secret santa for @imaginesharks!! sorry it’s so late!! will be up on A03 in the morning!
“Fuhrer Bradley has enacted a new law. Clause 28, an addendum to Regulations for Civic Amestrian People: anybody found promoting homosexuality will be found in breach of public decency laws and fined. Failure to pay will result in imprisonment. Back to work.”
Captain Buccaneer watches General Armstrong storm off. For the first time, her walk does not inspire fear. There is a rare tenseness to her shoulders, and he very much doubts that she is feeling optimistic enough to strip him of his rank. He hangs back for a moment, then follows her with a thrum of excitement.
He finds her at the shooting range. It is unsurprising: when she’s angry, she reprimands soldier; when she’s upset, she shoots cardboard. He still waits until she’s put the gun down before speaking. She may seem withdrawn, but he does not trust her not to accidentally (or otherwise) shoot him if he startles her.
“You’re upset,” he says.
“I have no reason to be upset,” says General Armstrong, and puts a bullet clean through the target’s head. Very impressive. Buccaneer likes that target, though, and considers it something of a shame that whoever painted it has had their work ruined.
“I’m upset,” offers Captain Buccaneer, because he wonders if empathy will get through to her.
“I’m not your mother,” says General Armstrong.
“No,” says Buccaneer. “You’re my General. You think Bradley will use this to tear Briggs to the ground.”
He lurches forward, then, because General Armstrong has just grabbed his sleeve and is dragging him into her office. He looks around. She has placed the single personal photo she keeps on her desk face down so that nobody can see it. Jackpot.
“Okay,” she says. “Talk.”
“You used to live with a woman,” says Captain Buccaneer, because she used to live with a woman.
“Astute. I have three sisters.” Damn.
“General.”
“Captain.”
Buccaneer truly cannot think of any way to get through to her. General Armstrong had lived with a woman before she had taken up command in Briggs, and she keeps a picture of them on her desk. He knows because he recognises General Armstrong’s lacrosse trophy (she is well known for this, because there is a story in an old issue of Central Times which details how she broke three girls’ arms for it, and Major Miles has it pinned to his wall) on the mantelpiece behind them. (The lacrosse trophy is General Armstrong’s prized possession, and she uses it to remind lower ranked soldiers that she can break their knees.)
“Get out of my office,” she says, and it strikes terror back into Buccaneer’s heart. He flees.
Hours later, he sits in the breakroom and listens to a dull radio drama with Major Miles.
“You tried to speak to the General, didn’t you?” says Miles.
There’s a moment’s silence, and then – “yep.”
“She’s being weird, isn’t she?”
“…”
Miles sighs and pulls his glasses off, and his eyes startle Buccaneer, just as they do every single time. “Is she freaked, or just mad?”
“I don’t know, I can’t read her.”
“Right.” Major Miles rubs his chin. “I’ll handle it.” Buccaneer hopes that leaving this in Miles’s hands is safe, though he trusts the Major implicitly.
Buccaneer waits for Miles outside Armstrong’s office, but it is her, rather than him, who emerges. He wonders faintly if she has murdered Major Miles, because she has a glint in her eyes that Buccaneer has never seen before, and he is not ashamed to say that it haunts his dreams. Adventure books tell stories about people with these sorts of glints to their eyes losing it and turning to evil.
“In,” she says. “Gentlemen, we are starting a revolution.”
Buccaneer feels his face going very grey, but Major Miles is smirking next to him, and he is not sure if he feels comforted by it or not. Sometimes, Major Miles’s smirks indicate pragmatic solutions to taxing problems. Other times, they indicate that he has wrapped the oil for Buccaneer’s automail in tinfoil, just to make it harder for him to oil it when it’s stiff.
When General Armstrong unveils a large piece of paper on which she has simply written ‘MISSION: FUCK YOU, BRADLEY’ with a crudely doodled image of herself killing Fuhrer Bradley next to it, he decides he is not comforted in the slightest.
“If I may, General, I think that’s libellous.”
“Oh,” says General Armstrong, with manic joy painting her voice a very interesting tone. “I know.”
“So,” says Major Miles. “I vote that we find a way to breach the ‘promotion’ clause without outwardly appearing to be promoting homosexuality.” Buccaneer thinks that this is a very good idea.
General Armstrong snorts. “Fuck that,” she says. “How spineless.”
The next morning, Captain Buccaneer stands behind a young Lieutenant and watches General Armstrong stride in front of battalions upon battalions of her men to give the morning address. The glint in her eyes has not gone, but they are shadowed by too little sleep and far, far too much coffee.
