pendleton. Where, it appears, the watch-dog border alarm has been pulled, because hordes of soldiers are en masse in the streets, doing a lock-down routine on all the citizens.

“You, private,” she says, singling out a frightened young woman, a green newbie, in the streets. Havoc’s now safely in the hospital, so there’s nothing she can do but hope she’d gotten him there in time. “I’m Major Rosemary, the Witch Alchemist. What’s going on here?”

The private mumbles out something about the city’s military office being plundered, with a Creta soldier caught inside, and escaping the authorities. There’s a mad chase to find him. This was approximately five minutes before the bombs went off in the base camp. No one can find him.

And no one will, Rosie thinks, dismissing the private. She stares at the chaos of the streets. It’s the same shapeshifter. And they’re long gone by now, wearing someone else’s face.

Instead of doing something productive to help out the military, Rosie goes back to the hospital to wait for Havoc. There’s a nurse to update her on his situation – that he’s going to be fine. The main concern is the smoke inhalation and pressure shock, but there’s no discernable concussion or head injury. The bruises and cuts on his head were from falling into a sharp bush, and it hit a few “bleeder” veins, explaining the huge loss of blood. That’s it. He’ll be fine. Discharged tomorrow.

She wanders to the hotel. It’s almost sunrise. Professor Grace is in the lobby, nursing a coffee and an obvious headache.

“Professor,” Rosie says.

She’s about to ask have you heard but that’s a stupid question because of course everyone’s heard by now.

“Rosemary,” the professor says back, lip curling. “You didn’t say you’d– oh well. At least you’re alive, unlike the other girl. Thank goodness for small mercies. It’s lucky that the higher-ups had an important meeting in town that made them leave that damn party early, else they would’ve died in that fire, too.”

The Brigadier General. And the other generals and various higher members of military society. They survived. That cannot be a coincidence. How? Why? Why did they survive and everyone else didn’t? An important meeting? It gives a cover story for that old man, which means the shapeshifter knew about this meeting, and that’s why he chose that persona.

It’s wrong. It’s all wrong. This can’t be happening.

Either Rosie’s slowly going mad without realising or there’s a government-wide conspiracy underway. Special people survived. The non-essentials didn’t. Perfect targets to get angry about in a war. But no one that important. But enough to spark mass bloodshed.

Wait, wait, wait.

Rosie needs to back up. First of all, there’s a shapeshifter. Is that alchemy? Some form of biological science transmutation? It might be theoretically possible to play around with melanin receptors and create and diverge new cells in a living body, and hair growth can be easily exchanged from dead skin cells with equivalent exchange. But no one would do that. That’s borderline human transmutation, which is very bad and extremely illegal. But they did do that. A shapeshifter. Or maybe it’s literally some other species entirely, a non-human monstrous entity in this f*cked up world. Alchemy is a little magical, anyway. Why not add zombies, werewolves, and demons to the mix?

The circle.

It’s all connected, somehow. It has to be. Space. War. Battles. Making war up for the fun of it. Starting war. Creating war. The shapeshifter, creating this conflict.

“Small mercies,” Rosie agrees, and leaves the lobby to get to her room.

Room. Suitcase. Compartment.

There’s a folded up map of Amestris she got for free from the train station. It’s mostly just railway routes, so it’s not the best map, but it’s all she needs. And now a pen… A pen. Hotel pen. On the desk. Now.

She grabs the sh*tty ballpoint pen, shakes it furiously to draw ink, and starts matching data point to data point.

Ishval. Pendleton.

The common denominator is war.

That’s what the data points are. The alchemy circle is based on battlefield locations.

8.

“Oh, Colonel Mustang, it’s good to see you,” Rosie says cheerfully, plastering on a pretty and innocent smile. “I was just in the area. It’s been so long, we need to catch up! Let me in, will you?”

Mustang looks at her like she’s asking him to sh*t in her mouth. To be fair, she’s implied a few times by now how much she doesn’t like him a whole lot, which might make him a little pissy around her. But he’s also the one who started it, and she’s never claimed to not hold grudges.

Whatever. She just needs to talk to him.

“Of course, my dearest Willa,” Mustang replies almost immediately, confused face contorting into a lovely smile. “Come on in, why don’t you. I’ll make you a pot of tea.”

