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“Has Major Elric asked you any… unusual… questions recently?”
Colonel Mustang looked up from his paperwork to see Warrant Officer Falman frowning slightly from the door, “He asked if I’d tried the noodle place down on Third and Seventh.”
“I said unusual not-”
“He only eats at the one down Fourth Street. The one that does the extra green onions if you smile nicely at the girl and doesn’t make you transmute your own takeaway bowl.”
“You don’t think that he’s tried out all of them?” Falman asked, clearly confused, “I would have thought that Edward asking about noodle shops is a-”
“Of course he’s tried out all of them,” Mustang said, lifting the pen from the page to refill the inkwell, “which is precisely why it’s suspicious that he’s asking me for my opinion on any noodle shop which has been open for longer than ten minutes.”
Falman blinked, “But-”
“You’re the intelligence officer. Surely you could have pieced that together.”
“That wasn’t the kind of unusual question that I meant,” Falman said eventually. “I was thinking more questions like whether owning land makes him part of the elite.”
“Not unless you count him asking for a list of successful mining towns,” Mustang said, putting pen back to page, “and frankly he does that all the time too. He’s good with metals, silicates, organics, and everything else found in the dirt. If he didn’t have other priorities then we’d probably spend our time dragging him out of holes he made in the parade grounds.”
“What were his last few assignments?” Falman asked. “There’s something about this which is bothering me and-”
“Reole, that nasty business with Shou Tucker, and some internal investigation. Reports of corruption in some town out past Eastern Command,” Roy said, tossing the reports he was signing off on in front of him, “so just his usual kind of mission.”
“And he didn’t report anything unusual happening on-”
“Major Elric’s reports vary between being excruciatingly detailed and infuriatingly vague, whilst never providing a single usable piece of military intelligence either way,” Mustang said drolly. “I believe he takes great pleasure in ensuring that he fulfils the requirements of his role whilst never doing so in such a way that any of his superiors might actually promote him to a role where he has more responsibility than the minimum necessary to access the Archives.”
“Sir?”
Mustang sighed, “Whatever you’re worried about, I am sure that it will eventually cross my desk, and I will - at that point - deal with whatever insanity the Elric Brothers have decided to get into this week. It will be no different to any other week, and I am sure that you will continue to be able to get your free drinks from the informal intelligence meetings that take place on a Friday night at the Arsenal Innhouse.”
Falman flushed. He hadn’t expected Colonel Mustang to be that well informed about the goings-on of his squad.
“Was there anything else I could help you with, Warrant Officer Falman?”
“No, sir.”
“Then go finish your reports. We aren’t going home until they’re done. Hawkeye was very clear.”
Falman paled, “I’ll get them to you in the next hour!”
For a second, Mustang wondered if he should care about his subordinate. Then he put it out of his mind. Fullmetal was nearly sixteen. At this point, Mustang was certain that the boy was settling down a bit. He hadn't had a complaint about significant property damage in nearly two weeks. How bad could whatever he was up to be really?
A few hundred miles away, Edward Elric clapped his hands together and reached out to one side of the mining shaft, sending energy rippling through the dirt and stone ahead of them.
“This was quite a major collapse,” he said, feeling the depth of rock ahead of him, “and I want a report on why the supports here were so-”
Halling grunted, “You know why.”
“Another one?” Ed shook his head. “He really was a useless bastard wasn’t he?”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Halling offered, holding the lantern a little higher as they walked down the stretch of tunnel that the mine’s new owner had just alchemically repaired. “Think we’ll be dealing with the rest of his bullshit for the next few years.”
“I’ll get Al to come down here and look at these other supports,” Ed said, eyeing up the rickety wooden supports. “What did he do? Rip up some pallets and tell you to use that?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” Ed said, horrified, "You're joking. No one would be that stupid."
“Said it would work. Said we didn’t need anything better. Said that-” Halling shrugged, “well. Said a lot of bullshit.”
Ed stared at Halling incredulously for a second before letting out another expletive.
Youswell was still recovering from Yoki’s incompetence. It wasn’t just that he had been corrupt - the entire Amestrian military was corrupt, as far as Ed could tell, and sometimes he thought that even Mustang was probably scraping something off the top. He hadn’t quite worked out what Mustang spent his State Alchemist budget on, but the man had a house that was far nicer than a Colonel’s salary should have permitted. Not that Ed necessarily disapproved of anyone scalping the military for all they were worth - useless greedy fucks that the Amestrian Government were - but when it led to normal people getting hurt… well.
Ed had opinions about that.