“Raise your hand if you’re a snitch.”
Nobody raises their hand. Buccaneer wonders if General Armstrong thought this through.
“Good. If any of you do snitch, you are on firewood duty for the next six months, and you lose electric blanket privileges.” That’s harsh. Buccaneer is certain that even General Armstrong sleeps with an electric blanket.
When she turns, Buccaneer wonders momentarily if she has well and truly lost it, but then she is turning on the projector. “Turn around, men.” Pasted onto the back wall is an image of two undoubtedly female hands intertwined with one another. Buccaneer is very impressed by General Armstrong’s skill with a marker pen.
“Leaving aside my skill with a marker pen, we are starting a resistance, Briggs.”
Buccaneer is very glad that General Armstrong can’t see anyone’s faces, because someone is sure to be betraying something.
“If any higher-ups show, this is part of the movement to reduce sexism in the military. Got it?”
There’s a muffled chorus of ‘yes, sir’, and then all the men begin to file off. Buccaneer notes that all dissent must have been suppressed, because he hears nothing else.
Buccaneer catches the General in the hallway after lunch, where men are parting like the ocean in an old story Buccaneer once read to let her through. “Do you think anyone is going to buy the sexism thing?”
“Oh,” says the General. “Who cares?”
Fair enough. “…Understood,” says Buccaneer.
“By the way,” she says. “Fuhrer Bradley is visiting next week. Find Miles and bring him here.”
Buccaneer does, and brings Miles to her office, and they stand side-by-side and hope General Armstrong doesn’t plan on having them both killed. “The Fuhrer,” she says, “is going to leave Briggs feeling as annoyed as possible – understood?” Well, there goes that.
“Sir,” say Miles and Buccaneer, but only because they are slightly more afraid of General Armstrong than they are of Fuhrer Bradley.
The Fuhrer arrives with an entourage of men. They visit the address hall first, and the way Bradley stares at the image makes Buccaneer’s flesh crawl. “Is this a breach of Clause 28, General Armstrong?” he says, and Buccaneer feels Miles tense up next to him.
“No, sir,” says General Armstrong innocently. “It’s supposed to encourage workplace unity.”
There is a long, long pause. “Good,” says Fuhrer Bradley. “I hope, for your sake, that it is nothing else.”
Then, his face breaks into a friendly smile, and he shepherds the three into General Armstrong’s office.
“I am,” he says, “willing to forget each of your misdemeanours. The past is in the past, after all!”
“Tempting,” says General Armstrong, and Buccaneer knows that she does not find it tempting at all. “It’s unfortunate that yours will be going down in history.”
“You’re walking dangerous ground, General,” says Fuhrer Bradley. “I suggest you take care, otherwise you might find yourself revisiting – what was it? – Alma, with your two men, here.”
“Yes, sir,” says General Armstrong, very quietly.
The next few days are quite terrible. General Armstrong removes the projector from the briefing room, and spends all her time scheduling the next plan of action against Drachma. It’s as if the spark of resistance has gone, and duty has taken its place. It is like the moral struggle in a Currer Bell novel, and those are always tiresome.
Finally, after she makes a young sergeant do 50 sit-ups for tripping in the lunch hall, which is very unfair, because Buccaneer has already had words with him about reporting the workplace bullying, Buccaneer storms into her office. Damn the consequences. “This is dumb,” he says.
“Enjoy firewood duty, Captain.”
“Who’s Alma?”
“Go.”
Buccaneer goes, because he is far too afraid of her to overstep the mark, but he will be damned if he lets Alma end this. He doesn’t even know who Alma is.
“I think she’s lost the spark,” says Buccaneer.
“No,” says Miles. “She’s scared.” He pauses. “I don’t like it.”
“Neither,” says Buccaneer. “What do we do?”
“We find out who Alma is.”
Buccaneer is rather enamoured with the plan. Miles suggests breaking into the General’s office. Buccaneer is not enamoured with this. A heist seems too dramatic for the early stages of a résistance. Also, it seems pointless.
“Veto,” he says. “I vote we talk to her.”
As it turns out, neither of those come to fruition because General Armstrong orders both men into her office a moment later. She has a strange habit of appearing right behind people at the most appropriate moments.
“Men,” she says. “I am 40 years old, and I have had only one partner in my life. Alma.”
“She left you?” says Miles sagely. (And tactlessly, in Buccaneer’s opinion, but Miles can get away with that kind of stuff).
“No,” says the General. “She died. Car accident.”
