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Her sons were glorious. They would be demons.
Alphonse was the sadist. He would tear the skin off of breathing animals just to hear the scream. She would watch him from afar as he stuck pin needles into ants, or sliced the legs off of squirrels and followed them around until they bled to death. All of this without the slightest command. It made her so proud.
Edward was the fighter. He started with his brother, pounding his fists into the boy’s skull when Alphonse had refused to give him back his favorite toy. Alphonse had ended up with several cracks and fractures in his skull that only her magic had been able to heal. Then when he was around eight, he had taken to walks at 3AM, and she, in her curiosity, had taken to counting the number of dead human and monster bodies left in his wake. All fools who had tried, no doubt, to prey upon him.
They were her sons and she loved them.
But something was happening to one of them.
Edward returned home one day and had not been able to look her in the eye. There were no cuts on his fists, no swollen eyes or broken teeth. No vicious, victorious grin.
Medusa dove in.
“What happened?”
Edward slumped in his chair, eyes listless and half-lidded.
“Answer me, Edward.”
“Nothing happened, mother.”
He never was the good liar.
But, folding her arms across her chest, she accepted it. Observation would eventually bear its fruit.
Two weeks passed liked this until Medusa found her target. Little Edward had found a playmate. A wisp of a girl, a frail little thing. She clutched a book to her chest and seemed to trip over her own feet.
Edward walked beside her, hands stuffed in his pockets as he absentmindedly kicked rocks and kept his gaze on the ground as the girl chatted. At uneven intervals, she would exclaim with excitement, and her little beige pigtails would bounce with her. Edward would stop and shrug, and soon they would keep walking.
This wouldn’t do.
He had already lied, so she wouldn’t give him another opportunity. She called Alphonse in. This would be his lesson, too.
“Come here, Edward.”
He did, looking up at his mother expectantly. Good child.
“Open the door.”
He did. The room was in shadow, but the light of the hallway partially illuminated its contents. The pig-tailed girl sat in a wooden chair in the middle of the floor, arms bound behind it with rope. Her eyes were red, from tears most likely.
Medusa waited. Edward said nothing, made no attempt at movement. But then, almost imperceptibly, she caught the sound of his swallowing. Medusa inclined her head.
“Break her, Edward.”
His fingers twitched at his sides. These were the words she used to command him since birth. And he was resisting.
The girl, whose eyes had now seemed to have adjusted to the light, looked between Medusa, Alphonse, and Edward in growing horror.
“A…a witch,” she whispered. “A real witch…”
Medusa paid no attention, nudging Edward forward. “Break her. Or Alphonse will.”
Edward flinched at the suggestion. Interesting. Fear. So he really had grown to care for this girl, long before she had started to implement social conditioning. She wondered if, perhaps, it would be worth keeping her around to study why. But to study it would be to allow it, to let it fester. Too dangerous for a first trial, too early. This way would do just fine.
When Edward still hadn’t moved, Medusa folder her arms over her chest. “Alphonse—“
“No,” said Edward. “I’ll do it.”
“You’re taking too long.”
He strode to the middle of the room, hovering over the girl’s slumped body. She gazed up at him, confused.
“Ed? What’s happening? Everything hurts—I’m so scared—”
“Maka.”
The girl stared at him, the rest of her words having died on her lips. Medusa watched Edward’s right hand clench at his side. Too long. Entirely too long.
Then she heard something—a scratch of a whisper too low to make out. She watched Maka’s eyes widen—sudden—before his fist slammed into her jaw.
The girl screamed and Edward kept going, throwing his whole weight into uppercuts and slugs. Eyes, jaw, nose, chin, repeat. Eyes, jaw, nose, chin, repeat. A familiar rhythm. A song, the first song she had orchestrated for him, and it ended with his foot. The final note, a solid crack that tore through one of the chair’s back supports and into the girl’s ribcage, snapping it in several places and puncturing her lungs if he had performed it right.
The chair fell over, the girl unconscious within it. Edward straightened himself, gathering his breath and wiping the blood off on his clothes. He jumped when Medusa gently touched his shoulder, then relaxed into it. A good sign. He had been distracted, but he hadn’t forgotten. Still, he would learn.
With a swift kick, she knocked Edward to the ground, making sure he would land on his back. Then she placed the heel of her foot on his ribcage, Their gazes caught for a second, until she drove her heel into the bone, waiting for the sound and sensation of the satisfying crunch beneath her feet.
Edward screamed and squirmed, but didn’t dare attempt to remove the offending limb. Still standing by the doorway, Alphonse watched in silence.
“Never,” Medusa spat, “lie to your Mother again.” With experienced ease, she kicked him across the room where he landed in a heap an in a corner. With magic, she lifted the girl’s body out of the chair and made it to float after her.
“Do what you will, Alphonse,” she said.
Alphonse smiled.
The door closed behind her.
---
When Medusa checked on Edward two days later, she first thought she would need magic to bring him back from death. With the damage to his body, she couldn’t hear his breathing, and was not yet close enough to him to check for a pulse.
A spell illuminated the room at once. Edward still lay curled in a corner of the room, wincing from the light. Then she noticed the still-open wounds all over his hands, which had been tied with rope at the wrists. Oh, Alphonse. How much he must love his brother to show such self-restraint.
“I’m going to rid you of your memories of that girl, and hers of you, except for her fear. And you will not lie to me again.” Edward blinked twice in understanding. She must have done quite a bit of damage. “This is for the best.”
He made no reply, and so she moved on to the spells. First to numb, then to set the bones back and regenerate the flesh. Five minutes later, he was standing, unable to look her in the eye. She could tell he wanted to cry, but was holding back. Perhaps he wanted to know what she had done with Maka before she performed the final spell of forgetting.
As if she would give him that satisfaction.