The thing was that the military also controlled the system. Ed could have given the mine back to the people - he’d considered it for a moment even - but Yoki had a point when he said no one would care. It wasn’t so much the mines that were the issue as it was the power structure surrounding ownership of the mine. If it wasn’t a senior member of the military, then the Fuhrer was likely to declare that the mines were a strategic asset and reappoint someone - quite possibly Yoki - to run them.
And so, here he was. The owner of a mine and, therefore, the official leader of a whole mining town.
He’d abolished company scrip almost immediately, even before Halling had suggested it, and lowered taxation significantly. He didn’t need the money, and the people here did, and whilst a couple of percent was necessary to pay the expenditures for the military office he needed to maintain to keep his superiors off his back should they ever look too closely at what was going on… well. More than that truly wasn’t necessary. They could spend the money on the town.
Plus he and Al had moved some of their stuff down here. They weren’t quite living here - Resembool would always be home - but they were definitely spending less time in Central than could be expected given their commanding officer had been relocated there.
Deaths in the mine had gone down significantly since Ed took over, and their productivity was about to start ramping up. He’d stabilised six of the thirteen mines already, and had been halfway through investigating the seventh when the eighth collapsed, trapping a dozen miners.
Ed had been there in under 30 minutes. Not a single miner had died.
It would earn him a lot of goodwill, but that wasn’t why he did it. He did it because people mattered. Teacher had taught him that much, and maybe she would forgive him for being a dog of the military if he was doing as much good as he could with the powers he had been given.
Now he and Halling were walking through the mine, trying to work out how best to get the mine back into operations. Hopefully it was just a few collapsed supports, but Ed had learnt enough mining in the last few months that he knew that might have to abandon an entire section of the mine if they couldn’t find a way to make it safe.
Thankfully, this was what he was best at when it came to alchemy. Earth and everything beneath it.
Maybe they’d rename him the Coal Alchemist after they saw him emerging from the depths, covered from head to toe in soot and dirt, his blonde hair stained black by a hard day of work under Youswell.
“I think we can probably get this back in operation by tomorrow,” Halling said, knocking his hand against the rock face, “if you or your brother could find time to shore up some of these supports, that is.”
“I was going to ask Al to come down later,” Ed admitted, “as we should probably finish checking over the other mineshaft before the end of the day, in case that one collapses too.”
“That works.”
“And then-”
“Are you Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist?”
Ed and Halling shared an incredulous look. That voice was young, female, and foreign. Three things that neither of them expected to hear whilst at the bottom of a coal mine that wasn’t even judged to be safe.
Homunculi -
Except if it was homunculi then Halling would already be dead and Ed would be fighting for his life.
He turned to find a girl with features like nothing he’d ever seen before, dressed incongruously in an elegant dress, her hands concealed within her sleeve, braids cascading down her back, ribbons interwoven throughout her hair. Worse, it seemed like she was younger than Al. Definitely not the age where she should be appearing at the bottom of a mine and surprising him. How had she snuck up on them?
“Who are you?” Ed asked bluntly, “and why are you here?”
Her face dropped, “ You’re Edward Elric?”
Halling’s face twisted in a direction that Ed hadn’t even seen the normally unshakeable man. It was something between disbelief and humour and a sudden sharp edge of glee that Ed had a sneaking feeling might be at his expense.
“What’s it to you?”
She stared at him, her face doing some complicated things that Ed didn’t even want to try to interpret.
“...but you’re so small. ”
Ed would have exploded in anger, but he was very conscious of the tonnes of rock that were pressing down on his head balanced only on supports that they knew were questionable. It was with some loathing that he bit it back and asked again, “Who are you, and why are you here?”
“But-” the girl stared at him, clearly still distressed, “I heard all the stories and I just thought that-”
Halling’s face suggested that Ed was going to be hearing about this meeting a lot. Probably in front of other people. Whilst none of them were entirely sober. For the rest of his life.
Great.
Why did this - whatever this was - have to happen in front of the man that was most likely to tell everyone in town about this weirdo girl that was going on about how small he was?
“Yes, yes, yes,” Ed said, “but who are you?”
“I’m Mei Chan!” She said, “Princess of Xing!”
Halling and Ed shared another look.
“Uhuh,” said Ed, “and who are you really?”
Her face fell, “But I am!”
Ed sighed, “Fine. We’ll sort this out on the surface. It’s not safe to be down here.”
“You’re going to look after me?” She immediately brightened, “That’s so noble of you! I can’t believe that Edward Elric is going to protect me like this!”
Halling was definitely hiding a laugh.
This, Ed decided, was fucking shit.
Why had he decided to take over Youswell again?