Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Captain Riza Hawkeye’s fingers glide over the smooth envelope situated in the center of General Roy Mustang’s colossal oak desk. She’s been shuffling from his office to wherever his next meeting would be all morning, so she isn’t sure who’d delivered the thing. She asks Jean Havoc when she bumps into him in the late afternoon, but he only gives her more to consider. He’s been in the general’s office almost all day, he says, mulling over mundane documents about construction site errors and burst sewage pipes, but no one has approached him with anything for the General. She questions Kain Fuery about it next but he just shakes his head at her. “I wasn’t even in this building until an hour ago, sir.” Heymans Breda and Vato Falman were Riza’s last resorts, but they had been running drills at the firing range from the time they got to work to the time she finds them loitering in the halls just before the evening bell rings.

Riza’s leg is bounding in place as her body attempts to pump the uneasiness out of her. She’s been pondering the mystery of the letter for hours, since she first laid eyes on it, and now, seated outside the room where the general’s final meeting is adjourning, she can’t contain the hurried beat of her heart. Her fingers crimp under the edge of the bench and she leans forward like somehow her anticipation for the general will expedite the session. She tries to tell herself it’s only a letter, but the “General Roy Mustang” sloppily splayed over the paper tells her it didn’t come from someone of profession, and the General is a controversial man who’s not unaccustomed to threatening messages. Riza wipes a hand over her brow and silently prays it’s anything but.

When at last the solid doors open and a mess of the country’s most important people drag their feet over the threshold into the hall, Riza springs forward and catches the cuff of the general’s sleeve between her fingers. He looks old, she thinks, and his disheveled hair is framing tired eyes, but he stops moving for her anyway.

“I’m concerned about something I found on your desk, sir,” she says. She keeps the sentence vague so she won’t attract attention from anyone nearby, and the general raises an eyebrow at her. Riza waits as he waves off Führer Grumman and another general with his hand and a few words before she lifts herself up on her toes, cups her hands, and whispers into his ear, “There’s a letter in your office and not one person knows how it got there.” He pulls back to look at her, questioning her urgency, but her eyes bear into him with enough potency to convince him of the seriousness of what she’s told him.

The general keeps a casual pace to his office, his heels hitting the floor in a slow rhythm. Riza feels his apprehension, though, as it grows to match hers. Her trepidation had festered in her gut for so long that there were a handful of moments in the day where she contemplated ripping the letter open herself. She’s only a breath behind the general as he rounds the doorway to his office and steps inside, his pace suddenly hastening. His hand finds the smooth paper as Riza’s had, and he traces the careless curves of his name before lifting the letter up and folding his thumb under the lip. One swift rip and he has a small, square-shaped piece of paper between his fingers. He eyes it critically, turning it over in the light before reading it to himself, and then aloud.

There’s a shiver in his voice that grows into an affronted growl as he works his way through the words. “‘General Roy Mustang,’” he begins, glancing up to look at Riza. She takes his cue and shuts the heavy doors to his office. He waits for the echo to disperse in the hall before he continues. “‘We are becoming increasingly impatient with your sad attempt to revive a dead Ishval. We will be forced to take action - to punish you - if you continue to press this reconstruction project any further.’” He pauses to inhale. Riza waits as patiently as she can manage for him to keep going. “‘Your Captain, Riza Hawkeye,’” he exhales, braces a hand on his desk. Riza tenses involuntarily at the hiss of her name between his teeth. “‘It would be a shame if something were to happen to her.’”

Riza’s quick to do damage control. She folds her arms behind her back and veils her face with composure. “This is a relief, sir. It’s nothing we haven’t dealt with before,” she starts, her mind flickering to the last time she turned a hostage situation on its head. “I’m not in enemy hands, not even close, sir.”

The general isn’t convinced. He crumples the paper in his hand, his knuckles turning white from his grip. “A ‘relief’?” He scoffs and lowers himself into his lofty General’s chair. He unfurls his fingers enough to pick his phone up off its receiver and breathe, “Führer Grumman, please,” into the line. Riza listens in a politely quiet way as the contents of the letter are repeated to the Führer.

It suddenly becomes overwhelmingly apparent to her that Roy is exhausted. As her mind drifts from the conversation being had, her eyes focus on the lines in his face. He spends so much of his time commuting between Central and his post in the east, where he’s needed a few days weekly to oversee negotiations with Ishvalan representatives. His promotion to general had not put a dent in his travel time, or hers for that matter. She frequents the east just as he does. They both spend nights together often, he asleep on his desk and she on a couch or chair. She tries to make things easier for him by divvying his leftover paperwork to Havoc and saddling maintenance duties in the Central office on Fuery, Falman, and Breda. It works most of the time, but work in the east itself is enough to keep herself and the general sleep-deprived.

Riza’s swaying in place as she’s recognizing her own exhaustion when she hears, “Thank you, Führer. Briggs it is. I’ll have her on the next train out.”

“I’m not going to Briggs,” she deadpans before Roy even places the phone down. His fatigued eyes find hers and she almost wavers before solidifying again. “I’m no use to you in Briggs, sir, and my job is to be of use to you.”

“You’re no use to me dead,” he says. His voice falters on the last word. He sighs and presses his back flush against his seat as his fingers comb through his hair. “I’m not taking chances, Captain.”

“You’re taking chances with yourself, sir, by sending your bodyguard off to a frozen wall.”

“All day,” he starts, his voice composed. “I sat in meetings all day and talked about Ishval with people who don’t truly want to hear about it. I said so many things, and heard so many things, but the one comment that stood out to me came from General Lemming. He told me a little disinterestedly that he’s been hearing ‘disturbing’ talk in the bars he frequents in the east, near the Ishval border. I asked him what he meant but he only told me to be careful. ‘We may be indifferent to your work but there are some people out there who truly hate you for it.’” His gaze had moved past her as he spoke but he refocuses on her eyes before saying, “There’s been some strange movement in the east. I’m not taking any chances, Captain.”

