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Twilight investigated everyone who came into Anya’s life.
For a spy, that kind of digging was as easy as breathing. If someone was likely to cause too much of a problem in the future, they were offered a job in another city. If someone had leverage Twilight could hold against them, it was filed away to be used later (if necessary).
It was a requisite part of the mission. The more Twilight knew, the more he could account for. The more he could plan, manipulate, and infiltrate. There were occasional problems -- misfilings, missing papers -- but they were relatively rare, even in his line of work.
Which meant that, strictly speaking, it wasn’t unusual for someone to have no records at all. Both during and shortly after the war, many people were displaced, many documents lost. Kids moved to new towns and lived with new parents. Babies were put into orphanages. Bodies were misidentified or never recovered.
Some people got around to filing for new documentation, new proof that they were alive and that they existed in the eyes of the all-knowing Ostanian government, but many forgot or couldn’t be bothered or were missing in action and had no choice in the matter.
(Twilight knew that better than anyone. It was much easier to pick up the details of someone who existed but couldn’t be found than to create a new identity whole cloth, after all.)
So it wasn’t entirely strange that Edward Elric seemed to have no proof of his existence. It was common in small towns where bureaucracy was lax, where people didn’t see the point in the government snooping over their shoulders and knowing too much. Names without matching identities were commonly found on the census, especially out in the countryside, where he’d mentioned he’d grown up.
That was the weird part. Because Edward Elric was smart. He took Anya’s lessons in stride, listened to her tangents at length, tried to tie her interests back into the schoolwork. He of all people should’ve known that living in Berlint without paperwork, forged or otherwise, was a rookie mistake that would turn an officer’s routine identity check into something much worse that much faster.
That left two rather glaring possibilities. Either he just didn’t have paperwork for one reason or another, or he was working for someone.
(And it wasn’t W.I.S.E., that much Twilight was sure. If another agent was involved, he would have been informed -- and W.I.S.E. wasn’t stupid enough to forget to give an agent an identity that could withstand the cold, intrusive gaze of the State Security Service.)
Both as Anya’s father and as a spy, it was his job to investigate Edward Elric.
The first few times Elric came by, Twilight sat in his office. The door was closed, but he could hear them well on the other side. Anya was more than a little reckless, but she had some wild intuition, and if she thought someone would hurt her family, she would go straight to Twilight.
Of course, even if Elric was incompetent enough of a spy to be lacking in the basics of background checks, he clearly wasn’t quite stupid enough to go snooping through the apartment or trying something with Anya when her father only a room away. It wasn’t long before Twilight was giving the pair of them some pocket change, and directing them to a nearby cafe where they could snack while they studied.
Three times they went out and three times Twilight followed, always in a different disguise. An older man who just wanted a quiet place to read the newspaper. A middle manager who needed somewhere to take a break from the stresses of work. A young newlywed with a coffee addiction and an already failing marriage.
It was during that third trip that the routine finally changed. Anya was halfway through both her peanut-covered donut and her math lesson when somewhere off in the distance, there was a loud sound.
Before most of the other patrons could realize the source, the windows of the cafe rattled in their frames and the building shook at its foundation. It was the kind of sound that was too easy for Twilight to recognize.
An explosion.
Amidst a murmuring sea of fear, people began to rush outside. Even now that Westalis and Ostania had reached an unsteady accord, most citizens hadn’t forgotten the terror that came from the past conflict. Everyone, even Twilight, would’ve hoped that it had been a gas main break or an unfortunately large car crash, but it was equally as likely that it was some idiot terrorist trying to reignite the flames of war.
Seemingly without a second thought, Elric murmured something to Anya and then picked her up, the first time Twilight had seen him make real contact with anyone at all. He always seemed just a little detached, even in the face of a small child -- or especially, maybe? -- but it was still interesting to see that change just a little.
Elric jogged away from the direction of the blast with the other patrons, Anya held tight in his arms. Bystanders were gathering in the nearby park, gossiping and looking at the smoke billowing the buildings in the distance.
It didn’t take long before Twilight saw Elric and Anya conversing with a familiar face -- Franky Franklin, whose newspaper stand wasn’t too far from the cafe (one of the many reasons Twilight had chosen the location in the first place). Elric placed Anya on the ground, planted a hand on her head for just a moment, and then turned and ran off towards the roiling smoke.
What the hell was he doing?
Twilight hated that he had to go after the boy when there could still be terrorists on the loose, but admittedly Elric had done the right thing and left Anya with a responsible adult (or close enough to one). He had to either be meeting with a contact or trying to help stop whatever the hell was going on, and both options were very stupid, in Twilight’s opinion. So, of course, he had to give chase.
It was during this chase that Twilight became very aware that Elric was, evidently, in very good shape. He was moving fast enough that even Twilight, a trained spy, could barely keep pace.
