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Chris Mustang is a lady who possess a core of steel within her. She doesn’t crack or break under pressure, and she protects the wayward souls who find themselves at her doorstep with a fierceness that rivals a lioness.
However, even steel melts under high enough heat.
Under normal circumstances, you would be forgiven for thinking that Chris Mustang was the sort of lady who didn’t cry no matter how bad things got, that she was the type to look at a situation, calmly analyze it, pack away her emotions and keep going.
These aren’t normal circumstances of course.
Chris stares resolutely at the MP standing at the wall, where the door that separates her from Roy stands.
“It’s the final day, what am I going to do kid? Break him out?” She asked, the tiredness from all her years on the mortal coil expressing itself in the way she practically sighed out the second question. “He’s my son, and he’s about to die. Just let me see him.”
The MP looks at Chris, like he’s trying to figure out if she’s hiding some sort of weapon on her, or god-forbid, that she wasn’t joking about trying to break him out. Granted, she knew the Fullmetal brat had just about damn near tried that a week or so back, shouting the whole place down until he’d tired himself out arguing against Roy and had marched out, mouth set in a grim line.
It had gotten the attention of the press, and with them came the scrutiny of not just him but all of Roy’s acquaintances, and Chris wanted to simply let go and scream and shout about the sheer unfairness of it all, but she couldn’t and didn’t.
Instead, she stared at the man in front of her, separating her from the boy (he might have been 40 but Roy would always be her little brat) on the other side.
“You have 10 minutes.” He sighed at last, moving away from the door. “But if I hear anything funny—”
“Yes, yes, you’ll come bursting in and throw me out on the street.” Chris snapped. “I’ve heard it all before brat, there’s no need to tell me. Believe me, I know .” And so she walked in, took a shallow breath once she had crossed the threshold, and forced herself down the dim corridors until she found Roy’s cell.
(“ When I grow up, I want a big house, with enough rooms for everyone! And the windows will be really big too, so the sunlight is always streaming in and— ”) Chris shuddered at the faint memory. Now that dream would never be fulfilled, just another one dashed on the ground for Roy’s justice.
Sometimes Chris really regretted raising Roy with such strong values. Those first few weeks post-Ishval, when he had posted up in his old room and refused to eave if the world wasn’t ending outside had been her first real taste of it. Now was just another version of that infernal question that had plagued her mind during those nights when she hadn’t been sure if Roy wanted to live or not.
If he were a touch less stubborn, a touch more selfish, would he be here?
She knew the answer of course. Her Roy-boy wanted the sun and stars and moon all at once, and he’d throw himself on the flames just so that no one else would have to get hurt while he continued his quest to have everything.
The dim hallway light makes long shadows on the cold linoleum floor, but none are longer than her boy’s. She stops in front of the correct cell, staring down at the man sitting on the floor within.
He wears a thin white button up and black pants. They’ll give him his uniform an hour before he’s due to be sent out to die, as one last comfort.
Chris thinks he looks small. Smaller than he had been at 6 when she had first taken him in, smaller even than when he was a baby, and first being cradled in Daniel’s arms as Wai Lam looked on from the hospital bed.
For a few seconds, Chris wonders if her boy was ever taller than her, because when she looks down on him now, he doesn’t seem like it.
“Mad— I suppose it’s just Chris now.” He says, looking up at her, a devilish smirk cutting across his face. “So you’ve come to visit me too. Please don’t act like Fullmetal, I doubt the guards will take kindly to that.” She snorts at that.
“That’s enough out of you brat.” Her hands find purchase on the bars, and it is a very close thing that she doesn’t clench them so tightly that her knuckles turn white. “You’re still so impertinent, should’ve rid you of that long ago.”
“I wouldn’t have come this far without it.” He whispers, eyes now cast low.
“This far.” She echoes. “You could have easily gone further.” Roy stays silent, and Chris takes it as permission to keep talking. Not that he could’ve shut her up if he tried, Chris is one of the few women who can get Roy Mustang to close his damn mouth after all. “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” That was something Chris told Roy once, when he was young enough to have barely crested her knee. “Dammit boy, you weren’t supposed to take that as advice. ” Her voice is choked, even though the tears refuse to fall.
“I didn’t.” He protests weakly, still refusing to look at her. “I was never the hero.” She honestly doesn’t understand how he can say that, when there were protests practically every day demanding that he be let out. He is a hero, perhaps not nearly as lily-white as the Fullmetal Alchemist, but he was a hero.
Was. It’s pathetic how a single word is almost reducing her to tears.
“Do you think that people will be happy with this? Do you think that this is atonement or something Roy?” That finally gets him to look at her, and Chris nearly crumples at the sheer weight behind those dark irises.
(He has Wai Lam’s eyes, but that heavy weight, that conviction , that was Daniel, that was Chris’ brother in those old old eyes.)
“It is atonement.” He says with finality. He gets up, removing the unnatural height disparity between them. Roy stands level with her, eyes boring into hers, and Chris would almost call it regal, the way he willingly shackles himself to his ideals and throws himself off of the steepest of cliffs if it means honoring them.
However, Chris Mustang had never once suffered fools for a single day in her life, and her nephew is no exception.
“Do you really think that dying will save you?” Chris asks acerbically. “Do you think that highly of yourself.”
“No.” He says honestly. “I don’t. But this is all I can do now.” Bullshit. Chris wants to say. You can do more. You did do more. You aren’t allowed to give up here. It’s the same sentiments Chris always expressed when Roy was a child and complaining that he had already given his all. He’s 40 and Chris is still having to scold him like he’s 10 .
She doesn’t say so of course, because as much as she might think him foolish and an idiot for sticking with this path, she can at least respect the dedication. She can’t convince him anyways, if Riza and the Fullmetal brat couldn’t, then Chris has no chance.
Suddenly he laughs, the action shaking his body until it turns from ‘shaking’ to wracking and the laughs turn into sobs. Chris isn’t a mother, but even so, she thinks that leaving him to cry like this isn’t right. So she grasps his hands, the ones encircled and forced apart by the special shackles they make alchemists wear.
“Roy.” She says firmly. He doesn’t respond, not that she thought he would. And so she stands there, holding her boy’s hands until the MP comes in and tells her that her 10 minutes are over. With that, she nods and heaves a heavy sigh. With this, she won’t see her little brat again until they march him into the field and shoot him like some common criminal. “Roy.” She says again.
“Yes?” His voice is thin and reedy and a little hoarse. He looks like a wreck, but even so there is the tiniest hint of pride and dignity in his stance. He looks like a wreck, but Chris knows better than anyone on the planet (including Riza and Edward Elric) that he hasn’t been broken, that he is still staunchly resolute.
“I love you.” She states simply. He flinches before she finishes, like he was expecting to hear something else. Silly brat. He stares at her, eyes clearly searching her for some form of deceit.
“I love you too.” He says at last. “And I’m sorry.” Which is such a blatant lie that were he still a child Chris would take him to task for it, but he’s 40 and Chris can’t. Instead, she nods, and walks out with the MP.
As she steps out of the building, she sucks in a deep breath of air. There’s no one around, not at this hour of the day, and even if it were an acceptable time, most people would be staying in anyways, glued to their radios waiting for the scheduled time.
Chris is alone, and it is this that lets her bare her emotions, and let a few tears stream down her face. Of course, the moment of vulnerability can’t last long, and she makes her way to the bar.
She has a date with a nice bottle of whiskey and her favorite cigarettes tonight.