Riza knows he isn’t wrong. It’s been one curious construction delay after another. Burst pipes, the breakage of pillars, nothing was going smoothly. To receive such a cryptic letter in the midst of so many unexplainable mishaps is a coincidence that can't be ignored, she supposes. Still, her stomach twists at the thought of leaving her general with a threat looming over his head. She can’t win an argument against him over the safety of his subordinates though (and she's admittedly much too tired to try) so she reluctantly concedes and says, “When do I leave, sir?” She rationalizes that she will be away for a few days at most. Perhaps a week if whoever they have doing investigations in Ishval is feeling particularly lazy.

Plus she wouldn't put it past Führer Grumman to order her to go to Briggs anyway. There is not a way she can win this fight, even if she so desperately wants to.

The general pulls a desk drawer open and shuffles through it before plucking an old train schedule from it. “1900. So just a little under two hours. That’s when the next train to Briggs leaves the Central station.”

Riza visibly winces. The Central train station is a hub that she always tries to avoid. It’s dusted in grey wisps of smoke from burning coal, and it’s always full of mind-numbing chatter. She never makes it from one end of the station to the other without bruising her shoulder on someone else’s or acquiring a headache. Most people consider the place a grand site with its high arches and marbled floors but she just considers it another building in need of renovations. As if the General can read her mind, he says, “It’ll be quick, Captain. You’ll be in, on the train, and then out.”

“And I assume I’ll be assigned a few bodyguards,” she says, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. Briggs was one thing, but the Central station was another. Her mood turns sour fast.

“A handful,” the General admits. “Escorts, really, not bodyguards. No one thinks you of all people need a bodyguard.”

“Different words, same meaning in this context, sir.”

She waits for him to tease her about what other meaning there may be for the word, as he normally would, but he’s not feeling so carefree. He’d adopted a stern face from reading through the letter and he keeps the look even now, as his eyes graze over his Captain. Riza knows the tone of his face is not meant for her but she can’t help squirming under the weight of his lips pulled down into a taught frown. His look disappears behind his hand as he rubs his face and it reappears somewhat softened. He pushes his chair back slowly and she keeps her attention on him as he closes the distance between himself and her in a few short strides. His hand finds her shoulder.

“I’m losing my patience with criminals,” he says. “If these people have problems with me then they should be coming after me, not my subordinates.”

Riza doesn’t feel the same, but she thinks it better than to argue so she says instead, “They go after us because we’re you’re weakness, sir, and it’s not like you try to hide the fact.”

“Please just cooperate,” he begs. “I’ve buried one friend. I will not bury my queen, too.” He dips his head to her until his forehead is almost resting in the crick of her neck, on her scar.

Riza’s heart aches for him as the words leave his lips. Suddenly he isn’t her general but her Roy, and she’s tempted to fold him into her arms. But she’s still understandably irked by the situation and so she says, “It’s only a threat, General, and you’ve not given me a chance to decide for myself how it should be handled. It’s on my life, sir, not yours or Grumman’s.”

“I know,” he says. “But, Captain, how would you handle this if it were a blatant threat on my life instead?”

She sighs. He has a point, although she wishes he didn’t. She heaves her shoulders up gently to get him to break contact, and he does as she wishes. His hand lifts off of her and he straightens in front of her, rubbing his eyes hard. “I would suggest a temporary leave from your usual Central and eastern duties,” she admits. “But I don’t think I would torture you with Briggs, sir.”

“First of all, you don’t ‘suggest’ things, Captain, you demand them,” he counters, a playful inflection dancing around in his voice. The sound makes Riza feel warm for the first time since discovering the letter. “Second of all, General Armstrong is at Briggs, and she’s been haggling for you since the Promised Day. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to have you for however long, though you should make it clear to her that you’re only visiting. I know I will.” His banter melts some of her frustration away and she doesn’t fight the small smile that curls her lips. He smiles back at her, his shoulders slumping as he exhales some of his worry away.

Even as calm as the captain and her general feel standing alone together in their joint office, they’re glued to each other’s sides until the time comes for them to part at Riza’s favorite, hulking Central train station. Her handful of escorts had somehow truly been a gaggle of secretly armed military bodyguards, and Riza fights off a glare as she shoots her general a goodbye salute from the steps of the train. His salute is less of a snap and more of a lazy wave and as his hand returns slowly to his side, she reaches out and takes it in her own. She shakes it, squeezing her fingers around his palm.

“Keep Isabelle comfortable for me,” she says, and his eyes flit to hers. “Liam and Lane need constant attention. Missy is kind of a brat so I always feed her twice to keep her satisfied. Isabelle, too, for that matter, and Sam and Stingray fight so keep them separated. Don’t forget that Yusuf needs medicine twice daily, and Oscar and Ulysses need daily baths until their fleas are gone.”

He nods at her, their code cracking a smile across his face. “A week at most,” he says. To those around them it sounds as though he’s trying to reassure her, but she knows the words are mainly for him. She takes her hand from him unwillingly. There’s nothing she wants more than to stay with him, but her rationality tells her that he’s right, and this must be right, and threats on her life should be taken as seriously as threats on his. He looks small to her as she backs into her aisle and takes a window seat. Her bodyguards file in before and after her and Roy shrugs at her apologetically as a big one ushers her away from the window so he can cross her lap and steal her view. Her head falls back on her seat and she resigns herself to her predicament, though if only a little bitterly. She hadn’t even gotten to go home and grab a change of clothes before she was guided hectically to the train station of her nightmares. If she could have gone home, she would surely be wearing something more comfortable than the stiff blue uniform she's stuck in now.