The men fall silent.
“That’s not why I called you in here. I called you in here because the first doctor refused to treat her, and the backup couldn’t do his job properly. Bradley is not the start of the issue.”
“We stop it,” says Miles.
“Yes,” says General Armstrong. “Fuhrer Bradley be damned.”
“Great,” says Captain Buccaneer. “Tiny snag – he’s already enacted Clause 28.”
“So?” says General Armstrong. “We just have to ignore it completely and make sure everyone else does.”
Very occasionally, Buccaneer wished that he could reckon with General Armstrong. One day, she would get herself killed. Instead, he just says: “how?”
“I need to make some calls,” says General Armstrong.
The calls are evidently urgent, because she doesn’t wait for Buccaneer and Miles to leave before picking up the phone. Buccaneer hazards a glance at Miles, who just shrugs, and they take their seats in front of General Armstrong’s desk. They are not comfortable seats, because General Armstrong tries not to encourage things like comfort being a part of her men’s lives.
“Hello, idiot brother!” General Armstrong half-shouts, half-growls into the receiver. Both men flinch halfway to the ceiling, and Buccaneer rather imagines that Major Armstrong is doing the same thing on the other side of the phone.
Buccaneer is certain that Major Armstrong does not have any time to respond before General Armstrong is shouting at him again.
“You are going to make sure that every soldier you know who has ever been hot for someone their own gender makes a show of it in front of everyone, do you hear me?”
Once again, Miles shrugs and leans back in his chair.
Beat.
“If you’re going to be spineless, at least be a bullet ant!” she shouts, and then mutters, “my men could decimate you like a centipede, Alex.”
She slams down the phone.
“Who are you calling next?” asks Major Miles.
“Lieutenant Hawkeye,” says General Armstrong. “She can relay my messages to the idiot Colonel.”
Buccaneer and Miles nod their approval. Lieutenant Hawkeye is a fine soldier.
“Put me onto Lieutenant Hawkeye… Fine, put me onto Colonel Mustang.”
Buccaneer shoots a ‘yikes’ look in Miles’s direction. He’s not sure he wants to stay for this.
“Idiot Colonel,” she greets. “I am your superior officer. I want you to send a love letter to every single one of your male subordinates.”
Beat.
“That is an order, Colonel!” Beat. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about one of your subordinates, Mustang! Get him roses and let him shoot you in the face – it’ll make for a good evening.”
After a moment, the phone hits the cradle again, and General Armstrong positively glowers at them. “Central cultivates weak-willed men,” she says, matter-of-factly.
That’s it for a little while.
Two weeks later, General Armstrong interrupts breakfast (not just any breakfast, either, but Friday breakfast, which is when Buccaneer gets his yogurt, so he hopes that the General has good reason to take him from it) by dragging Miles and Buccaneer into her office once more.
“Catch us a bear, Captain,” she says.
A – bear…? “I’m sorry – what?”
“A bear, Captain. We need a bear.”
“A… bear.”
“Alive, preferably.”
A live bear. General Armstrong wants a live bear. He doesn’t know whether relinquishing his yogurt was worth it for a live bear. “A live bear.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Why?”
“To freak out Fuhrer Bradley. He’s coming to visit again.”
“…”
Fuhrer Bradley arrives with his wife and his son in tow, and Buccaneer turns to General Armstrong with horror rising in his chest. “What if the bear kills his kid?”
General Armstrong shrugs. “Then the bear kills his kid.” Well, there’s no arguing with that kind of logic, so Buccaneer doesn’t. General Armstrong sidles (a General Armstrong sidle is a perfectly normal walk from someone who is very, very angry). “Hello, Fuhrer. I hope you enjoy Earl Grey tea.”
The Fuhrer smiles, his eyes wrinkling in that good-natured old man way that they do. Buccaneer is no longer fooled by them. “That sounds lovely, General.”
Miles and Buccaneer wait outside the door. Sure enough, there is a scream moments later, and the door flies open as Cordelia Bradley flees the room with Selim in tow. Buccaneer feels a bit sorry for them – sure, she’s the wife of a devil-man, and he’s fairly sure that her sisters, whose names are ridiculous and whose father went mad last year, are also quite evil. She’s the nicest person in her family.
“Please remove your bear, General Armstrong. I’m afraid my family aren’t too fond of it.”
General Armstrong crosses her arms. “He’s a pet.” Buccaneer sort of wishes that she would just take it outside and avoid the unnecessary upheaval.
Fuhrer Bradley sticks a sword through it.