She’d phoned Maes as soon as she could to ask for Mustang’s home address, promising to explain later. Maes knows everything, so here she is, a day after the wreckage of the Pendleton fiasco, making a home visit to her fourth favourite Ishval War veteran. It’s a nice flat in a nice part of the city, next to a park and fountain and everything. The envy of overzealous parents looking into school districts for their overstimulated children. And Havoc’s resting at home, taking a long nap and regretting ever agreeing on taking that vacation.

The door closes behind her.

She drops the smile.

“The attack in the west was planned by the Amestrian government,” Rosie says.

Mustang closes his eyes, counts to five, and then asks her to explain. They don’t move to the living room or anything, because he’s an ungracious host and his couch is probably covered in mothballs or sem*n stains or something, so Rosie stands by the door and explains her hyped-up story like she’s taken too much LSD.

She leaves out the part about the country being an alchemic circle (he’d probably lock her up in an insane asylum if she tried to explain that part), but she does reiterate the most important parts of the launch day. First, all the important generals were moved out of the area literally right before the bombing. Second, Havoc and Rosie both saw the shapeshifter so no, she’s not imagining things. And third, this is definitely a conspiracy and this is way out of her league, please help, oh mighty Colonel.

Roy Mustang, the Flame Alchemist, has the power she lacks. He’s the proper shining war hero, able to fell all men on this planet with a snap of his fingers. Maes trusts him implicitly.

When she’s done with her tale, Mustang considers her words.

“Maes, Riza, and I have made note of certain inconsistencies in this country,” he says carefully. “I’ve been attempting my hand at politics ever since the… unfortunate civil war, to try and change certain things, and the way they’re run.”

Rosie’s first thought is, who the f*ck is Riza? And her second thought is, Change? Certain things? Is he talking about rank ascension or a government coup?

She can’t tell with him. He might just be talking about lobbying legislatures and holding up protest signs in front of police stations and other worthless political actions like that. But no, despite his pretty boy demeanour and being known as a useless flirt with no brains (it’s still true to an extent, though), Mustang is a smart man. A useful man. One who knows what needs to be done and how to get there. She’d seen that side of him in Ishval, burning and burning and burning until he razed every last enemy to dust.

They talk a little more about certain details that he finds particularly interesting, and various hints about his goals for the future.

By the time she’s kicked out (“oh, it’s indecent for a married woman to be seen in another man’s house!”), Rosie is ninety-nine perfect sure Mustang had been trying to tell her that he’s planning on rising through the ranks via the popular vote. That, or he’s about to start a lucrative gay p*rn industry. Who knows with him. He’s got the face for it, at least.

Then she goes home and cries in her room like a baby because she can’t figure out the circle.

So many data points!

Way too many wars and battles and “minor skirmishes” in Amestris and its borders. So far, she’s drawn up like fifteen different diagrams following the shape lines, but all she’s done is confuse herself more and more. She’s missing more data, is the main takeaway, which is incredibly unnerving because that means that there’s going to be more wars in the future. She’s not good enough at alchemy to recreate a brand new circle with only half the data needed, so the only thing left to do is study to prove whatever theories she needs to prove.

If Rosie were a certified child prodigy or genius, she’d have figured this out in no time. But as luck has it, she’s just a normal person (plus a very unfortunate start to her career, and permanent head trauma), so she’s forced to slave away in the library.

There’s a new genius joining the military, though, as of October. And, joining Colonel Mustang in Eastern Command. Maybe she should ask him.

“What’s this about a twelve year old State Alchemist in the news?” Rosie asks Havoc during dinner time.

She knows the answer, but she wants to hear from him.

Havoc sighs and slumps down a little. “Edward Elric. Little bastard.”

He tells her about the new soldier in the ranks, and how he’s a cute twelve year old boy with golden hair and golden eyes, until he opens his mouth and squeaks obscenities that would have anyone’s mother wash their mouth out with lye. The kid’s also a double amputee circa age eleven, and is from Resembool of all places, so he’s probably got some sort of sheep STD. Also, he has a younger brother, Alphonse, who is seven feet tall.

Rosie thinks she’s heard him wrong. “Younger?”

“And seven feet tall,” Havoc says. “Poor kid has to duck to get through most doors.”