“Captain Hawkeye,” the big man to her right pokes her arm. She leans forward as he leans backward to give her one last view of her general. The train’s horn rings loud in her ears as the trademark Central station smoke hurls out around Roy's form. She’s jerked ahead with the train’s sudden acceleration, but she’s able to make out his meager wave before he's too far behind for her to see. She reaches across her bodyguard and presses her palm against the glass, where the image of him had just been. “This is your doing,” she says to him. “I’ll be back soon,” she says to herself.

“If I have anything to do with it,” the big man next to her thrusts a thumb at his chest. “You’ll be back next week, Captain. My name’s Tyler Holden, it’s a pleasure to meet you. You’re kind of a legend.” He gives her his hand and she takes it amiably. He’s a chiseled man, somewhat reminiscent of Alex Armstrong, she thinks. His jaw is a sharp square and his deltoids almost touch his ears, but his eyes are a warm brown. Riza awards him the best smile she can muster under the circumstances.

“Nice to meet you.”

“General Mustang didn’t waste any time moving you out,” Holden says. “That’s to be expected of such a team player. Us little guys can rest easy knowing the general has our backs, you know. He’s a good man.”

He is, Riza knows.

“You know what he told me just before I boarded this train?” A man at the front of Riza’s row turns around. “He ordered me to come back alive. I’d never met the man until just then, and he was so genuinely concerned for my safety.”

Riza flattens her hands on her lap and tips her head back. She listens to the people around her swap stories about the gallant General Roy Mustang. There is at least one person in every seat in the car she and her guards occupy, and each of them has a kind word for her General. Her eyelids fall slowly and her breaths drag steadily as she falls asleep to the rumble of their voices. They put his face in her mind and she’s able to pretend it’s him beside her long enough to drift into an appreciated unconsciousness.

She’s not sure how long she got to sleep before she’s woken by a thunderous crash and the screech of steel wheels against the train tracks. Her head had somehow migrated from the seat to Holden’s shoulder, and as she’s jostled forward with the blast he catches her head in his hand before her forehead can topple into the seat in front of her. Lights are flickering above her head and the familiar sound of a gun being cocked wrenches her out of her sleep-induced confusion. Not fully understanding what is going on, she tugs her own gun out of its holster on her hip and checks her clip out of habit.

“Whoa, this is kind of exhilarating,” someone behind her mutters. She turns her head enough to catch the face of a young soldier she doesn’t recognize. He has icy blue eyes with hair the color of wheat and he’s wearing a cocky grin on his face. “I’ve never seen the hawk’s eyes in action.” She all but scoffs at his words because he’s naïve, she thinks, but also only just a young man. She stands from her seat and hears his low whistle followed by a sharp grunt as an older officer next to him jabs him with his elbow.

“Get your gun out, you idiot,” he says. “Or else that kind general will be turning you to ash when we fail to deliver Captain Hawkeye to Briggs unharmed.”

“The general wouldn’t do that,” the young soldier laughs nervously. “Would he?” He begs Riza to answer in his favor, but she only shrugs at him.

Before the practical kid can retort, another jolt of thunder spreads through the car. Riza has to grab at the shoulders of Holden and the young soldier to keep herself on her feet. She tries to pinpoint the source of the shock but it had reverberated throughout the train. It’s the scent of burning rubber and harsh smoke that leads her to her to breathe, “Bombs.”

“What?” Holden asks.

“There are bombs on or under the train. I know that smell.”

A low grumble escapes Holden’s throat. “Persistent bastards, aren’t they? How did they find us? When did they have time to plant bombs?” He flies to his feet and thrusts a massive arm out in front of Riza, curling his fingers over her arm. “I do apologize, Captain Hawkeye, but it’s probably best that you lay low.” Riza suppresses a dissatisfied whine. She’s growing increasingly frustrated with the men around her who think they know best and so she gently pushes Holden’s arm down and out of her way so she can shuffle out of her seat into the aisle.

“We need to stop the train,” she says. “It could hit a town, another train, or a person if it decides to blow while in motion.”

“We can’t leave this car,” Holden says. “Orders from General Mustang himself.”

“If you won’t go then I will,” Riza warns. Her eyes dart across the aisle and down rows of seats over her guards. When no one makes a move to take over for her, she shoves the door to the next compartment of the car open with her gun perched reliably in her hand. She immediately regrets the decision when a hand bolts over the threshold to her face, and rough fingers cloak her jaw. She hears concerned shouts from her companions, shouts telling her to shoot, but she’s staring into the nothingness of a black mask and black eyes and they’re pulling her in. Haltingly, her feet are scuffing toward the masked person and it takes the squeeze of their fingers against her skin to trigger her to whip her gun up and fire a shot through their wrist. She staggers back as the masked aggressor tosses her out of their grip to grasp at their lesion.

“Captain,” Holden bellows, “drop!”

Riza does. She drops to her knees as a clip’s worth of bullets are laid into the masked person. When the assaulter is lying in a pool of their own blood Holden bends down to wind an arm around Riza’s waist and pick her up, whirling her around so she’s behind him. He slams the door shut and orders men to keep it closed. “Close call,” he says.

Riza steps back into the aisle, a little dazed. She presses her palm to the barrel of her gun and feels the heat there as it stings her skin. Someone came after her and that someone grabbed her face. She takes a few long breaths to quench the thumping of her heart and Holden sticks his hand out at her. “Stay away from the doors, Captain.” She nods, fully intending to do so. As acquainted with battle as she is, she doesn’t think she’ll ever be used to the feel of an enemy descending upon her. She had frozen for a moment. How embarrassing.

Yet another blast shakes the floor under her feet and a few pairs of hands stretch outward to keep her steady.

