Shining Epilogue
After I fleshed out the final chapter and did some edits on the first few chapters I got in the mood to continue it...but honestly I just don’t want to retouch the fic again. So it goes here.
Shining on FFN A03
Riza leaned on the old poker table and watched her son's eyes light up as he finally began to grasp what his teacher was telling him. Five years, where had the time gone? Suddenly her baby boy was an alchemy student and she knew what that meant: the thirst for knowledge was going to wean him away from her.
She watched him soak up all the information Ed was telling him as Ed's way of teaching connected well with Maes's way of thinking. Both boys had learned young and without the complexity of higher education to get in their way. Their methods of understanding alchemy differed from Roy or even her own basic knowledge and she wasn't sure if it was natural talent or their innocence at that age. Riza always wondered how Ed and Al had taught themselves alchemy, especially when she saw so many older alchemists struggle under her father's tutelage but as she sat in on the lesson, she understood now. Youth was on their side, their minds open to so much and it captured their imagination. They were uninhibited, where most other students felt pressured to perform or concerned with worldly stresses...children were unburdened. They were free to believe. So Ed and Al's early years of learning alchemy in their father's study just to make their Mom happy opened their mind to the impossible just like she used to escape in her books.
Riza smiled as Maes wrote down elemental symbols on the notepad and she noticed Ed couldn't help but smile too. Maes had been so determined to learn alchemy that he actually struggled learning how to read and write. He was like his father, eyes set on the destination and struggling to push past the obstacles in his way to get there. He needed to let the future fade into the distance and concentrate on what was in front of him.
“So sugar is C, H and O.” Maes said and circled the letters he had written on the paper. “Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen.”
Ed sketched out the molecular structure of sucrose on his own notepad. He was really enjoying teaching Maes, the kid was really brilliant and quick to grasp all the concepts he laid out for him. He wished Al was here, but he was on his own quest at the moment and to ease his mind he dove into teaching Maes alchemy. “Right. Here is what it looks like. You have 11 atoms of Carbon, 22 atoms of Hydrogen and 11 atoms of Oxygen. What do you see?”
Maes chewed on his pen cap and Riza shook her head, a bad habit he picked up from his father. She wanted to chide him for it, but didn't want to interrupt. His little brow furrowed in thought and she saw a familiar look on his face that made him look so much like Roy just a smaller version. It made her think about what Roy had said about the homunculus trying to 'fracture the mind' with a traumatizing event. Roy had lost his parents at Maes's age, he said he didn't remember much from that time but his Mother did. Madam Christmas said that he became so withdrawn that she worried she wasn't going to be able to keep him as her foster son. She didn't know how to reach him, she wasn't a mother and had no idea how to care for a boy who just lost his parents. She asked him to help with chores and read to him, kept him occupied to the best of her ability. However she noticed a change in how he would think, like he was suddenly trying to explain how everything worked to it's finest detail to see if he could take apart what he didn't understand and find answers. Answers...like how he no longer had his parents and why he wasn't allowed to go with them when they died.
Was Maes sitting here now suddenly focused and understanding something he wouldn't have understood two months ago because he had a great teacher? Or did his stay at the Overlook hurt him more than he let on? They tried so hard to explain to him what Tommy, or Pride, was and why Roy had been so angry with Envy... so angry he lit him on fire. He hadn't seen his father like that, maybe small outbursts of frustration, but Roy had been so careful to be a better man than his father. Riza had simply applied the understanding of the relationship she had with her own father to that statement, not understanding fully what that meant to him. At least not until he finally told her about the man who Roy called father.
Bill Mustang was a man who was driven to find the answers to the ultimate question of immortality. He wanted to make philosopher's stones, he wanted to be the one who finally came up with the answers alchemists had been looking for for centuries. He wanted to be famous, he wanted to be at the top with the power and wealth that would come with being that man. He wanted to be something, because all his life he had been a nobody. Bastard son of a client that had left his prostitute mother with two kids and shattered dreams of moving up in society. Mustang. The little wild horse with no pedigree and no value to society. He wanted to be a thoroughbred and to do that he was going to have to climb his way up using what skill he had: intelligence.
Madam Christmas had reluctantly talked about her brother after their return from the Overlook. Roy had many questions and he really wanted her to deny all of Envy's claims. Instead she hung her head and admitted that it was true. Her brother Bill was furious with the man who fathered them, a man with social standing who visited the lesser side of town to have his fun with girls he could seduce. A man who they never learned the name of but they assumed he at least had alchemists in his background as alchemy was a genetic trait and their mother's family definitely didn't pass it along to them. Chris had gone into her mother's line of work, becoming the statistic that Bill hated, and her brother left to work on the railroad just to get a honest paycheck. Chris snorted and Riza saw the hurt in her eyes, something that the indomitable Madam Christmas had buried for so long she didn't realize she let it surface. She could still hear her voice shake as she said, 'He said he'd rather break his back working than lower himself to make work on his back like me.'.
