Cost of a Secret

Review Replies: radcat. Thanks so much. There is a slow recovery for Ed and Al, and Roy's going to have his hands full dealing with what Karen has done to Liam. Wateria. Thanks.

Chapter 10

Testimony

“We are here to decide whether Liam Tyler should be placed into the custody of his father, and whether the treatment of Liam was justifiable reason for Major General Mustang to remove his son from his mother’s custody in the manner he did,” the judge said, looking so neutral as he spoke that it was driving Roy mad. He couldn’t determine if the man had any previous feelings on the case. Even if it wasn’t in Roy’s favor, at least the man would know where he stood.

Roy could feel the small hand in his own tighten its grip and he looked down at Liam, breaking the eye contact he’d had with the judge. He saw his son biting his bottom lip, and for just a moment, concern for the man at the front of the room vanished. Roy moved his left hand to rub at his son’s cheek to calm him as he leaned down close enough to press his lips to the head of black hair.

“You okay, buddy?” he whispered.

“Just afraid I won’t be able to tell him when I need to,” his son said, a little too loudly. The other attorney glared over at the table where Roy and Liam sat and shushed the boy.

“Mister Tyler,” the judge said, making Liam look up, brown eyes wide and frightened, “do you think you could tell it now? So that you don’t have to worry about it the whole time we are here?” The elderly man smiled at Liam warmly, and the fear of the judge visibly subsided.

“I… I think so, sir,” Liam said.

“I know it is unorthodox, but perhaps it is best to let this boy say his piece now,” the judge said. He then looked back at Liam. “Son, why don’t you take this chair beside me? That way everyone here can hear you.”

Liam nodded as he released Roy’s hand so that he could grip the seat of his chair and push himself off. He walked to the front of the courtroom, arms wrapped around himself.

“Sir, this is horribly out of order,” the other lawyer said.

“And this is my courtroom,” the judge said. “You’ll get your chance at an opening statement, but not before this boy gets an opportunity to say what he needs to say. Or would you rather he be too afraid to say anything, in favor or opposed to the major general?”

Liam climbed into the chair on the witness stand and looked up at the judge. “Do I talk now? Or do they have to ask me questions?”

“You can talk,” the judge said. “You can talk to me, and the rest of them will hear you just fine.” Liam smiled just slightly. “So tell me about your mother.”

“Well, she’s really smart. A really good alchemist, and she lets me keep my cat Ed, even though she doesn’t like him much. She doesn’t like my dad much either, especially since he stopped her research funding. She talks about that a lot, and she works down in the basement a lot now since he did.” Liam paused and looked down.

“Can you tell me about the basement?”

“Well, there are a lot of strange noises from there, and I’m not supposed to go down unless my mom wants me down there.” Liam closed his eyes tightly and still wouldn’t look up at the judge. “I don’t like going down there.”

“Why not?” the judge asked, his voice very calm.

“Mom’s been experimenting with new transmutations. Stuff she doesn’t let me help her with like she used to. Did you know you can make a tattoo with alchemy, but that it hurts a whole lot?”

“No, I didn’t,” the judge said. “I don’t know much about alchemy. You’ll have to dumb it down for me.”

Liam looked up and tried to smile, but it looked like he just couldn’t manage it. “She did it to Ed first to show me.” Liam shivered. “I never heard him cry like that. He was tired for a couple of days after.”

The young boy pulled his legs up onto the chair, but the judge didn’t correct him for sitting improperly. “She wanted me to know what it would be like.”

“And why did you need to know?”

“I… Because…” Liam looked frantically between the judge and his father, and Roy just wanted to go up and pull him from the bench. He wanted to hold him and say that his son had said enough, but Liam surprised him, finding bravery that Roy wasn’t sure he, himself, had. The boy dropped his knees and let them fall to the ground, feet smacking the wood base of the witness stand. “Can I show you?”

The judge nodded, but looked surprised when Liam began untucking his shirt.

“It is on his back, Judge,” Roy said, clarifying so that the man didn’t make Liam stop when he’d managed the courage this far.

Liam lifted his shirt and showed the man his back.

