Work Text:
Inspiration strikes Berthold unexpectedly when he’s down in the village on a job.
It’s a task so simple as to be almost insulting for a man of his skills: Mrs. Shepherd (Or is it Stepford? He can’t be bothered to remember details as trivial as names, not when the greatest alchemy the world has ever known is struggling to come together inside his skull) has a bird’s nest caught in her chimney and doesn’t want to risk her husband or son hurting themselves if they climb up to remove it. She hopes Mr. Hawkeye, with his alchemy, can remove it without having to put anyone in danger.
She says this in such a practiced voice, and offers such a disproportionately high sum of money as his fee, that he knows without having to ask that the woman’s actions have been prompted by a glance at his poor motherless daughter and a self-righteous need to rescue her from her father’s carelessness.
For a moment, anger cuts through the calculations that usually fill his head. He has half a mind to refuse and storm out—in his father’s day, someone of her standing would never have dreamed of showing such patronizing behavior to a Hawkeye—but then he remembers the pinched look on Riza’s face that seems to grow worse every time he looks at her. Whatever else Mrs. Shepherd-or-Stepford might assume about them, she’s right when she guesses that they need the money.
Berthold swallows his pride and starts sketching out an array on her parlor floor.
The practice of alchemy—the scrape of chalk against tile, the challenge of planning out the lines that would lock his intentions into place—had always calmed him, even back in the days when he had just been Bertie the Idiot, Edmund Hawkeye’s youngest son, scribbling away at his circles. He had spent most of his time wanting nothing more than to be left in peace, away from his father’s constant disappointment in Berthold’s lack of interest in improving the fading Hawkeye fortune, his brothers Elias and Conrad’s constant bickering with each other and him, his anxious sister Theresa’s constant well-meaning efforts to make life better for all of them.
His wish had come true in pieces: first Theresa had been married off by their father to an businessman from Aerugo. Scraping together a dowry for the wedding had pushed them to the brink of starvation, but afterwards Pietro's wealth had been enough to buy the family the favors with the government that they needed, at least until he tired of Father's demands and had moved Theresa back to Aerugo just in time for the First Southern Conflict to trap her there.
A few years later, Father had decided that the Hawkeye family’s fading star was due to the fact that unlike the other great families of Amestris, the Hawkeyes alone lacked any significant military presence, and had set out to rectify this error as soon as possible. As second son, that fell to Conrad’s lot, and he’d enlisted within the month. They’d quickly sent him to the front, where men were desperately needed, without bothering to give him any training other than how to fire a gun without dropping it in shock, but taking Conrad’s belligerent personality into account, none of them had believed Conrad would really have any problems adjusting.
They sent a perfunctory military letter of condolence at Conrad’s death only two months later.
Elias had married by then, but before his pale, pretty wife could produce an heir, she’d fallen ill with a sickness that had quickly spread to everyone in the family. Berthold hadn’t been spared, and he’d spent a few days confined to his bed, feeling as if his mind, his body, his very soul was on fire. When he’d awoken, the doctor had told him he was the only one left.
Despite everything it had taken from him, though, the sickness had given him one thing back: the taste of fire in his heart, running through his veins. Almost everything—with one glaring exception in marrying his wife—he has ever done in his life since then has been to recreate that feeling he half-remembers. Fire is power, he knows, and so is knowledge; and if he ever works out how to control them both, he’ll be able to regain the composure he had in his younger years, to regain—
Balance.
Berthold freezes, Mrs. Stepford-or-Shepherd’s ridiculous array entirely forgotten. Fool that he is, he’s forgotten to balance the damn array, that’s why it isn’t working! He needs something in the lower corner to weigh it down, to balance out the other elements so that it clicks into motion.
He steps out of the house like a sleepwalker, the harridan’s angry shouts fading behind him. The world swirls with possibilities; he could use a spiral, or a star, or a blazing sunrise to balance the array out—or perhaps more a deceptively simple curl of script in just the right place. He’ll have to check Roy’s assignments first when he gets home, of course. The boy’s aunt pays lavishly for his lessons and keep, and a Hawkeye must honoring such an obligation. But after that, the hours shine forward golden and idyllic, free for him to take his time weighing the benefits of each possible symbol, one more step closer to unlocking the secrets that have eluded him all his life.
In his abstraction, he finds himself back home before he knows it, and what he finds in his study takes him so by surprise that he stands by the door silently watching.