That sounds like a hormone imbalance. Probably has a tumour on his pituitary gland, if he’s that tall at that age.

But there are more concerns about the older brother, the State Alchemist. He’s called Fullmetal, which is either a nod towards a metal alchemy specialty or his automail limbs, which is the funniest thing Rosie’s heard all year. Someone in the upper office has got a sick sense of humour to make fun of a child double amputee like that.

She hates Mustang for this, though. Incorrigible.

Havoc says Mustang recruited this kid from the countryside, and actively encouraged him to take the State Alchemist test. The fact that Edward passed isn’t the point, but Mustang actively creating new child soldiers is bewildering, honestly. Mind breaking. How dare he. Does he want another Rosie? Rosie doesn’t want another Rosie. She barely remembers anything right after the war due to trauma. Mustang held her down and burned her stomach and smelled her cooked flesh and he still wants to keep hearing the screams of dying children.

That freak must get off to it.

Anyway.

After dinner, Rosie realises it’s been a while since her and Havoc have just chatted. She’s had her nose in books for the past few months, busy with her second year of university and trying to become an alchemy whiz. Havoc’s also been busy, doing whatever grunt work demanded of East Command. It’s the first time in a while they’ve been able to simply exist together, in peace.

The conversation from dinner leaks into a conversation with tea and autumn blackberries in the living room. The radio’s on, mindless background chatter, and the topic of war stories comes up.

“It was a weird nick on my forearm, from that stupid shovel,” he says, rolling up his sleeve to reveal a faint white scar in the shape of a checkmark. “My battalion laughed at me for ages.”

Havoc was a trench-digger in northern Ishval, probably one of the most dangerous jobs in the entire war. He eventually got promoted out of the trenches and into a better position, but he didn’t really see any of the actual fighting. Back-up camps. Finding stragglers and punishing them. Not a glamorous or glorious job.

“I’ve got a wicked bullet scar,” Rosie says.

It’s a mistake to mention that, but she’s so relaxed and chilled out on the sofa with her flatmate, in the warmth of a home and full from a meaty stew dinner. It’s a mistake, because she’s wearing her slu*ttiest tank top and pyjama shorts, where basically her entire body is on display, and he can’t see the scar at all. So he gets curious about where it is.

“On your abdomen?” He asks politely. Actually, not that polite, because interest is obvious on his face and he’s starting to smile.

“No, on my leg,” she says, and pushes up her pant leg to reveal the faded mark on her inner thigh.

She’s sitting on the other edge of the sofa, one leg off and the other leg slightly crooked outwards against the sofa back cushions, so that he can see the scar. And, subsequently, the entire curve of her bare leg. Soft, squishy, meaty flesh, easy to grab, nice to touch. It must be a welcoming sight. Her pant leg is rolled up right to her panty line, and it’s completely possible that the hem edge of her underwear is visible from his angle.

Havoc swallows. “Oh. Yeah, wicked scar.”

He’s sitting on the other side, so close she can almost feel his leg against her foot. It would be so easy to breach the distance, to lean in close, get on top of her, and feel her thigh himself. She can taste him, his desire, his need for intimacy, his urge and lust. She can taste him like he’s already touching her.

Rosie wants to devour this man. Every inch of Jean Havoc.

He’s a hotblooded young man, obviously interested in women and sex. With the right words, the right actions, she can easily seduce him into being wholly and completely hers. And, there’s a part of her that already knows that he wants her as well, and he’s doing his damned best to seduce her back.

What happens in the next few days is a race of the sexes – who can woo who first?

It’s silly in retrospect, how the next few weeks are two perfectly intelligent adults strutting around like birds of paradise in sexier and sexier pyjamas. It comes to head when Rosie wakes up and tries not to laugh at how stupid they’re being. But she’s not confident enough to actually confess (he needs to hurry the f*ck up and ask his f*cking wife out), so she’s still stuck in the little game.

She’s on the verge of a breakdown by the time winter rolls around, and she eventually decides to call Maes just to let it all out.

“Maes,” she hisses, so emotional and horny that it’s killing her. She’s wearing a cropped tank top that makes her hourglass shape look incredible and booty shorts. It’s so, so dumb. Havoc is at a pub with his friends, so she has the flat to herself to cry alone. “I need help, please.”