“What are we going to do?” Someone asks.

“It’s safe to assume there are terrorists in all the cars but this one,” Holden says. “But we do have to stop this train. They’re attempting to contain us, it seems, probably because they don’t plan to kill the captain here. We’ll be handing her over to them if we don’t gain some control over the situation.” Riza swallows hard. No, they wouldn’t plan to kill her here. She’s been a hostage before and she knows what that entails. Most likely they would only wound her so they could hang her over the general’s head for however long as they pleased.

She feels the uncertainty grow like a mist around her. She opens her mouth to counter with, Well, maybe they expect you to leave here, but is cut off by a bomb burst. This one feels to her like it’s right under her boots and she catches sight of her bodyguards tumbling against windows before she realizes herself what is happening. She hears the creak of the wheels and the snap of metal chains against steel walls as the train breaks into pieces. Holden lunges for her before she loses her footing. He wraps her in his arms and hugs her to his chest as he falls back first into a window. Riza manages to choke out a, “Holden,” before her breath is knocked out of her by the crash of the train into the hard-packed snow. Holden wheezes into her ear as glass shreds his flesh.

Before the racket truly registers in her mind, Riza is untangling herself from Holden’s grip and fumbling around for her gun. Her head is pounding and she tastes the iron of blood on her tongue, but all around her are the bruised and bloodied bodies of her guards, and she’s frantic to find a way to protect what remains of them. She scrambles to her feet as best she can with seats in between her legs. Above the whine of the dying locomotive, she can hear distant voices growing louder as they near all too quickly. “Where’s my gun,” she mumbles as her heartbeat reaches a maddening high. “My gun, I need my gun.” She pulls herself up over the seats and searches the snow below the busted windows, but finds nothing. Finally, someone taps her shoulder with the butt of a gun and she takes it eagerly. “Thank you.”

Her chaperones start to stir, some of which with thick red film over their eyes. She notices the one who had handed her the gun was the young soldier who’d been so enthralled by her earlier. She looks at him, surveys the purple bruise forming on the peak of his cheek, admittedly concerned. He just nods at her carefully with a thumbs-up.

“Captain,” Holden pushes himself up on his elbows. “When they get here, we’ll take care of them. You run.” He gestures with his chin to the windows across from him. “Climb on top and wait until you’ve heard the last bullet leave the last clip.” Sitting out during a fight doesn’t sit well in Riza’s gut, but she agrees. She rationalizes that she may be able to pick a few off from her high perch, anyway.

Just as Riza’s nodding to Holden in support of his plan, the doors on either side of the train are wrenched open. Snow pillows in with a harsh wind around Riza and her guards. Her sight is instantly stolen by the thick blur the combination creates. As the lights start to dim to a deafening dark in the car, she knows she has to act fast. She waits long enough to help Holden to his feet before sticking her gun in the waistband of her pants and clambering up the seats to the window directly above her. Her fingers are painfully numb by the time she presses them to the cold glass.

“We’re just here for Captain Hawkeye,” a muffled voice calls into the car. “Resist, and we’ll shoot.”

“Captain Hawkeye isn’t here,” Holden says, and Riza is suddenly glad for the weather as she dangles from a seat, unnoticed above his head. “You’ve been tricked. Leave now.”

One ugly, throaty laugh barrels into the car over the whoosh of the wind as the man who first spoke says, “Kill them all and find the Captain.” The car promptly explodes into wisps of light and cracks of bullets against flesh as both sides take the man’s words as their cue to strike. Riza reaches for her weapon and almost drops it when a bullet grazes her calf. She bites down on her lip to keep from crying out at the surge of pain that runs into her chest and points her gun at the window. She tries her best to cover her face with her elbow as she shoots upward and glass rains down on her. She re-holsters her weapon and gains a few gashes in her hands as she grips the sides of the jagged window and hauls herself out into the freezing cold. She gives herself a moment to lie on her back and roll away from the window, snapping her gun out of its holster again. Her eyes steady on her surroundings, which, she laments, she can’t see.

“Damn it,” she says, her breath floating around her as the cold air steals it. She listens intently to the fight going on beneath her and slams her fist into the ice forming on the outside of the car. She needs to do something. There is no way she can sit back and keep herself hidden away while her comrades die only a few feet from her. She shifts toward the broken window, peers down inside and catches sight of the young soldier’s face as light flickers on-and-off over it. His eyes are lifeless, blood trickles down his cheek from the corner of his mouth. Riza swallows a scream and skids backwards into…something. She swirls around on the icy car, still seated, and another mask-clad someone kneels in front of her, taking her jaw in their hand. “Not this again,” she says, whipping her gun up as she had before, ironically not frozen as ice whirls around her. This person was prepared for her, however, and they steal her wrist in their free hand and dig their thumb painfully into the lacerations in her palm. She grits her teeth, involuntarily opening her hand to relieve the pressure. Her gun falls with a clang onto the steal.

“Captain Riza Hawkeye,” the person mutters lazily. She can barely hear them over the wind flying around her head. “Nice to meet-” She stops them mid-sentence, does the only thing she knows to do in her situation: she takes her free hand, winds it into a fist, and slams it into the person’s temple. They topple sideways, obviously not expecting the blow, and she takes advantage of their vulnerability by kicking herself away from them. By the time she manages to get to her feet, the masked person is just starting to join her and she hurriedly presses her foot to their chest and punts them off the side of the train. They seize her ankle as they go down, and she joins them on the long drop into the piles of snow below. As soon as she touches the sickeningly cold powder she grapples around it for a weapon, anything she can find. She hopes that maybe her gun had fallen in the commotion but nothing turns up as she wades through the watery ice.