“Judge we can’t know that Major General Mustang didn’t—”

Roy wanted to cut him off, but it wasn’t his voice that rose up in the courtroom. It was Liam’s. “My dad would never do this to me! He has never hurt me, ever!”

The boy had dropped his shirt and was glaring at the lawyer, no longer looking afraid. Instead, he was defiant and daring the man to say another bad word about Roy.

“I think what he was trying to say is they may have been drawn on,” the judge said.

“You can try to wash them off if you want,” Liam said, trying to calm himself. “They don’t hurt anymore, but they won’t wash away.” His voice grew softer. “I tried.”

********

Ed was on his fourth beer, realizing he was going to need to stop. Very soon. Alcohol enhanced his current state of mind, and while most pegged him a “happy drunk.” He was learning now that he was only happy drunk if he was happy sober.

Of course, he’d never been drunk when sad to discover what he was slowly finding out now: if he was sad sober, he’d be miserable with alcohol. Already twice he’d nearly started to cry, and Ed just didn’t cry. Certainly not at the drop of a hat like he was tempted to at the moment.

“…So, I told her the car was mine, and she slapped me with a parking ticket. Here I thought she was drooling over the car and she was trying to find the owner to fine them.” Havoc laughed and Ed saw Al snickering, shaking his head. Al was still nursing his first beer, while Havoc was on his fifth.

Ed tried to laugh, but it came out as a nearly strangled sound. Of course, the noise made Al rush to his side in concern and hug him, exactly what Ed didn’t need to keep his composure. So he pushed Al away, as he’d been doing for the last few years. “I’m fine, Al,” Ed said. “Just give me a minute.” He squirmed away from Al’s embrace and stood from the table. Havoc was looking up at him, eyes a little glazed from the amount of alcohol he’d had.

“Brother, you can talk to me about it,” Al said. “I know I’ve only been with Winry, but maybe just talking about it can help.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ed said. “Not with you, not with anyone. We broke up. It’s over. I don’t want to dwell on issues and problems in my relationship with Roy. There’s no point. If he didn’t trust me enough at any point in our relationship to tell me about his son, then it is over. You don’t try to fix something that’s junked, and that’s what my relationship is, Al. It’s in the scrapheap.”

Al shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

“Of course you don’t,” Ed scoffed, heading toward the bathroom. “But you aren’t exactly the most realistic person in the world.”

He ignored the look of hurt on Al’s face. That struck a little too close to home for both of them, and rather than say more that would only injure his brother, Ed left the table and headed to his bedroom.

********

“I’d like to call Roy Mustang to the stand.” The major general stood, giving his son’s hand a little squeeze as he left him for the same chair Liam had occupied at the beginning of the hearing. The older man glanced back over his shoulder at his son, offering him a reassuring smile which he saw the seven-year-old return. Roy turned back to the stand and allowed himself to be sworn in before taking the seat.

The other attorney, the one Roy wasn’t paying an arm and a leg for, began questioning him about his absenteeism as a father, a term that irritated the man more than he could say. He hadn’t been present every waking hour, and that troubled him still, but it had been a safety issue. Up until this point, he’d genuinely believed Karen was the better option to the crazy people who wanted Roy hurt and/or dead.

“I was wrong.”

He explained the markings on Liam’s back as a transmutation symbol that he was familiar with, one involved in controversial experimentation that was part of the military’s past. He couldn’t elaborate further because Shou Tucker and his chimeras remained one of the great military secrets, one of the things a person just didn’t talk about in the military. One that the military wouldn’t let the public know about, but yet had no laws to enforce. To create laws would mean explaining how the military knew they were dangerous and wrong and the millions of other things that the chimeras were.

“I told you that is confidential military information, but I am aware of the implications of the symbol,” Roy said, keeping his voice calm as he was questioned for the third time. “But does it truly matter what she alchemically tattooed onto my son’s back? Or does it matter that she did it in the first place?”

He then went on to tell of how Liam’s school had contacted him, concerned for the boy’s health, or hoping that he had care of the boy and that was the reason for two weeks’ worth of absences.

His lawyer would enter written testimony from both the headmistress of Liam’s school and Liam’s teacher, which Roy knew could only help his case. If they thought him in any way unfit, they would not have called him the moment they suspected something was wrong.

