Chapter Text
Alphonse had two eyes colored in blazing molten gold. Ed couldn’t remember his brother having another eye, one that glinted sharp steel blue in the moonlight. He only knew his little brother, bright like the sun with eyes that shone the same when he and twilight blue Winry poured over old medical texts and alchemical research journals.
Ed’s right eye was like his brother’s. Not exactly the same, if you looked hard enough, you could tell that Ed’s was a little more yellow, barely lighter than Al’s. It was duller, too, he decided one day as he studied it in the mirror; it didn’t shine the same, it didn't feel as warm and safe as Al’s. There was something behind it that felt almost dangerous. It did not remind him of mom, or of home and roaming sunshine.
He didn’t think much about his other eye. It was plain enough, which he felt a little bad for thinking about his soulmate’s eye, but the dark, near black of the iris didn’t stand out like others’ blues and greens and greys.
He hoped, though, that one day, when he met someone with one gold and one brown eye, when he watched the gold in their left fade into the stark color of their right, both those brown eyes would glow like mom’s soft green, and Winry’s sharp blue, and Alphonse’s cool gold.
He hated himself when he realized he stole that from Winry.
***
Lieutenant Colonel Roy Mustang was 25 years old when his left eye went brown. He was a grown man, an established military officer, a killer thousands of times over. He was looking down at a boy, a child eleven years old, missing limbs, mangled in a horrible way, only barely looking up at Roy from under heavy eyelids and long blond eyelashes.
The boy’s left eye, impossibly dark and worryingly familiar faded into the same wildfire, raw gold as his right.
Roy felt sick.
He didn’t let it show. He kept talking, ignored the way the boy’s eyes just hardly widened, shoved down that disgusting churning in his gut that threatened at the back of his throat.
He was grateful to make it out of the Rockbell place with the degree of nonchalant composure he did. He pretended not to notice Riza’s eyes on him, still mismatched in two shades of brown. He pretended he wasn’t stumbling and tripping over his own feet by the time they made it to the tiny motel.
It was that night that Riza woke at a dizzying hour of the morning, roused by clattering in the next room, and carefully pressed open the Colonel’s door. He looked up at her from the floor, distraught and remarkably intoxicated, with bloodshot black-brown eyes that pleaded silently even as a sob ripped from his throat. Roy threw his head into his hands, grasping at his hair and digging his nails into his scalp. Riza knelt beside him and pushed away the half-empty liquor bottles, pried his hands from his hair.
His face was red from the alcohol, and the crying, and the angry red scratch marks trailing over his cheeks and neck. He mumbled quietly to himself, and Riza wasn’t going to ask him to speak up.
He did anyways, he turned his face to her, looked her firm in the eye, and whispered as he shook his head frantically, “He’s a boy, he’s— he’s only a kid, Riza, I don’t know— I don’t know what to do. Why, why, why—” He tried to pull his hands back up to his face, but Riza held them firmly in hers. “What the fuck?” His voice breaks, and he sounds broken, he sounds like he’s dying. “What did I do? No— no, I deserve worse, but he doesn’t—” A deep, shaking breath tremored through his body. “He doesn’t deserve this.”
Riza knew, some tiny part of Roy had always been optimistic about the prospect of meeting his soulmate. He hoped it would be some man or woman, his age, soft and not world-weary and scarred like he was. He hoped it would feel like coming home and second chances. He wasn’t expecting a child, a young boy not even old enough to have finished primary school, broken and beaten down, literally torn apart by his being a child, only wanting to see his mother again.
“Are you considering,” Riza pauses for a fraction of a moment, “doing anything about it?”
Roy jolted back like she had held an iron to his hands. “No!” His eyes were wild and searching, hoping, begging. “You know me, you know me!” His words were desperate and slurred. “I couldn’t— I’m not like that! He’s a boy!” His voice was high and hysterical, like she had never heard him before.
“I know. I know, I didn’t mean— I’m sorry, I know you wouldn’t hurt him, Colonel. I’m sorry.” She reached one hand out to him and he took it. She helped him off the floor and onto the bed. “Get some rest, everything’s going to be fine.”
She hoped that was the worst of it, as she looked down at him, already dozing off with soft black hair stuck to his sweat-slicked face. The less hopeful, more realistic side of her knew it hadn’t even really started yet.
Edward Elric became a state alchemist, the youngest in history.
Roy drank. He drowned out the confusion and guilt with any bodies he could, men and women he never bothered to know or remember. None of them were blond.
Maes died and it got worse. He got better at hiding it from Riza, or maybe she gave up trying to keep him from killing himself slowly. Maybe it wasn’t worth the work, being the only one trying to talk Roy off the ledge. She and Gracia brought food over often, knowing he wouldn’t feed himself anything beyond cheap street food on the weeknights or weekend afternoons he had to stumble home from the bar on his own. Seeing Gracia always twisted the knife settled in his stomach; he didn’t deserve her kindness, not when her husband was dead and her left eye had already faded to a flat grey and he was the one acting like a child. Roy was a leech, a grown man with trivial issues he didn’t have the maturity to deal with properly. Eventually, Riza started driving him to work every morning, and all but putting the pen in his hand herself. He didn’t know if the rest of the team saw what was happening. If they did, no one said anything. If they noticed, they decided to leave it alone.
He lost an eye, and it only really hurt when he realized he lost the one that was once Ed’s.