“Over here!” She hears her assailant call to their colleagues over the wail of the storm. “C’mere, Captain Hawkeye. This’ll be much easier for the both of us if you just,” they wrap a fist in her military jacket and grunt, “Give up.” They jerk her back against them, and she thinks tiredly about how sick she is of being touched. She slams her elbow into their gut and they lurch with the blow but don’t loosen their restraint. They curl their arms over her chest to keep hers tucked tightly to her sides.

“I can’t wait to dump you on the steps of Central Command,” they breathe into her ear. “Dead.” She rolls her eyes at them. How little they must know about her if they think death is what frightens her.

“You must be pretty unafraid of General Mustang,” she rasps, digging her nails into their abdomen. They tighten their arms around her and they slip over her clavicle to land on her throat. They keep squeezing the air out of her even as her lungs begin to burn and she starts to hack out labored breaths.

“The Flame Alchemist,” the person says, but Riza isn’t paying attention. She feels her consciousness slipping as black spots begin to litter her vision. “Is a dead man, one way or another.” Words like that would have riled a free Riza, or breathing Riza, but this Riza is struggling to keep her head above water. “Go to sleep so we can get you home by morning. We want to greet your precious general with a pretty new letter dipped in your blood.”

No.

With all the strength Riza can find she picks her leg up and thrusts her heel into the top of her captor’s foot. They draw back in pain and their arms naturally slip as they almost reach for their leg, which is surely pulsating. Her arms finally free, Riza grips the person’s biceps and tips herself forward, hard. This person is big, but Riza is strong. She pulls them onto her back effortlessly, even as she’s eating large gulps of air, and gravity takes care of the rest as her assailant falls headfirst into the snow. While they struggle to find their footing again, she goes quickly for the train. Her foot stops just before she sets it into the first groove of metal as she listens attentively to…nothing. There had been sounds of gunfire pounding into her head before she was fighting for breath and now she hears nothing. “No, no, no,” she whispers to herself, her hands skimming the frozen steel.

“You might have made it out of here if you had packed the whole train,” a deep voice filters into Riza’s ears and she turns toward it slowly. Her legs are aching and she’s lost all feeling in her fingers but she narrows her eyes at its source all the same. She widens her stance, pulls her fists up. The person speaking to her isn’t wearing a mask. He has a thick black beard and a large burn scar over his right eye. “We probably wouldn’t have caught on to your little trick if this had been any old train full of regular passengers,” he takes a few steps toward her and she acts as though she’s reaching for her gun. “Come on, Captain, give it up. There are at least five of us and only one of you.”

Shit, Riza thinks. She glances around for any route of escape, the wind dying down enough to reveal to her a few more masked individuals brandishing guns, which are pointed at her. She lifts her hands, palms facing her enemy, as she lays her eyes on other people around the perimeter of the trees, a few yards away from the backs of the people in front of her. They’re hard to make out against the white, but they stand out stark against the foliage, even under the cover of moonlight. A relieved breath escapes her throat. She walks forward sluggishly as the soldiers behind her aggressors do the same, mirroring her actions. When she’s close enough for her captors to take her, a Briggs soldier breaks the quiet.

“Step away from Captain Hawkeye.”

General Olivier Armstrong saunters forward on horseback as her men take control of the otherwise uninhibited situation by cuffing the terrorists. She points a finger gun at Riza, makes a bang sound, and her hand recoils from the feigned shot as she says, “You’re dead, Hawkeye.”

Chapter Text

Two hefty Briggs men on horseback pluck Riza out of her place in the snow as she’s staring, open-mouthed, at General Armstrong. They heave her up by her elbows and deposit her behind a smaller Briggs man who kindly instructs her to huddle against him while someone drapes her in a heavy pelt. Her questions are lost in sighs as she presses her numb face between the man’s shoulder blades. Her eyes smart when warmth brings blood back to her freezing tissues, but she relishes the feeling all the same.

“Get her to the wall,” Armstrong orders. Her voice is a beacon that everyone in the vicinity pauses to read. “We don’t need her losing appendages. I want five – no – six people escorting her. Ryder, take Perry, Huller, Tarkington, Scully, Malik, and go now.”

Riza furls her fingers into the jacket of the Briggs solider as he reins up on his horse. I can move them, she thinks. I’m so glad. She takes a moment to flit her eyes over the hood of her pelt and peer at the people who had been on her only moments ago. Their matching black coats cling to their backs as snow turns to water against them. The cessation of an angry wind, and the quick work of the Briggs soldiers, lays bare their unmasked faces. She studies each one with quiet antipathy, especially the scarred man, until the horse twirls at its master’s command, effectively replacing her view with that of an expanse of darkened snow-topped land. “I'm Second Lieutenant Ryder, Captain Hawkeye,” the rider says. “Hold on as tight as you can, sir.”

Ryder slams his heels into the taught muscles of his horse and it blanches before lurching forward into the white. Riza snaps her eyes shut, twists her pelt in her hands and locks it close to her body as it begins to billow out behind her, threatening to join the rushing wind, and she’s happy to bathe in the heat she captures underneath it. Her form is tingling where hot and cold mingle on her skin and in her bones. The feeling is keeping her from fixating on the blitz of pain that she’s sure is wreaking its havoc. She’s far from interested in knowing just how bad off she really is. Her thighs tighten hungrily against the horse, and she passes a chill from herself to the animal before receiving its warmth in return.

Lights dim into view by the time Riza and her company reach North City. The uneven footfalls of the horses steady as they drop off frozen piles and begin to clatter on iced brick. Riza opens her eyes for the first time since taking off and glimpses people shifting around under a soft snowfall. They hold lanterns in her direction, entirely unfazed by the cold, as she gallops past them. She eyes them enviously. Their faces seem to be untouched from the whip of the cold air, and they’re dressed for their circumstance, whereas her body has been filling with a glow in a tortuously sluggish way. Her fingers and toes still pang and when she runs her tongue over her lips she can’t miss the chasms that have formed there in her skin. They light her up when she grinds her teeth against them.

