Vickers

From my FMA WIP about the restoration of Ishval

Prologue to my WIP, which starts after the end of the manga:

In 1908, roughly 3 out every 4 Ishvalans in Amestris were killed in the Extermination campaign ordered by Fuhrer King Bradley, or about 400,000 people.

In 1915, Fuhrer King Bradley was killed, and replaced by Lt Gen Grumman as Fuhrer. Shortly thereafter, he passed the Ishvalan Restoration Act, to restore Ishval and return there whoever wished to of those who had survived the Extermination campaign.

The man put in charge, Brigadier General Roy Mustang, was personally responsible for 1 out of 3 of all Ishvalans killed. Two other members of his team had also killed in that campaign, but not being capable of the same kind of mass destruction, were responsible for only hundreds of deaths each, not over a hundred thousand. The sniper, Captain Riza Hawkeye, he kept with him as his adjutant. The foot soldier, Second Lieutenant Jean Havoc, he put in charge of a company of volunteers to help with the restoration of Ishval, who would become known as the blood soldiers.

---

Cowboy¹ watched both his flock and part of his employer’s flock together from the top of a hill overlooking a pasture on one side and the encampment on the other. He had an Amestrian name and even an Ishvalan true name, though he hardly ever used either one. A thick scar cut diagonally above and below his right eye, where he’d almost lost it fighting off Amestrian soldiers in 1908 while he was getting his Ishvalan wife and children to refuge. A convert, he had no Ishvalan blood – he was light skinned, blue-eyed, and dark haired, under his red bandana, with a sparse triangular goatee.

After the agreement had been reached not to conduct trials for the actions of the blood soldiers during 1908, at least while Grumman was in office, the encampment had sprung back to life. It was bustling and busy, but there was a somber underpinning that had not existed before.

Cowboy was on the clock with his employer, and his replacement came by at 3pm to watch the flock until it was time to return them to the sheepfold. He wasn’t on the clock with his own small flock, though. Them he took to his own sheepfold nearby, that he was squatting on by permission of the military and civil authorities. When they were settled, he headed back to his family tent close to the unmarried refugee women’s compound. He’d be back to check on his own flock again after supper.

When he got there, he saw a jeep delivering heavy, dirty fleeces to the women’s compound. The soldier who got out of the jeep to meet with the women had a stiff leg and walked with a pronounced limp. When the soldier turned his head to talk to Mistress Joleen, the Ishvalan elder from the Camel Rock refugees, Cowboy recognized him as the man whose knee he had shot in the stockade. Black hair, simple black mustache, lightly tanned skin. Oddly blue eyes, given their almond shape.

The soldier turned to walk to the back of the jeep and his eyes met Cowboy’s. There was an awkward moment as each recognized the other across the small open space in the compound. Then the soldier went on to the back of the jeep and continued his work. Cowboy hesitated, and then headed over to the jeep himself.

The soldier waved to acknowledge Cowboy, but continued checking things off on his clipboard and talking with the women who loaded the fleeces into their handcarts. When he was done, he turned to Cowboy, who was still standing there.

“I did that, didn’t I?” Cowboy said, motioning to the leg.

“Corporal Isaac Vickers² , sir,” he said. “Pleased to meet you. Yes, you did.”

“Is it going to heal?” asked Cowboy.

“Nope,” said Vickers. “Kneecap splintered. They got all the bone fragments out, but no kneecap left.”

“You can’t automail it?”

“I could. And the military will cover it,” he said. “It’s not healed enough for that yet, though. And I’m not sure I want to. Automail means a lot of pain when it’s installed and a lot of maintenance afterward. But otherwise, I walk like this from now on. It won’t get much better. That’s why they’re keeping me with the jeeps for now. Don’t want me walking too much or doing manual labor.”

“No one’s arrested me,” said Cowboy.

“Second Lieutenant Havoc asked if I wanted to press charges. I told him if he didn’t think I needed to, I’d rather not. He didn’t think so, so I didn’t. I lost a kneecap, but you lost a lot more.”