Bill left, worked hard on the railroad and met Xingese immigrants that had been brought in to lay track. Some were indentured servants, others members of clans that had fallen out of favor...too many were tossed aside by the side of the road after they had been used up. It was there that he interest in Xing and alkhestry had taken root, as he identified with these people who were treated like mongrels by the well off railroad managers. He went East, expanded his knowledge and enjoyed the culture and women. He came home and was a changed man. He had something, finally, that would make him an equal with those who were privileged: he had power in the form of alchemy.
Chris had smoked almost three packs that night as the truth came out. Riza glanced at her husband occasionally, looking for a reaction from him. All she saw was a softness in his eyes, because the woman he called Mom had carried this all those years to protect him and leave him with what memories he had of his father. What Chris never realized was that Roy had memories of a violent alcoholic backing his mother into the corner and making her cry. Not realizing he had memories of desperately trying to help his father with his work so that he could finally make him stop drinking and staying up all night. That maybe if he got his work done, maybe he'd stop being so angry. There were good memories, but there were too many memories of things a young mind just couldn't understand that were filed away for later. She didn't see him react until his Mother uttered the words, “That Hotel, is where he met Tim Marcoh.”
Roy's eyes grew wide as the silence in the room allowed her to hear her own heartbeat echo in her eardrums. Marcoh, the crystal alchemist...the man who created the philosopher's stone. It made sense, how could one man do the work to extract a soul and compress it into usable energy? If Roy's father had been the one to figure out how to extract souls, then Marcoh may have been the one that refined the process to do something with it. However what Roy struggled with was that the man who he had served with in Ishval, the man who was currently with Alphonse and Scar trying to take down the homunculus....knew his parents. Is that why he had taken him under his wing in Ishval? Were they using his unpolished research down in that pool?
“Mom?”
Riza snapped out of her thoughts and looked at the two young men in front of her. Ed looked concerned and Maes had clearly been trying to get her attention. She looked at what was on the paper and blinked. “Did you make that?”
Maes nodded and showed her the heart shaped sugar crystal he had made with alchemy. “I made it for General Armstrong. Do you think she'll like it?”
Ed put his hand over his mouth to stop a laugh from coming out. He didn't know that was who the kid was making it for, he assumed he was making the sugar heart for his mom. Roy's son....had a crush on Olivier Armstrong?
Riza looked at the perfect heart shaped and ran her finger over it. “You made this?”
“Yeah!” Maes said and pushed his notes to her. “Ed helped me but it's really super simple. I had a pile of sugar so all I had to do was think about how to make all the chains that look like this move together and make a new shape. Then I bonded them all so it's smooth. I didn't know how to make it red so I rubbed a strawberry on it.”
She looked up at Ed who was very proud of his student or incredibly amused that he was currently enamored with Armstrong. “So where is the wheel you used?”
“Mom.” Maes said in a not so hushed whisper. “They're trans..moo...tation circles.”
She bit her lip. Dammit, he was growing up way too fast. “Don't you want to show your Dad?”
“He's talking with the General.” Maes said and slipped off his chair. “So can...we go see them? I know they like to yell at each other in the other room, I'm not supposed to go in there. “
“Sure.” Ed answered before Riza could deny the request. He would enjoy watching Roy fidget when Maes complimented the General. Maes was off his chair in an instant with his alchemy creation in his hand and quickly on his way to the office where Mustang and Armstrong were hashing out the master plan to take down Bradley. He grinned at Riza and ran to catch up with the kid. He needed to see the reaction the gift got from both officers.
Riza got up and followed them and watched Ed open the door after a brief knock, Maes quickly rushed in under his arm. She could hear his excited voice showing his father what he made and just as Roy was about to compliment him, Maes chirped 'I made it for you General Armstrong' and she arrived in time to see Roy's smile fade and Ed cover his laugh with his hand. She walked in the room as Maes handed the gift to his favorite Amestrian officer and to her surprise Olivier gave the boy a smirk.
“You can’t help being attracted to a powerful blond who will order you around. It’s been passed down in the Mustang line for generations.” Olivier watched the little boy smile and then looked across the table at his father who was hardly amused by her comments.