Maes panics, doing a who what why huh where are you before Rosie tells him to shush.

“I think,” she says gravely, “ that I have a crush on my husband.”

There’s a pregnant pause.

Then Maes laughs. And laughs. And laughs.

“I want grandchildren,” he says, and then stops laughing to give her sage, sound advice about how to navigate feelings of love and desire. It’s actually a nice chat, and for a second he sounds old and wise. He talks until there’s a baby’s sharp cry over the receiver, and he spills out a quick apology and hangs up to deal with his seven month old daughter.

Thus, Rosie comes to the conclusion that if Havoc doesn’t man the f*ck up and do something about this animalistic attraction, then she’s going to make him.

At the end of December, there’s an important military gala. To celebrate the new year, and because a bunch of hotshot Colonels from other regions are coming to visit. Which means of course Mustang is dragging his entire team into the gala, and of course Havoc has to dress up in a swanky new tuxedo, and of course he gets a plus one.

“Only if you want to,” Havoc says, scratching the back of his head and looking away. “It ends pretty late, and I know you sleep early.”

Rosie’s already planning her dress. “If I fall asleep, you can carry me to bed.”

“Duly noted,” he says.

There’s hunger in that wolfish face, so she’s done her job well to remind him of how f*cking hot she is and how he can definitely join her in bed later. Which he won’t do, probably, because he’s got sensible country manners and isn’t nearly perverted enough, contrary to the way he looks and acts.

If only.

She buys a dark turquoise dress from a fancy shop because she has money to burn and because she’s going to be the hottest bitch on the dance floor. It’s a bold, beautiful colour to match her eyes, with a low square neckline, painfully tight ruched waist to make her curves pop, and a flowy A-line skirt bottom to her ankles because despite how much she wants to have a sexy slit up her leg, she thinks some old f*cker in attendance might get an aneurysm if she shows off anymore skin.

Havoc can’t stop looking at her the entire drive to Eastern Command. He might’ve accidentally run someone over, for all he cares, because he keeps glancing at her in the shotgun seat, swallowing something down, and then barely paying attention to the road.

They manage not to kill anyone.

The sexy ass dress has the added benefit of allowing everyone to gape openly at her.

“My my,” Colonel Mustang says appreciatively to the fake couple, a flute of sparkling water in hand. “You look very nice tonight, Havoc.”

And then he ignores Rosie entirely.

Bitch.

Trailing behind Mustang is probably the hottest woman Rosie’s ever seen in both lifespans. She’s tall, muscular, and more intimidating than any General she’s had the displeasure to meet. Like, supermodel hot. Gisele Bündchen hot. Uma Thurman on beauty steroids. She’s wearing a navy blue dress with a V-neck so low that new religions have been founded to worship it, and is currently following around Colonel Mustang like a badass bodyguard.

Oh, wait. That’s Riza.

Rosie remembers Havoc talking about his team, but he’s usually fairly private about his work life. She knows everyone’s last names and general descriptions, but that’s it. All that she knows about her, also known as Hawkeye, is one simple rule: Riza Hawkeye is always the most competent person in the room, especially when she’s outside.

It gives more credence to the theory that Roy Mustang only surrounds himself with competent people to make up for his lack thereof.

The gala is complete with Rosie finally being introduced to the rest of Havoc’s coworkers. There’s Kain Fuery, Heymans Breda, and Vato Falman. They all seem like nice and pleasant people. They’re in on the secret marriage thing, so the suggestive glances they give Havoc when they think she’s not looking is getting her hopes up. Maybe she’ll finally get laid tonight, if his friends peer pressure him enough.

And then…

Edward Elric. And his plus one, his ginormous, seven foot tall eleven year old brother, who for some reason is wearing a suit of gothic armour.

“You!” Edward accuses, pointing rudely at Rosie.

She’s by the refreshments table, wondering if she’ll be able to eat the tiny bakewell tarts without bursting her dress open. Havoc is still in the loo.

“Me,” Rosie agrees, and decides against eating for now. Later, though. The desserts are beautiful.

“You’re the Witch alchemist,” the kid says. “Major Rosemary, right?”

