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They did not have the “call home” type of relationship. They had the “show up on the doorstep after not exchanging a word for years” type of relationship. Chris Mustang kept tabs on Roy, and he knew that she did, and he felt neither threatened by her special breed of hands-off caring nor obligated to check in when he knew she could easily find out for herself exactly what he was up to.
The summer after eighth grade, he left to spend more than three years studying alchemy in a village too small for a train station; Chris knew for a fact that it had a post office, but Roy never wrote to her and she never gave him grief about it. She sent maybe two letters in the entirety of those three years, and both of those were because his sisters claimed to miss him. She missed him too, obviously, but he knew that without her having to tell him. She knew he thought about her without him having to say so.
He showed up in August, just before the start of term at the academy he’d applied to without her knowledge. He’d grown from an awkward thirteen-year-old to a too-skinny sixteen-year-old who carried himself with calm confidence. Chris wasn’t surprised he still wanted to join the military, but State Alchemists could bypass the academy, and most did. But Roy was a decade younger than even the youngest of the State Alchemists, and he wanted to serve his country now . And his father had graduated from the academy, his footprints beckoned Roy forward along that path, as they always had.
Apparently, Roy had failed the written exam but gotten called in to interview on the basis of his claim to be an alchemist, probably helped along by his legacy status. He had the knowledge he needed, could easily rattle it off in oral form. He’d known more about the military at four than Chris ever had until she needed to start paying attention for the sake of being any kind of intelligence asset. Even now, it took a minute for her to identify a soldier’s rank based solely on their stars and bars; it was much easier just to listen until someone else inevitably called it out.
Roy spent the night drinking and playing cards with his sisters, with somewhat unsettling ease. She knew he’d experimented with alcohol in the last couple of years before leaving for his apprenticeship, but what she was watching now went beyond experimenting. Apparently, this Master Hawkeye had a liquor cabinet. Still, it was a probably a good thing Roy already knew how to hold his drink before going off to military school.
Chris made him breakfast the next morning, told him to comb his hair, and gave him a ride to the school. She watched him walk in through the iron gate without looking back, and didn’t hear from him again for over a year, when he turned up at the bar without warning, laughing and holding hands with a boy called Maes Hughes. It was not his first weekend pass, but it was the first one where he wanted to come home, and Chris sure as hell wasn’t going to turn him away.
She listened to Roy and Maes bitch about their classes (Roy apparently carried Maes through chemistry and was surprisingly good at political science; Maes was the only reason Roy passed history). She watched the ease of their casual intimacy, Roy laying with his head on Maes’s lap on a booth seat while the other boy played with his hair. It was obvious that they were more than just roommates. She didn’t give a damn, but her heart twisted with the knowledge that Xavier would have. The father Roy had always idolized would’ve cut him out of his life for this betrayal of his traditional Amestrian values, the same way he’d cut Chris out. She kept that to herself. Roy was probably at least partially aware of it anyway, he’d never been stupid. When she asked him, Roy said he understood the consequences should he and Hughes get caught, and he’d shown that same stubborn determination he’d shown in the face of the children who bullied him in primary school when he said he didn’t care. Chris was damn proud of him in that moment, and told him so by pouring him a drink and reminding him that he always had a place here, and so did Maes Hughes, if he wanted it.
“I know, Aunt Chris,” Roy said, in lieu of ‘thank you,’ because they never actually had to say the things they meant.
That was his one and only visit before he swung by to tell her about graduation, two days before the event. “I’m sorry I didn’t visit before,” he said, spinning the stick around the rim of his mostly empty martini glass. “I was on restriction. It’s Maes’s fault.”
“For three years , Roy-boy?”
“Two and a half.” She snorted and shook her head. If he didn’t want to check in, he didn’t have to. If he wanted to come home, the door would always be open. That’s how it is, between them.
“How is Maes?” she asked.
Roy shrugged and said, “He’s good,” with a smile that proved they were still together. Chris was glad, and worried at the same time. Things were overlooked at the academy that wouldn’t be overlooked for commissioned officers, and she’d seen the idealism of youthful relationships strain and snap under pressures far lighter than being forced to pretend that no relationship existed at all.
Roy said he could handle it. Chris had no choice but to believe him.
After spending almost a full two weeks living with her like it hadn’t been seven years since he’d slept in his childhood bedroom, Roy received a short, urgent letter from Riza Hawkeye. He caught an early-morning train while Chris was still sleeping, and the next time she saw him he carried a silver watch in his right pocket, the youngest State Alchemist in history.
He got his own apartment, in the kind of utilitarian on-base neighborhood where he’d spent his early childhood. He stood in the darkened hallway outside his front door staring at nothing for several minutes, seeing ghosts, until Chris coaxed him into going in and unpacking his few boxes.
He came to the bar one night while it was snowing fiercely outside, heartsick because Hughes wouldn’t shut up about his girlfriend. And Hughes was going to Ishval, and he might die. And Roy was terrified. He had nightmares about the desert for months before he first set foot in that sand. When Executive Order 3066 came down, he was almost relieved. Surely being on the front line couldn’t be worse than being left behind.
He came back haunted, afraid of fire and unwilling to touch a gun, and he slept tucked under Riza Hawkeye’s arm. She hovered over him and clearly didn’t trust Chris, or anyone, but there was something there that made Chris pause. There was none of the easy laughter that had accompanied Maes’s visit, but there was a force, an almost magnetic attraction, between Roy and Riza, an unbreakable bond it would take an idiot not to recognize. They never once used the word “love,” but it was there . Even though, from listening to them talk, Roy and Maes were still seeing each other. Or whatever that was called when it happened on a battlefield. Chris figured it was none of her business, that Roy would ask for her advice if he wanted it, and that war did far worse things to people than complicate their relationships.
Chris watched Maes kissing Roy, slow and deep under the bar lights, on the night before his wedding to Gracia, and she wondered which of them was going to have the harder time letting go. Somehow, she didn’t think it was Roy.
Roy was posted to East City. She saw him sometimes, but not always, when he had to come back to Central every year to recertify as a State Alchemist. Just like always, the door was open when he needed to come home. Just like always, when he did, they were quiet, and she loved him, and she worried. When he drank now there was nothing of the good kind of drinking about it. He drank enough to drown, and she kept pouring, because it was about the only thing she knew how to do. He looked so lonely these days.
When Hughes died, Roy was shattered, hardened and frighteningly angry in a way she’d never seen. It was the first time Chris thought she truly understood what he was capable of, the hellfire destruction he’d unleashed in Ishval. Now, he had a target worthy of his rage. She made herself his ally, trading coded messages filled with words like “homunculus” and “Promised Day” and all of it felt far too big and slightly unreal, the kind of story that would ordinarily have her questioning the teller’s sanity. Except the teller was Roy , and he needed her help, and she gave it without hesitation and left the country when he asked her to. She wondered what the hell he thought he could do against a plot to destroy all of Amestris, but if anybody could save the world, or at least the nation, then she believed in him.
He actually called her from a hospital room, the first time she could remember him ever using a phone to talk to her when it wasn’t a part of their conspiracy of secrets. He was blinded and scared and needed to come home, but couldn’t. So she went to him, smelling like alcohol and cigarettes and unconditional love. And they were quiet, and she stayed until Roy felt strong enough to push forward on his own. She watched him crack a smile at his team’s teasing and heard them whispering about the reconstruction of Ishval, and when she left the hospital she figured it’d probably be a few years before she saw him again. And she was fine with that.