Cowboy thought about that. “Maybe not as much as you think. I still have my wife and kids. And my wife lost a lot of people, but I’m not Ishvalan. I didn’t. And now I’m building up a herd. Lost my home and job for eight years, but now I got them back, along with a pardon.”

“You want me to press charges?” asked Vickers with a grin.

“Well, no,” said Cowboy, “not really. How’s your family taking it?”

“I’ve already got this,” he said, uncovering the scar from 1908 that his fringe mostly hid. “I’m a soldier. Never left the service. We deal with it.”

“Must be hard on your wife.”

“No wife,” he said. “I was talking about Ma and Pa, brother and sisters, cousins. I’m taking the acolyte classes though. Your wife got a sister? Pretty hard to get to know the ladies out here.”

“You’re a blood soldier?” asked Cowboy.

“Yup,” said Isaac. He always asked for an invitation when talking with any Ishvalan or anyone Ishvalan-connected, but so far, the conversation always ended in polite, or not so polite, excuses pretty soon after it got to this point.

“Here in Gunja, right?”

Vickers nodded. “Half combat, half murder.” Some even wanted numbers, and he had an estimate of that, too.

“Nothing before Ishval, though?” asked Cowboy. “Or after. Right?”

“Nothing,” said Vickers. “Well, drunk and disorderly in bars in my late teens, and a couple of brawls, but not since I was twenty. No one hurt worse’n a broken nose or a black eye.”

“Maybe someone,” said Cowboy, hardly believing he was saying this himself. “Got to talk to the Missus, first.”

“Sure thing!” said Isaac. He’d never gotten this far before. “Just so you know, widow’s okay, kids too.”

Cowboy looked at the soldier’s wide smile. They were so eager. And after talking to the mess tent soldiers the other day, for the first time, he had an idea of why.

---

Photo by Nickolas Nikolic on Unsplash

“Yes, I’ve seen him. He’s started bringing deliveries into the women’s compound. He’s lame, isn’t he?” She sat at her loom, moving the thread back and forth. Like most of the women from Camel Rock, she had no children younger than eight.

Several teenage girls stood in the corner of the work tent with drop spindles, spinning wool, chattering, and giggling.

“I think he’s cute,” came from the corner, then the voices dropped low again, so it was impossible to hear who ‘he’ might be.

The weaver had a marriageable daughter, almost nineteen years old. But she was holding out for an Ishvalan son-in-law from one of the young men from the Xerxes refugees. There was no sex imbalance for the younger generation, but the problem was that they were younger. The young men could find jobs, in the military encampment or even in the town now, but they weren’t really established yet.

“My sister is working in the Data Collection building,” said another weaver. “She was already an old maid in ’08 – already twenty then and not married. Would she be too old? He says kids are okay, but what if she’s past child-bearing? Probably not, but she’s getting close to thirty. It’s not automatic anymore.”

“I’ll meet him,” said a third weaver from Camel Rock, with a three-year-old playing at her feet. She had a pale scar that ran at an angle from the right side of her nose through her upper lip. That was the one that her clothes didn’t cover.

“You’re not a widow,” said the first woman, and the third weaver turned her head back to her weaving.

The woman with the sister in Data Collection frowned. “You know the soldiers don’t care about that. Look at their Lieutenant.”

“I’m not like that!” objected the third weaver, angrily. “It wasn’t my fault. And I killed him!”

The loud outburst interrupted the spinners giggling in the corner and they looked over. It was just the scarred old aunt, angry again. They returned to their work and their conversation.

---

When Isaac brought the next delivery, one of the women had a little girl with her but no handcart. When he was finished with everyone else and the clipboard, she addressed him.

“You are Corporal Vickers?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “But that’s all I have for now.”

“I’m not here to pick up wool,” she said. “I’m not one of the washers. I’m a weaver.”

“Okay, ma’am,” he said. “What can I do for you then?”

She stood there silent and lowered her head.