The pace of Riza’s group picks up fixedly until they land themselves at the foot of the Briggs wall, suddenly clambering around on that uneven ground again. The doors to the wall are already open and welcoming, and a golden light basks over the white of the snow. Ahead of Riza are a few more armed Briggs men, their eyes shielded by opaque goggles and their faces cloaked in hoods. Ryder guides his horse right into the Briggs entrance and Riza’s stripped from him and his animal before she’s even had time to breathe in the heated air. She assumes her feet have touched down on the wall’s floor but she can’t feel them and so they give out from beneath her. Someone catches her before she dips forward, and she’s flung swiftly into Ryder’s arms after he climbs down from his mount.

A voice calls loudly over the bustle of soldiers that instructs Ryder to deliver Riza to the medical room. He obliges, and Riza’s staring at the Briggs ceiling, high and grand above her, admiring the glow of the lanterns as she soaks in their light, when she’s abruptly reminded that she’s tired to the point of debilitation. She lets her head sink back against Ryder’s arm. The cold and the terrorists had done their part to exacerbate her exhaustion, sure, but she hadn’t slept more than a few hours in all day. The aches of her body dull as she feels the tug of her eyelids as her heartbeat slows to match her lethargic breaths. An elevator clicks on and the whir of its cables pushes her delightfully close to sleep before Ryder draws her up gently. “Sorry, Captain, but you can’t sleep until the doc’s taken a good look at you.”

Ryder steps out of the elevator seconds later. Riza is trying to learn to sleep with her eyes open when a sharp voice seizes her attention. “Set her in that chair,” it says. She realizes rather slowly that she must have reached the medical room when she’s deposited into a seat and her eyes meet the face of a small woman with glasses and spiky blonde hair. “Captain, I’m going to take your boots off. Ryder, take her jacket. The sooner she’s out of these damp clothes, the better.” The doctor struggles to strip Riza of her boots as Ryder collects her soiled jacket. She finds herself pulling away instinctively against the back of her chair when her freed feet are dunked into a large bowl of agonizingly hot water. A small table is dragged across the floor and soon her hands join the pain party in their own pot of searing liquid. The water stains to a reddish brown color from the blood that cakes her skin.

“Burns,” she whimpers, but she keeps her appendages submerged.

“That water is only a little over thirty-two degrees Celsius,” the doctor replies. “Not much higher than your core body temperature. Your fingers and toes are somewhat frozen, though, so the heat’s bringing the blood back to your hopefully undead tissues and, well, that’s a painful process. Give the water twenty minutes to work its magic.” She perches herself on a stool close to Riza and takes her chin in her hand. She dips the tip of a small towel in the hot water and starts to dab tenderly at Riza’s face. Out of the corner of her eye, Riza spies the cloth turning a darker red each time it meets her skin.

“More blood,” she says in a sigh.

“You’ve got blood on the back of your neck and there’s a cut here,” Ryder speaks up from his spot against a wall and touches a finger to his temple. He’s a tall, lean man, with brown hair and eyes to match. Riza hadn’t noticed before, her mind fogged up by the exasperation. “Your leg was bleeding when we got to you and it’s still bleeding now. There are at least two deep bruises on your face, too.” He swipes a hand over his white Briggs coat, which is blotched with what Riza can only assume is her blood.

“Nothing I can’t fix,” the doctor quips. She runs her fingers with a little too much pressure over one of Riza’s bruises and she winces. “I need to take a look at that wound on your leg. I’m also concerned about where the blood on your neck is coming from.”

“My hair clip, most likely,” Riza tells her. She didn’t feel it the moment it happened, but she’s sure it jammed into the back of her head when she was crushed against Holden’s chest as the train tipped. A wisp of guilt flutters into her mind at the thought of Holden, and she stalls in her seat, her hands curling into fists in their murky water. I’ve left my guards behind.

“I’m going to need you to loosen up, Captain,” says the doctor, but Riza barely hears her. She’s rigid in her seat, her thoughts occupied by an onslaught of uneasiness. Were any of her men alive? Did she abandon them? Should she have let General Armstrong order her to Briggs before she could search the train’s debris? She feels a twinge of pain on her temple as a cool liquid drips down her cheek. “Seriously, Captain Hawkeye, this is hard with your jaw all locked up like that. Have you never had stitches before?”

“I have,” Riza replies. She makes a conscious effort to abide by her doctor’s wishes and relax. “I’ve only just remembered that I left allies out in the cold.”

A silence seeps into the air around Riza and she’s left alone to think mindfully about the fate of her companions. Ryder doesn’t offer any words of reassurance, he only clears his throat and shuffles uncomfortably from one foot to another, while the doctor quietly draws a needle through the sensitive flesh on Riza’s face. As she moves from stitching to gently picking plastic pieces of Riza’s hair clip out of her head, Riza finds it’s much easier to focus on the biting pain than the images of white snow soaked in her soldiers’ blood. She presses her chin to her chest so the doctor can tweeze her skin apart and the feeling is caustic at best, but she’s content with the distraction.

Some miserable minutes pass before Riza’s hair is returned to the nape of her neck. The doctor drops a small plate of bloodied plastic on her stool and dowses her hands in a clear, foul-smelling liquid before instructing Ryder to the leave the room and scissoring Riza’s pants leg apart. She touches the pulsing injury on Riza’s calf and Riza recoils only minutely, although it’s enough to compel the doctor to catch Riza’s ankle tightly in her hand. “Did you know you were shot, Captain?”

“Yes. I felt the bullet skid across my calf.”