When he gets older, the lack of respect to the hierarchy will no longer be so cute. But for now, with his squishy cheeks and gorgeous looks, it must be difficult for anyone to get upset with him for being a dick. Which also makes Rosie sad, because he’s a child and shouldn’t even be speaking to these military types.

“And you’re Edward Elric,” Rosie says mildly.

Behind him, his massive brother apologises profusely for his older brother’s rudeness. A charming southern belle-type to counteract a country hick. They’ve both got country accents, similar to Havoc’s, but thicker and less decipherable.

For the next minute or so, Edward peppers her with questions about her alchemy. Rosie answers them all, mostly because he’s an entertaining little brat and intellectually stimulating enough that she’s barely annoyed at his insufferable personality. Things about atmospheric alchemy, the properties of flight, and what kind of displacement equations she’s using to propel her entire body weight on a flimsy stick.

“You’d be surprised,” she says. “Broomsticks are quite aerodynamic. And I’m surprised you’re asking me about this. Colonel Mustang’s also an expert on atmospheric alchemy – he’s the leading expert, as far as I’m aware. Fire is just energy transfusions. Isn’t he your commanding officer?”

Then Edward and Alphonse cringe, and she decides she likes these boys.

“You know what, I’ve got a puzzle for you that’s been bothering me for a few years and you two look bright enough for the task,” Rosie says, and looks around for materials. She picks up a napkin from the table and steals a pen straight out of Mustang’s back pocket, because Maes had mentioned once that Mustang always carries a pen and notepad with him like a nerd. Mustang makes a confused, hurt noise at her blatant theft, but she really couldn’t give a sh*t about his feelings and goes back to the boys to draw the unfinished alchemy circle of Amestris.

Alphonse leans down to see the napkin art. He’s a really, really big boy.

“In Ishval, I found this unfinished circle,” she says, making up a mindless half-truth just to keep them hooked. “I’ve never been able to finish it or understand it, so have a go and try to interpret what it’s saying.”

Edward greedily accepts the napkin with his gloved fingers and stuffs it in his pocket. Then gawks at her and then across the gala hall, where Havoc is returning from the bathroom to take his place by Rosie’s side, and then back at Rosie.

“What the f*ck,” the literal child says, out loud, at an insufferable volume.

Havoc raises an eyebrow. “Language.”

“Oh my god,” Edward says, sounding genuinely appalled and in the middle of having a conniption, despite the looks they’re receiving from other fancy guests. “She’s your wife? The Rosemary you keep blabbing about at work and talking weepy blubbery sh*t about is the f*cking Witch? I thought it was some weird inside-joke. How the f*ck did someone like you manage to bag someone like her?”

There’s a pause.

“Weepy blubbery sh*t?” Rosie asks.

There’s a small commotion where Havoc tries to fight a child and the child is more than ready to literally bite people, but eventually the adults (Rosie, and then Havoc, maybe) leave the situation, courtesy of Rosie dragging Havoc away and trying not to point at him cruelly and giggle. Absolute bully behaviour.

The rest of the gala is nice. Confirmation that Havoc is apparently bragging about how hot and cool she is to his coworkers (who are in on the secret, therefore know that he’s crushing on her) is delightful.

On the drive back home, a quarter past midnight, Rosie decides to poke at the topic.

“I like that, you know,” she says.

“Like what?”

They’re both tired as f*ck from the gala. Too much socialisation. Too much dancing and pretending to like all the stuffy visiting Colonels.

“That you’re happy with me,” she says. “I’m happy with you, too.”

They pull into the street parking. He doesn’t say anything for a bit, then reaches over the centre console to kiss her cheek. “I am,” he says, with a sort of delicate softness he’s rarely ever displayed before. “If you’ll have me.”

They go home, and the energy between them has changed. It’s settling into something more final, more complete, hanging on the precipice of all things whole and wonderful. There’s a promise for champagne in the kitchen, but she’s struggling to breathe in this dress and might just faint if it isn’t off within the next hour, so they head to their individual rooms to change into pyjamas. The entire time, Rosie’s wondering what he’s thinking, if he wanted to ask to rip her clothes off in the hall and take her right then and there.

Then there’s champagne in the kitchen.

She doesn’t want to drink alcohol. She wants to drink him.

“Rosemary darlin’,” he says, after a swig. “Can I take you for a dance?”