“So,” says Miles. “That didn’t work.”
Buccaneer is feeling rather faint. “He killed a bear,” he says. He’s like a bear, and he feels faintly as though Fuhrer Bradley has just killed his younger brother. Miles pours him a cup of tea.
“Don’t drink that,” says General Armstrong. “There’s arsenic in it. I wanted to see what it’d do to Bradley.”
The next month, the glint has returned to Olivier’s eyes, and she is waving a newspaper clipping in Buccaneer and Miles’ faces. “Central have begun to revolt,” she says. Disgust lingers on her breath. “Colonel Mustang is leading the charge.”
“Great!” says Buccaneer.
“We,” says General Armstrong, “are going to go down there and make sure he doesn’t fuck everything up, which he probably already has, because he’s a dumbass.”
Central is a very strange place. For one, Buccaneer isn’t used to this amount of smog, and they have to stop off and buy ginger to open up his windpipe again. Also, it’s populated, and the people don’t have to hunt for their food. It’s very strange and futuristic. Buccaneer can’t imagine living a life where he goes from birth to death without ever hunting anything.
A man walks past them on the sidewalk.
“Good morning,” says the man.
“Don’t talk to me,” says General Armstrong.
Mustang’s office is nowhere near as tidy as General Armstrong’s office, and Captain Buccaneer is half-inclined to blame it on his subordinates, who make the place look untidy just by being present. He slaps the ginger one upside the head with his flesh arm as he walks past, just for the hell of it.
“Ow!” yelps the ginger man, rubbing the back of his head.
“Good,” says General Armstrong, and opens the door to Mustang’s office. “Idiot Colonel,” she greets. “Lieutenant Hawkeye!”
“Hello, General Armstrong.” Lieutenant Hawkeye salutes.
“At ease,” says General Armstrong, and – seeing Colonel Mustang begin to lower his arm, follows it up with a “not you.”
In the hour-long meeting, they discuss plans of action, good firearms and how best to revolt without being demoted, and Colonel Mustang’s arm is stuck in a salute for the whole time. As Major Miles closes the door, Buccaneer swears he can hear Mustang sob. General Armstrong snorts. “Weak,” she says.
Captain Buccaneer nods in agreement. He went three hours without crying, once, and he was only a Sergeant.
A blonde man stands up, then, and opens the door for them. He smiles at General Armstrong, and hands her a piece of paper. “That’s my home telephone number, sir. I hope this isn’t inappropriate – but I would love it if you’d give me a call.” General Armstrong stares at him for a moment, then tears the number in half and swans out of the door.
Another one of Mustang’s men can be heard sobbing. “Yes,” whispers General Armstrong to herself.
“You… really hate Mustang, don’t you?” says Major Miles.
“I don’t hate Mustang,” says General Armstrong. “I hate that Briggs doesn’t have Hawkeye. I take it out on Mustang because he’s an ass, and he deserves it.” She pauses. “Yeah, I really hate Mustang.”
They almost make it all the way to the train station without incident.
That’s a lie. They don’t even make it out of Central Headquarters. Bradley takes Major Miles and Captain Buccaneer to his office whilst General Armstrong is in the bathroom. He sits them down and fixes them tea.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he says. “I gather you’re rather attached to your little revolution.”
“Sir,” says Miles quietly, because he may express some amount of hatred for Bradley where Buccaneer cannot, because Bradley would kill him in a heartbeat and receive no hatred, whereas Buccaneer’s death might cause a bit of a stir.
“I think your General prefers you both alive, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” says Buccaneer, because he likes to think that General Armstrong likes him and Miles, a bit.
“I can’t hurt one of my most important Generals,” says Bradley. “There would be uproar were I to do so… however,” he pauses, and Buccaneer has to swallow down his nervous system’s twinge of approval at such blatant dramatic effect. “I received a lot of criticism for letting you into my military, Major Miles. And you – Captain Buccaneer – tread lightly. You’re no different than that bear, in my eyes.” He pauses. “Sorry – I made a mistake. Bears don’t usually lose their limbs in silly childhood accidents. They’re rather better survivors than that.”
Silence falls upon the room. Buccaneer is conscious of Major Miles working his jaw, and of his automail arm making a faint rattling noise as he works not to punch Fuhrer Bradley in the face with it. Then they’d see how he felt about silly childhood accidents. (It was also not a silly accident, as far as Buccaneer was concerned, but enough about that).