As they finally grew close to the site of the blast, Elric began to scale the nearby brick wall. The act was admittedly impressive -- he seemed to exert enough force on both his right hand and left foot to be able to chisel out a series of small but useful ledges. Twilight had to remain on the street and hidden just out of view, even as Elric kicked off the last remaining few lengths of wall and began running from rooftop to rooftop.
He’s scoping the place out, Twilight mused. Who -- or what -- is this kid?
In the blasted remains of the intersection, even from just around a corner, it was easy to see the terrorists at work. There were no more than four or five of them, each armed and alert. Though the explosion had been loud, it seemed to have only taken out a building or two and shattered a lot of windows. If there had been bodies left in its wake, they were still buried under rubble. In the center of the terrorists’ small, makeshift circle was what Twilight could only assume to be another bomb.
The first explosion was bait, the spy surmised. They’re going to wait for law enforcement to come in and set off the second one. Maximize the impact against the kinds of people who can keep the war at bay, and rile up the citizens in the process.
On the bright side, that meant the initial casualties would be low -- trying to present it as a gas explosion, maybe. The second bomb and the terrorists with guns were the real problem now.
Elric clearly thought the same. Without warning, he dropped down from above, moving with an unnatural grace as his feet impacted the back of the one of the terrorists. His free hand grabbed out for the head of another, and drove the pair into the ground simultaneously.
Twilight had to admit he was almost impressed. They’d no doubt have concussions -- maybe a couple broken ribs for the guy Elric was now standing on -- but they were alive. It was much harder to incapacitate rather than kill. Which implied that Elric knew what he was doing, and had maybe even done this kind of thing before. He didn’t seem to even have a gun, which meant he had knowingly gone into this unarmed.
The three remaining pointed pistols at Elric, but only one of them was stupid enough to fire. The bullet narrowly missed one of the men on the ground, and the sound of the shot echoed through the empty streets and rattled against broken glass.
They might be here on a death sentence, but it’ll be for nothing if they die before they can detonate, Twilight thought. Smart kid.
With no hesitation, Elric charged forward to grab the confused terrorist with the still-smoking gun, tossing the firearm aside and turning the man into a human shield. Taking advantage of their reluctance to shoot their comrades, he barreled forward towards the other terrorists.
Once he was within arm’s reach of them, Elric threw his human shield at one, knocking them both to the floor, and swept the legs out from the other. With all of the terrorists now on the ground, he cracked together the heads of the two who had fallen together, leaving them all seemingly concussed and/or unconscious. Finally, using some rope that had been left as part of a nearby construction project, Elric tied up each of the terrorists.
Twilight hated to admit it, but this kid did a damn good job for someone with -- seemingly -- no intel to work off of and no plan beforehand.
There was only one problem left. The bomb.
It had to be disabled, because on the unlikely chance one of the terrorists awoke, they would set it off with no hesitation. There was no telling how sensitive it was, and if moving it would trigger it.
Elric, to Twilight’s surprise, handled the problem by clapping. The sound was loud and sharp, maybe even more so than the gunshot had been. An unusual blue light seemed to appear from out of nowhere, flickering dangerously across the boy’s face, and for a moment Twilight thought the bomb had detonated.
But, no, when Elric moved away, the bomb was now laying in a set of disparate pieces.
As soon as Elric had vanished back down another alleyway, Twilight left for home, discarding his disguise as he walked. He had to be there before Anya made it back or it would look far too suspicious -- they’d only been gone forty-five minutes or so.
Even as he tried to plan how he would explain the events of the day to Anya, he was far too focused on what he had seen Elric pull off. If he wasn’t already working for someone , Westalis-aligned or otherwise, then he was a hell of a vigilante to just be running around unsupervised.
If this kid wasn’t a spy already, then W.I.S.E. had better snap him up before Ostania did.
-----
As he got back to his apartment one night, Ed found a note amongst his things, pointing him in the direction of a “reputable” source of legal documentation. He had no idea who had put it there or why, but logic dictated it was probably one of the parents of the kids he tutored. For all he knew it had been in his bag for the past week without him noticing, so he couldn’t exactly narrow it down to a single suspect. Presumably, one of them liked him enough to both notice and care that he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a legal citizen.
Still, assuming the note was written with his best intentions in mind, it’d probably be smart to have some kind of paper trail backing him up as long as he was in another world.
(Amestris may have been a military dictatorship but at least it didn’t have a secret police. )
He set out early the next day, before most of the city was awake. As he approached the address, he saw a familiar face; the guy with curly hair -- “Franky” -- that he and Anya had seen the other day. Anya knew him, so he must’ve had some kind of connection to the Forger family.
Is this thanks to Loid Forger? Ed wondered. I mean, I already figured something was up with him, but…
Franky recognized Ed, at least, as they began chatting. Ed was relatively sure he’d gotten some kind of a discount, although the whole process had still ended up costing him about a month’s salary.
He’d come by to pick up his papers next week. It was kind of nice.
Now at least the only alien he’d be where the government was concerned was interdimensional.