For the moment, however, Roy was on his own. In more ways than one.

“Yes, sir,” Roy said, “but that relationship ended recently. Why it seems to make a difference that it was with another man, I don’t understand. I was involved with Edward Elric the Fullmetal Alchemist and yes, he did live with me. That has all changed.”

“And if he comes back?”

It will prove Ed is the dumbest person on the planet and Roy the luckiest. “Then he comes back.”

“Statistically speaking, homosexual relationships between two men can be very brief and you—”

“Statistically speaking,” Roy interrupted in a similar tone, “almost a third of heterosexual marriages in Amestris end in divorce. And, I am bisexual, not homosexual, but as my recent relationship with Ed has been the only relationship I’ve had in ten years, will you pardon if I ask you don’t try to sum me up with statistics based upon one year-long relationship?”

“How do we know you won’t have a series of women or men coming and going from your home?”

“Because I haven’t for the last four years? If you can make statistics of one relationship, I’d think four years of patterned behavior would be more than enough.”

Then they began again on the attacks. This was what Roy feared the most, that the very reason he’d let Liam stay with Karen would be what kept him from Roy. He had taken extra safety measures the moment Ed entered his house. All people needed was a new way to hurt Roy, and he knew he had to keep Ed safe to prevent it. There was a special security system at his house with additional patrols from the military and Central’s police force.

He had walls around his home that didn’t used to be there. He had already lined up a nanny and a school for Liam, both of which he’d done extensive checks on—or rather, his team had at his pleading requests.

“No I cannot guarantee his safety with me, but I can guarantee the lack of it if Liam stays with his mother.”

When his overpriced, yet somehow worth every cent, lawyer began asking Roy questions, he got to show his softer side. Though the major general found that side the most difficult to put on display. As though it was being dragged out of him, Roy told of how he felt for his son and the rest of his team. He reluctantly admitted how protective he was of them all.

He saw his son grin when he managed to get question after question right about Liam’s interests and favorite things. If this hearing did nothing, it reinforced to his boy that yes, his father did know an awful lot about him and had listened to him over the years.

********

Ed stepped out of the bedroom later, a somewhat sheepish expression on his face as he saw Al waiting in the living area. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s the alcohol.”

“It’s my fault,” Havoc said as he was bagging up some garbage. “I knew that. I’ve seen you with a few in you.”

Ed nodded, folding his arms across his chest. “It’s just been a rough few days, and I’m not exactly going on a lot of sleep.”

Al gave him a sympathetic smile, which irritated him, or rather increased his own irritation with himself. “So…” Ed said with a sigh. “I need to deal with this all a little better I think.” That included Al, but he didn’t want to delve into that just yet. “Havoc, what can you tell me about Mustang and his kid?”

“Some of that’s for him to tell,” Havoc said. “But I’ll tell you what I can. And Ed, the only people who knew about Liam were Major Hughes and Captain Hawkeye. Then I found out by accident when Liam got sick and I was the only available person to pick up his cold medicine. The rest of the team found out gradually after Liam figured out how to call his dad’s number at work and didn’t know he should pretend not to be the Major General’s son.”

“So why didn’t he tell me?”

Havoc shrugged. “I don’t know.” He sat down in a battered recliner. “He doesn’t like to talk about himself, but I can tell you after a certain point, he got afraid to tell you. You could see it. At least, according to Falman and Hawkeye you could. I never did.”

Ed only frowned at that, arms still crossed at his front. Why hadn’t the man trusted him? Why had he feared him? Roy Mustang was a smug bastard who went toe-to-toe with Ed when the rest of the world feared him. Afraid?

********

Roy was once again holding Liam’s hand as the judge began to speak his decision.

“I think that there needs to be additional investigation into this matter, but it is my opinion, Major General that your actions seem justified in getting your son from his mother’s custody. At this point, I see no reason why he cannot remain in your care.”

“That means I stay with you, right?” Liam asked.

Roy managed only a few bobs of his head before the boy launched himself at him.

Well, he’d won the first battle, but being a father, confronting Karen, helping Liam recover… All of that was still ahead of him and it terrified him.