Ugly Story (Fullmetal Alchemist)
“How’d you get into this line of work, anyway?”
“Ah,” Roy says, and Ed immediately understands that he has stepped in it.
“If it’s personal, you don’t have to—”
“No, it’s.” Roy clears his throat. “You have a right to know. Although if you were looking forward to a romantic evening—”
“No, well now you do have to tell—”
“I killed someone,” Roy says, pulling Ed up short. “Driving drunk.”
“Oh,” Ed says. The statement takes a moment to process, and longer to believe. “What— What happened?”
Roy sighs—not frustrated. Tired. “I was working this backwater factory town in Arkansas at the time. Consulting, whatever. I had this rental car, and I was fucking. Pissed off, and…” He seems distant, organizing himself like he’s tidying a stack of papers on a desk. “I would drive home from this bar. I never should have. One day I hit someone.”
There’s a bubble of horrible silence around their little table. Roy, Ed realizes, is drinking tonic water with lime. “Did you. Go to jail?”
“No,” Roy says flatly, and Ed feels, somehow, stupid for asking. “That’s not— I was working for this guy at the time, and I called him from the drunk tank. The judge got in at nine, and by then everything was…” Roy makes a gesture, closed fist to open. Poof. “The cop from the scene bought me a Gatorade and drove me back to my hotel. Insurance covered the car.”
“That’s,” Ed says, and then stops.
“Wrong,” Roy says. “Yes.”
“And then…?”
“It’s hard to remember. I don’t say that as a dodge. But I kept going like that for a while. Then I got promoted, like the next quarter, and I just.” He rolls his shoulder uncomfortably. “I could see it, suddenly. The whole thing, like I told it to you. Quit my job. Started going to meetings.” He taps his glass. “Sixteen years go by. Here we are.”
“So you were…?”
“Twenty-three.”
Twenty-three is young. Ed’s twenty-five, though. He never would have, at twenty-three. “Who was it?”
“Migrant worker. On his way to his shift.”
“Early morning?”
“Yes.”
It’s a horribly vivid answer, somehow. Ed watches condensation crawl down his glass and catch the light.
“If you want to go,” Roy says softly.
“I,” Ed says. He hasn’t managed to finish a thought in the last several minutes. “Give me a second.”
“Okay,” Roy says, and he wipes his thumb through the ring of water on the table.