The doctor shakes her head. There’s a look of dismay or dread on her face, but Riza can’t tell which. “The bullet went straight through, Captain.”

Riza’s eyes are almost lost in the back of her head as she rolls them. She reminds herself that she shouldn’t be surprised, really, because her adrenaline was probably masking the pain, but she is still so indescribably tired of it all. “I’m going to have to pack the wound and it’ll need to be sewn up in a week at best. This is going to hurt so just bear with me, okay? Three, two, one,” the doctor pours alcohol down Riza’s calf and she bites the inside of her cheek to keep from kicking her leg out of the doctor’s grasp. Her heart starts to pound erratically in her chest as the ache drags an urge to vomit up from her gut, but the doctor works fast with practiced fingers at clearing and packing the wound. She tapes an itchy pad of gauze over it before moving to Riza’s hands next, her pace quickening as she notes Riza’s discomfort. She begins to tweeze pieces of glass out of Riza’s palms.

“General Mustang’s the one working the Ishval stuff,” the doctor comments as she pushes against Riza’s skin to bring a small piece of glass to the surface. “I’m assuming that’s why you’re here, all bruised and minced. Lieutenant Colonel Miles tells me the general is somewhat unpopular on both sides of this everlasting conflict. You can’t please everyone, I guess, but I didn’t think anyone would be dumb enough to actually make a move against the Flame Alchemist.”

Riza lets the doctor’s words sit for a time, until she feels like she can reply. A furnace had kicked on behind her, and her back is being layered with heat. She struggles to rip her attention away from the sensation and consider the doctor instead. “We get angry letters sometimes,” she finally says. “Dirty looks are commonplace and the occasional nasty shout isn’t unheard of in our company.” She pauses to suck air in through gritted teeth as the doctor begins to sew her raw and red hands back together. She watches the needle thread through her thin flesh for just the blink of an eye before continuing. “The threats we usually receive are from citizens who think they can somehow push the general out of his position in the government. This is the first time someone’s claimed to take aim on one of our lives.”

“It wasn’t an empty claim,” the doctor scoops the bowl out from under Riza’s patched hands and dunks the water into a nearby sink. She turns Riza’s hands over in hers, pinching her fingers and asking if Riza can feel them. When she’s satisfied with Riza’s responses, she pulls her feet from their vat of warmth and tests her toes in the same way. “You can feel them and move them fine. You got lucky there, Captain. If General Armstrong hadn't received a call from Captain Falman in North City about the strange blasts then no one would have been scouting for your train and you would be in, well...” She shrugs. "You should thank Falman for his diligence when you see him next."

“Thank you, doctor,” Riza breathes, making a mental note to treat Falman to lunch the next time she's free.

“The name’s Monroe,” the doctor holds her hand out to Riza, who takes it politely. “Most people just call me the ‘Briggs doctor’ but that gets monotonous after a while.”

Riza could identify with monotonous. She’s heard “captain” more times than she can count and “lieutenant” more times than that. “Now,” Monroe starts as she’s gathering her equipment. “You need to get out of your clothes. Here, I’ll fit you with some wrappings for your wounds so you can take one heck of a shower before General Armstrong arrives and inevitably demands your attention.”

Riza finds she’s more comfortable slipping out of her slacks than she is when she’s wearing them. There’s a pleasant warmness that overtakes her hips, her thighs, when she rids herself of the cloth that’s heavy with the remnants of ice and snow. Monroe cleans around Riza’s packed and gauzed gunshot wound one last time before hugging it in a plastic material that she folds three times over. She repeats the process on Riza’s hands and sticks some surgical tape over the stitches on her temple. “You can borrow a pair of shorts from me for the evening,” Monroe says, pouring a cup of coffee from a small pot on the furnace. “I guess you can borrow the shower in my quarters, too, since the general isn’t here to assign any to you.”

Riza is grateful, though she wishes she had been given long, wool pants instead of shorts as she hobbles into the hall after Monroe. It’s chilly outside the medical room (outside the protective bubble of the furnace) and Riza’s legs are charged with goose bumps until she reaches Monroe’s room and enters a small shower stall that fills with a heavy steam at the turn of a knob. She catches a glimpse of herself in a fogging mirror and wipes a bandaged hand over the condensation to reveal her bruises, the bags under her eyes, and an angry red temple. Her jaw’s a blackish purple and there’s a blemish of the same color above her right eye. She rids herself of her clothes, careful not to agitate any part of her walloped body, and ardently steps away from her reflection to advance cautiously into the shower. She swears the water is sizzling against her, but she works as best she can to scrub the past few hours out of her hair and off her skin.

The drum of the water against the shower floor is rhythmic, and Riza forgets for a moment that she’s in Briggs. Without pain to interrupt her, she thinks freely about the soldiers out in the snow, about their stillness in the train being a confirmation of their demise. She wonders bitterly about how she might have avoided failing them. Her plastic-wrapped hands catch her face as she pulls in a ragged breath. There’s a knot forming in her chest that warns of an impending, fatigue-induced breakdown, so she mutes the rhythms of the water and steps, naked, out into Monroe’s room. The cold hijacks her attention as she hoped it would. She lugs clean clothes left for her by Monroe over her body.

Just as Riza is contemplating curling into a ball in the middle of Monroe’s bed and having herself a nap, there’s a sharp series of knocks on the steel door. “Captain Hawkeye,” the stern voice of General Armstrong wafts, unwelcome, into her ears. “There are things we need to discuss, Captain, so don’t let your mind drift too close to sleep. You’ll find me when you’re ready.”