Riza is perched on the single chair in the study, swinging her dangling feet absent-mindedly as she bends over a textbook; Roy has moved to sit on the floor instead, long legs sprawled before him and back propped against the bookshelf that stores Flamel to Ostanes. The boy’s working away at an array, though. Berthold contents himself with that much.
But the very next moment—“What are you working on?” Roy breaks the silence without looking up from his sketched-out array.
Riza hardly looks up either: doesn’t jump, doesn’t show any signs of surprise that her father’s apprentice is talking to her. How long has this been going on, Berthold wonders irritably. He supposes the children must have spent some time together when they weren’t in his presence, but he’s never wasted much time wondering what they might do. The same things all children do, perhaps—eat, sleep, teach themselves something halfway useful if they can.
“Schoolwork,” Riza replies shortly, and then frowns and scratches out something she’s written down.
Roy’s mouth quirks into a smile. “What kind of schoolwork?” he asks, patiently, as though this exaggerated effort it takes to draw an answer out of her is an old joke between them. Victoria had those; those ridiculous statements she repeated, not because they were amusing or original or even true, but merely because they made her laugh.
“Old Cretan,” Riza says, and puts her pen down. “We’re translating Rhodopis’s Tales.” She pauses, presses her lips together in a frown Berthold recognizes being very similar to his own, and adds, “I can’t think of this one word.”
“Tell me what you have so far,” says Roy, smiling. “It might make it easier.”
Riza doesn’t look entirely convinced, but she starts talking anyway.
“ A maker of marvels, a…magician. I think that’s a better word. Anyway, it starts: A magician lived once, in a house upon a cliff, with his daughter of marriageable age. He loved nothing but his art and his daughter and the first rather more than the latter.”
Roy stops smiling. “Riza—“ he says, a little uncertainly, but Berthold’s daughter is as stubborn as her sire, and she barrels onwards.
“He jealously protected both from the eyes of the world, but the day came when his daughter fell prey to the feeble organ that is a woman’s heart.” Berthold catches the hint of irony in his daughter’s voice and smiles to himself. “She let her lover into her father’s palace of marvels and left his secrets open to the four winds, who picked them up and scattered them throughout the earth. When the magician found out, he was furious. The young man having escaped, he turned to his daughter and caused her betrayal to be wrought upon her back in the form of great spots where he struck her, and, that not sufficing, had her sink to the floor as a—“ Riza sighed “—that’s the problem is. It’s not a dragon—it’s smaller than that, but lizard sounds wrong.”
Roy shrugs. “Salamander?” he offers, and—
Salamander. The word burns through Berthold’s mind; the eternal reptile, the child of flame. The perfect element to balance the array. Oh, his clever daughter, to give him the answer in her ignorance.
And with that, he knows the children’s nonsense has gone on long enough. There’s a need to do real work now.
“Roy! Riza!” he booms, and is, in some distant corner of his mind, oddly amused to see them both jump. “What is the meaning of this!”
Riza’s eyes go wide, and she gathers up her fallen book quickly. “Father, you’re back already I’ll go up to my room and won’t bother you or Mr. Mustang I’m sorry—“ Before he’s entirely aware of it, his daughter is halfway to the door.
“I’m sorry, Master Hawkeye,” says Roy, looking mortified. “It won’t happen again, I swear it won’t—“ But, Berthold notices, the boy’s gaze still darts away from his to follow Riza as she flees the room, making sure she’s out of range of her father’s perceived anger.
Berthold has always known, in a vague and guilty way, that he doesn’t love Riza near as much as he should—doesn’t love anyone, for that matter. Victoria, he thinks bitterly, came closest to overcoming this…whatever-it-is that is wrong with him, but that is over now. She is gone. He is alone, and he cannot care for Riza as she deserves, not as long as his alchemy remains more important to him and to the wellbeing of Amestris.
But Roy can. Roy does.
For the third time that day, Berthold feels the satisfaction of discovering a solution he had not even considered before.
He can’t give Riza much, but he can give her this: he can give her the gift of flame alchemy to present to the world and the man she’ll likely marry. He can give her a dowry, which, even if not made up of money like his sister Theresa’s, has a price worth far more than gold. And his child, his own magician’s daughter, can bear the weight of her treasure on her back like that other until the world, not to mention Roy, is ready for it. This he will offer her, a gift like no other. It will make up for the rest.
“I want that array complete in an hour, Roy,” he says absently, attention already twelve steps ahead, and settles down in his chair.
Soon, he tells himself, and goes back to work.