“Well, boys!” says Bradley, having wallpapered over the threat in his tone with cheerfulness. “Drink your tea.” Buccaneer is aware of him watching as he and Miles stare down at their tea. “Oh,” he says. “That’s how it is, is it?” Beat. “I can assure you, I haven’t poisoned your tea. This was just a warning.”
Buccaneer’s flesh fingers tremble. “I don’t understand the issue, sir.”
“Don’t you, Captain?” says Bradley. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the proportion of homosexuals in Amestris is rather large. We need a workforce, and we can’t have one if nobody is reproducing.”
“…What?”
“You,” says Bradley. “General Armstrong, Colonel Mustang, Major Armstrong, Lieutenant Hawkeye and Lieutenant Ross.” He pauses. “I am a busy man, Captain. I only see a 10 to 20 people per day. Today, I have seen 16, and six of those people have been homosexual.”
Major Miles raises his hand. “Permission to speak, sir.”
“Denied, Miles. I know Colonel Mustang is bisexual. You don’t have to tell me.” He pauses again, and Buccaneer begins to wonder whether it is really for dramatic effect, or if Bradley has a tic. “Six out of sixteen people,” he says. “Ten of those people have children. Only seven of those have children. We lose energy…” beat, “for our workforce. Do you see my point?”
Buccaneer runs his flesh thumb over one of the screws in his automail. “Not really, sir. Your sample size is… small.”
“I assure you,” says Fuhrer Bradley, “it is not.” There’s that strange, piercing look again, but it’s underpinned by dishonesty (Buccaneer can smell it. He trains Sergeants.)
Buccaneer heads towards the door with the distinct impression that Fuhrer Bradley is a very stupid man.
“I hope for your sake that your General doesn’t hear about this conversation,” says Bradley.
“So,” says Miles, when they return to Briggs. “Fuhrer Bradley threatened to kill both of us.”
“Oh,” says General Armstrong. “Excellent. We’re getting to him.” She pats Major Miles on the shoulder. “Good work, you two.”
Soon after the encounter with Fuhrer Bradley, they receive news from East City: they have joined the revolt. Miles phones his mother, who lives between Resembool and Ishval, and tells her precisely what’s going on. She cries, and tells him that he is brave, and that she will pray for him. She does not specify whether she will join the revolt, which Buccaneer supposes is fair, but Olivier doesn’t like at all.
Two months later, they head down to Central for a march led by Colonel Mustang (‘public appeal’, says General Armstrong disparagingly. Buccaneer privately thinks that it is a good thing.)
“Hello, Idiot Colonel,” says General Armstrong.
“Hello, sister,” says Major Armstrong.
“I wasn’t talking to you, slug!” says General Armstrong, and then: “I made posters.”
The posters vary from being politically intelligent but incomprehensible (‘Clause 28 will lead to the disenfranchisement of the majority of Amestris and increase the number of political casualties to an irreversible majority before the end of the decade’), to genuinely politically intelligent (‘We speak together as one to retain our Amestrian rights’) to very crude and incomprehensible (‘Your sister-in-law is called Goneril and nobody is surprised because she fucked a dude out of wedlock and we all saw the sexual health scandal after that, so who’s talking family sanctity now?’), and Buccaneer’s favourite is one that simply says ‘Drop Dead, Fuckhead,’ in a bright red marker, because he knows that nobody will ever use it because it has absolutely no relation to their cause.
The turnout in Central Plaza is impressive. All of Mustang’s men are present, barring the Elric boy. Buccaneer is surprised by civilians, who seem eager to join them. One young woman with two automail legs, who seems to have been picking up automail supplies, even grabs the poster that says ‘Drop Dead, Fuckhead’, and screams it at the top of her lungs as she goes.
They slump down in Mustang’s office, and the tiny Sergeant (bless him) fiddles with the radio until, once he has flicked past Buccaneer’s favourite radio drama (everybody in the room refused to allow him to listen to it), he comes upon the news.
“…And now for Fuhrer Bradley’s address.” Everyone sits up dead-straight.
“It has come to my attention,” says Bradley, “that Clause 28 has been subject to widespread criticism. There is nothing more important to me than the people of Amestris,” he says, “which is why I will be repealing the Clause. However…” There is a pause, “I stand by my convictions, and I hope that some of you will stand with me.”
They count it as a victory anyway, because that’s what it is.
As they leave Central, Bradley corners Buccaneer one more time. “I believe,” says Bradley, “that we will be meeting again, Captain Buccaneer, and I don’t expect the consequences to be good for you. Good day.” Buccaneer responds by grabbing a civilian and kissing him, just to annoy Bradley some more.