This was new. Every woman who’d met him for deliveries in the compound so far had been very business like and had redirected any attempt he’d made at conversation back to wool.

“That your little girl?” he asked. “She looks like a sweetie.”

The woman looked up at him then and smiled. Nice face, scar around her lip, but lots of the Ishvalans, including the women, had scars. Seemed a nice shape, too, as far as he could tell beneath the robes, which wasn’t much. At least not too skinny or too fat.

“Mrs. Cowboy says….” she started. Suddenly, she didn’t know what to say. She was already breaking rules by talking to him directly and she hadn’t thought past this point.

Suddenly, he felt electrified. An Ishvalan woman was approaching him! He looked around. There ought to be a man or at least another adult woman around, or this could go sideways real fast. Then he saw Lydia Carcano coming up from the family area with her little girl, Julie. Perfect! He waved to her and then turned back to the woman.

Damn knee. The thing to do now was to talk to the girl, not the mother, but he couldn’t bend down. And he couldn’t even ask for anyone’s name. Ishvalans didn’t share true names.

“What a pretty belt,” he said to the girl, bending at the waist. That was stupid. It was just a plain rope belt, but the kids didn’t have any pretty doodads.

The woman laughed at him then, and he looked up, grinning, and shrugged. Nothing to compliment for the mother either. She didn’t have anything pretty on either and direct compliments on physical appearance were too forward. At least, without a chaperone.

Lydia got there while the man and the woman were standing there awkwardly, trying to figure out what to do next. She came up to Isaac and gave him a hug, then handed Julie to him. “Oh, Isaac,” she said, “you’re a lifesaver.”

Then she turned to the Ishvalan woman’s child. “She looks like she’s just Julie’s age,” she said. “Is she three?”

“Yes,” said the Ishvalan. The child’s age was a sensitive subject. Children of Camel Rock women who were under eight meant rape.

Lydia knew that, which was why she had brought it up. “It’s such a nice age, isn’t it?” she said. “Past all the no, no, no of the two-year-old’s.”

Meanwhile, Isaac was swinging Julie back and forth. Everyone knew the Carcano kids. Lydia was not a homebody, and she never went anywhere without at least one and usually two or more of them.

“Yes, it is,” said the Ishvalan.

Isaac set Julie down in front of the other three-year-old then, and she immediately shoved the other little girl. “Up!” she commanded the man who had put her down.

“Julie Carcano!” said Lydia and slapped her bottom. “No pushing!”

Julie looked back at the other girl, who was still standing. “Sorry,” she said, glumly.

Isaac knew this ritual. Now he was supposed to pick the other little girl up, but he didn’t seem to have permission from the girl’s mother, and he wasn’t sure of the other little girl either.

Lydia bent down to the Ishvalan girl. “Do you want up?” she asked. Then looking up at the Ishvalan woman, “It’s okay, isn’t it?”

The woman nodded and Lydia picked up the little girl.

Julie frowned. No one was holding her or paying any attention to her.

Isaac held out his arms. “Come here, you!” and she ran into them.

“You’ve met Isaac?” Lydia asked the Ishvalan woman then. “He’s so good with Julie, as you can see.”

---

Some time later, Lieutenant Jean Havoc was walking down the sidewalk in front of the shops extending from the hospital, across the road from the encampment, towards the city. He’d just made his weekly check-in at the hospital and was making the rounds of the shops before heading back across the road for lunch in the mess tent. Besides, Vickers wanted some ribbons from Mrs. Mac’s shop for the daughter of an Ishvalan woman he was seeing. With his bum knee, he didn’t do too much strolling around these days.

Jean was looking at a ribbon and trying to figure out which of the yellow ribbons he should choose when he heard voices from the back of the store.

“He should get automail,” said a woman’s voice, speaking in city Amestrian. “He should be willing to take the pain for you, to be a real man.”

Jean didn’t know much Ishvalan, but he did know what the Ishvalan woman’s first response meant. He grinned to himself.