A dance with no music, in the kitchen of their flat, wearing pyjamas, in the middle of the night. It might be the most romantic thing he’s ever asked her.

“Only if you call me Rosie,” she says.

Havoc asks to be called Jean, and it’s odd to start calling him by first name, but she supposes it’s now the next stage of their relationship. Then they’re dancing to nothing, a melody in their head, the beat of their hearts, and once the heat in her body rises to an all time high, Jean picks her up and puts her down on the kitchen counter. She wraps arms around his neck and they kiss and she doesn’t want this moment to end.

Heavy breathing picks up, she’s about to ruin the fabric of her shorts, and there’s a sizable boner tenting his joggers when the doorbell rings.

And yelling.

Lots of yelling.

“Open the damn door, Havoc!” The disembodied voice of Edward Elric shouts. “I know you’re in there! Wake the f*ck up!”

Oh my god, what.

They separate, Jean craning his neck up to the sky to pray to the gods above, before confronting the annoying little sh*t co*ckblocker. The sudden mood breaking wills both of their arousal away, and Rosie hops off the counter to see what kind of nonsense this brat is starting now.

He opens the door. “What the f*ck do you–.”

“You!” Edward yells again, and points at Rosie. “What the f*ck were you doing in Ishval?”

Her mind goes blank. “What?”

“You’re gonna make the goddamn neighbours angry, you little sh*t,” Jean says, but he’s got enough sense to let Edward and quiet Alphonse inside before berating them further. A true sense of proprietary, that one.

Edward shoves the napkin in her face, this time with a different colour ink connecting the rest of the dots. He completed it. Honest to god, this twelve year old child genius finished the alchemy circle that’s been haunting Rosie for over three years.

“What,” the kid says, dark, simmering, and truly angry, “were you doing in Ishval with human transmutation?”

9.

They call Colonel Mustang to come over. An emergency call. Mustang arrives at one in the morning with Hawkeye, and they’re wearing matching pyjamas. Which is… interesting, but not the time to be thinking about that.

There’s a nationwide conspiracy, apparently, with human transmutation. The entire country is a human transmutation circle. The fact that the Elric brothers are somehow experts in human transmutation is also interesting (because what the f*ck, they’re children, how do they know???), but Mustang sees the completed diagram and also calls it a human transmutation circle. And Hawkeye looks at it and agrees, and she’s the most competent person in the room, so Rosie automatically trusts that woman and her judgement calls.

Rosie fesses up the whole story this time, with Azka and her past few years of studying maps. And her theories on whatever that shapeshifter was. There’s more planning, and the Elrics reveal more and more interesting information about human transmutation and what they know about it.

The conspiracy. The highest office is purposefully causing bloodshed in very specific parts of the country to complete the alchemy circle, using actual human lives as inputs. Then Alphonse pipes up about something to do with the Philosopher’s Stone, which makes no sense and Edward shushes his brother.

Poor Jean is in the corner, conflicted about the eroding pillars of national trust and the crumbling decay of blind faith in higher powers.

“I’ll fix this government, from the top down,” Mustang promises.

It’s three in the morning and Rosie’s half-sure that the Flame Alchemist just confessed to wanting to overthrow the government, but okay. Whatever.

She thinks she’s been helpful. Her secret fairy wish all along has been to f*ck up Amestris and tear down the military dictatorship system, which appears to also be the goals of her conveniently placed friends. Roy Mustang, with all his flamboyant power, wants nothing more than a democratic future of leaders, carving the way into a respectable future. Rosie’s beginning to see the appeal in this bastard.

There’s going to be Mustang, and then Maes and Hawkeye clearing the path for their new Führer. And the rest of the chessboard, the players in the field, with their head start into the government conspiracy (to do… something. She’s not sure. But they’ll figure it out in time).

And Rosie will be hanging in the back, with her husband and their home and her inevitable retirement. If all goes well, she’ll be able to leave this system, to escape and live out in the greener pastures of the republic future. Away from war, the fear of falling, and being able to live out something sweet and simple. Non-military. Born into the military, dying outside of it. And eventually being able to have sex with her legal husband. Fingers crossed.

The future’s for hope, and it’s looking up for one Willa Rosemary, current military dictatorships and power-grabbing coup d’etats aside.