“What was that?” asked the Amestrian.

“Bless your heart,” answered the Ishvalan, and Jean had to cover his mouth to muffle his snicker at the country phrase so many of the Ishvalan women had picked up. “It’s not just the pain, but the recovery time, and the maintenance. There are many things to consider.”

The Amestrian city woman headed out of the shop then, giving Jean an angry glare on the way out. He didn’t recognize her. She hadn’t been at Data Collection – she was just one of the Amestrian tourists that looked down on the soldiers, assuming that anyone in uniform had been involved in the genocide. Which, come to think of it, while not true, was a fair generalization.

The other woman, the Ishvalan, then came around the shelves of displayed goods. She nodded at him politely as she looked at other items in this row. He felt a wave of heat in his face as he recognized her from Data Collection, and looked down for a moment. When he looked up again, he saw something other than the polite mask he expected. And it wasn’t anger either.

“Mr. Lieutenant,” she asked. “Do you need help?”

“I’m supposed to pick up a yellow ribbon for a little girl,” he answered. “I didn’t realize there were so many different kinds.”

She knew he was already married and had no daughters. “Who is it for?” she asked.

“One of my men is courting a woman with a three-year-old daughter,” he answered. “It’s for her hair. The little girl’s, I mean. She likes yellow.”

The Ishvalan looked over the yellow ribbons, then picked one out. “Brighter is better for little girls,” she said. “And this long, so her mother can cut it in two for both of her pony tails.”

Jean looked at the woman and smiled. “Any ideas what the mom might like?” he said.

“This man of yours, Vickers, he’s a good man?”

“All of my men are good,” he answered, “considering…. He’ll be kind.”

“The mom would like this,” she said, and picked out a blue silk scarf.

Another woman came in then, from the eastern Amestrian countryside this time. She and Jean spoke and laughed, and by the time he turned back to the Ishvalan woman, she had left. So he headed back to the encampment.

When he got to mess tent, he caught sight of Vickers and went up to the table where he was eating.

“Corporal?” he greeted him.

“Yes, sir?” Vickers responded, then smiled, seeing the sack. Jean pulled up a chair from another table and sat down. He handed the sack to Vickers.

Isaac looked inside. “So what’s the blue for?” he asked. “Oh, and thanks for the yellow ribbon.”

“You have no idea how many shades and widths of yellow ribbon there are,” Jean answered, handing Vickers back his change. “That’s your change for the yellow stuff. The blue thing is on me. It’s for the mom.”

Isaac pulled out the blue item and turned it over in his hand. It appeared to be some kind of scarf. “Think she’ll like it? What is it?”

“Pretty sure. She picked it out herself. Not sure if she knew I knew who she was. I’ve seen her at Data Collection.”

Vickers nodded. “I heard through the grapevine that she went there. To check on my stats.”

He looked back at the blue item. “Hmm. So she likes this….”

---

The guys had “helped him move” into the married housing tent, which had consisted of one of them carrying his duffel bag and the others each putting a hand on his footlocker / chest.

It was a weird situation. The Ishvalan ceremony wasn’t for a few days, so he wouldn’t bring his bride – she’d settled on “Reba” for her Amestrian name – in here that night. The ceremony could only happen on certain days of the week, and had to be scheduled, so the “Move In” part of the Amestrian countryside “Setting Up House” marriage custom was just shoe-horned in whenever it could be. But it seemed odd to him. He wished he had some family there, to make it seem more real.

Well, it would be real enough after the ceremony, when she actually crossed the threshold. He grinned at the thought.

The next day, when he came back to the tent after work, the area dividers had been arranged and there were piles of rugs and pillows. While he was trying to figure out how that had happened, Reba came in with her little girl.

Isaac was shocked. “What are you doing here?”

She frowned at him. “Moving my things in. This will be our tent, won’t it?” Of course, Ishvalan women did not normally enter the dwelling of an unrelated man alone, but she hadn’t thought the Amestrians really cared about any of the Ishvalan customs, although they abided by them. And she and Isaac would be married by the day after tomorrow.

Normally, Isaac would have greeted them with a smile and played with her daughter, but he just pushed past them both abruptly, and went out of the tent without saying a word.

Asha came around the corner with her pre-teen daughter and a bag. “Hello, Mr. Corporal,” she said, and went past him into the tent. “Where do you want this?” she asked Reba.

Meanwhile, Isaac just stood there awkwardly outside his own tent. Technically, since his stuff had all been moved in, the “Move In” was done, which meant that if his bride was already in the tent…. But, of course, that wasn’t right because they needed the Ishvalan ceremony first, which wasn’t until day after tomorrow. But then, they did need to get Reba’s and her daughter’s things in first, which would usually have been brought by the men during the “Move In.” And of course, it was already weird for the Move In and the First Night to be on two different days anyway.

He saw a few of his friends from the unmarried men’s barracks tent heading over. He’d been planning on giving them beer and chips, before heading over to the mess tent for dinner as a kind of “thank you” for helping him yesterday….

“Hey, Isaac,” said one, then they stopped, hearing feminine voices from inside the tent.

“Um,” said Isaac. “Change in plans. Mess tent first, then I’ll stand you guys a round at the tavern.”

As the men walked away, Reba came out of the tent. “Mr. Isaac!” she said. “Where are you going?”

He turned around to her then. “Just getting dinner with the guys,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “Um, you and Asha can finish up in there. No hurry.”

“Isaac!” she said, coming up to him. “I need your opinion.”

To her surprise, he stepped back from her as if she were poison. She was used to some of the Ishvalans doing that, but not the Amestrians. “I’m sure whatever you want is fine,” he said, head down, avoiding her eyes.

“Are we getting married or not?” she asked, angrily.

He looked up sharply at that. “Yes!” he said. “Day after tomorrow. Right? Not tonight!”

“What does that have to do with it?” she asked, but less angrily.

“Well, we have our own customs, too,” said Isaac. “I know it doesn’t matter to anyone else, but it’s not right for the bride to enter the house before… the wedding. Which we can’t do until after your wedding ceremony.”

“I… Asha, did you know about this?”

She shook her head. “It didn’t come up with Raj and me. We just signed the registry and then, when the tent was set up, we just moved in…” Then she added, “Oh, the move-in and the wedding night were both the same day….”

“So does this mean… a problem with your gods? Or the marriage?”

“Not really. It’s out of order, so I’ll just make a sacrifice at the altar stone to keep things copacetic there, and legally, we’re giving the date of the wedding to be the Ishvalan ceremony, so that’s good.”

“So I shouldn’t enter the tent until after the ceremony?”

Isaac shook his head.

“Can any women enter the tent before then?”

“I’ve… never heard of anyone doing that,” he said, and shrugged.

“Asha,” she said. “Can you get my wedding things out of the tent?” Asha nodded and went back in.

“I’m sorry, Isaac,” said Reba. “I didn’t mean to disrespect your customs. I thought I’d be preparing for the ceremony in that tent.”

“Don’t worry,” said Asha, coming out with a couple of bags. “We’ll do it at our place.”

“Reba?” he said. “Thanks.”

Approximately nine months later, he became the second of the soldiers stationed under Jean to have a child (Caesar and Lydia’s fifth child was born a few weeks before Isaac’s) and the first to father a child with an Ishvalan wife.

1. Cowboy is the name I’m giving the stagecoach robber from Volume 12, chapter 46 of the manga, who stops the stagecoach horses.

2. Hughes calls out an Isaac squad that appears to be under his command in Ishval in Volume 15, Chapter 60. Appearance roughly based on the soldier with a bandaged head on page 105 who sees the surrendering Logue Lowe approach. We only see him from behind. His last name comes from the Vickers machine gun: an English gun used by Canada from 1914-1919. The last names of the soldiers in the manga are all weapons, or weapon systems, or defense contractors. I’ve continued that system when naming my own original characters.