Riza doesn’t answer. She turns her back to the door, napping still a possibility in her mind. Going to meet with General Armstrong means a discussion about the train, and although she is curious about the general’s comment out in the snow, she isn't sure if she's emotionally prepared for a formal meeting. She lowers herself into a sit on the edge of the bed. General Mustang is surely frantic by now, she presumes, and skipping a meeting with Armstrong deprives Mustang of reassurance he’ll only get from his captain. She grimaces. He’s going to find out she’s been shot, he’ll overreact, rush to Briggs, and see her split temple and bruised face… She’ll never be without escorts again.

Reluctantly, Riza ventures out into the wall when she feels she’s waded through enough time to mentally prepare for a discussion with the Ice Queen of Briggs and all that might entail. Monroe’s room sits behind a glassless window of sorts, with the first floor of the wall looming below and the walls of the hallway breaking the view on the left and right. She peers over the edge warily, and there are people far below, knocking icicles off high pipes and scraping brooms against a concrete floor. She leaves the scene to wander aimlessly through the halls of the wall, trying to retrace her steps back to the medical room where she assumes Monroe returned to. She passes endless lines of hissing pipes and shades of grey before she hears the familiar click of boots on solid ground. She whirls on her bare heel to see Ryder striding towards her; the coat that had been dirtied with her blood still clings to his body. “There you are, Captain Hawkeye,” he says, a little breathless. “General Armstrong is getting impatient and so she sent me to come get you. I was a little concerned when you weren’t in the doctor’s room, so I’m quite relieved to find you’re okay. Now if you could please follow me to the briefing room, the general has something important to tell you.”

Riza struggles to keep up with Ryder as his footfalls hasten. She favors her healthy leg (the one without a hole in it) and as a consequence her movements are choppy. Her situation disturbs her. She hasn’t been so messed up since the Promised Day, and even then, with her life seeping out of her, she hadn’t felt as useless as she does now, hobbling after Ryder down what seems to be an endless hall. She’s too prideful to ask him to slow down, so she does the more rational thing and places more weight on her leg than she should. If she inverts her foot just right, and places it down toes-first, the pain that flies up from her gunshot wound into her lower back isn’t so miserable.

Riza didn’t notice before, when she was being carted up one story to the medical room, but now, as she’s making her way to the third floor with Ryder, she’s finding that this hulking wall in the middle of an icy wasteland is…pristine. It’s kept clean and grandiose, as though General Armstrong really were a queen. There are no splashes of stains on the walls, as there are at Central and in the east, and it seems to Riza that every person - every thing - has a place. She’s secretly impressed. As magnificent as it is to her, though, there is never a cease in the noise of the wind as it screams against steel, and there’s a never-ending coldness to the place that her recovering fingers and toes don’t appreciate.

Ryder eventually leads Riza to a pair of large, forbidding doors decorated in the Amestrian military insignia. He raps on one before pushing it open and ushering her inside, where she can see General Armstrong sitting alone, her brows pulling together in a frown she never seems to shake off. Riza wobbles inside. The table the general is occupying is long, with at least ten seats, and she’s tempted to fall into the nearest chair but clutches at her battered leg and makes for the one closest to the general instead. A light gasp escapes from her as she tentatively bends down into her seat, the movement lighting her on fire, and the general signals for Ryder to exit the room. He does so with the clack of the door as it snaps shut behind him. The briefing room looks wholly untouched to Riza. It's a conglomerate of the trademark Briggs grey, and there are outlines of dust on the walls where Amestrian flags used to hang.

“We recovered a few live men from the train,” General Armstrong begins. Relief permeates Riza’s body. What a good way to start a conversation she was so dreading. “They’re locked up, as I’m not convinced they aren’t traitors. None of them bear wounds that are in need of the doctor’s care, and one of them, Holden, was particularly aggressive as I barred him from visiting you, Captain.”

Riza’s relief quickly melts away into anger. “With all due respect, General,” her tone is as composed as she can manage. “Holden was in charge of my safety. It’s my understanding that General Mustang personally appointed him to the position, and he did his job on numerous occasions. I’d like to request that you release him from confinement, General, please.”

“Captain Hawkeye, did it not occur to either you or Mustang that for a letter to appear seemingly out of thin air in a general’s office it would need to be delivered by someone who could remain inconspicuous? Like a solider, perhaps? Did it never cross your mind how convenient that attack on your train so clearly was? Captain, someone’s inside our military handing information of your whereabouts and movements to someone on the outside. Whether it’s your life that’s being threatened or not is beyond my care, but there is a person making a fool of this military - and of me, by extension - and that is unacceptable. I will bag the rat and to do so you will quench your tendency to be soft, and keep your mouth shut.”

Riza’s mood turns foul before she has the sense to stop it. She looks at General Armstrong with what she can only imagine is a gaze of contempt, but beneath it she harbors the knowledge that she’s right. Somehow someone had managed to get past Havoc unnoticed, and somehow the enemy had deduced which train Riza would be on and had time to plant bombs on it. She swallows hard. “You said, 'You’re dead, Hawkeye,’” she starts, changing the subject to avoid an outburst she would surely regret. She’ll revisit the confinement of her men when she briefs General Mustang later. “What did you mean by that, sir?”

The general sits back in her chair, crossing her legs. The tip of her sword ticks against the floor. “Führer Grumman and I have a proposition for you, Captain Hawkeye." The Führer...? "This train debacle may be a blessing in disguise. You want to keep General Mustang safe, yes? You can’t do that up here in the mountains where he’ll surely keep you, and so I say we take advantage of this situation. I spoke to Führer Grumman as you were showering. If you’re up for the task, we’d like to assign you to the east, where your orders will be to infiltrate whatever cowardly terrorist group is threatening Mustang and his work in Ishval.” She eyes Riza thoughtfully, and waits for a response.

“I see,” Riza replies. “So…Captain Riza Hawkeye is murdered during a terrorist attack in the mountains. This would be advantageous for us, sure. I die, these terrorists lose their leverage, and it’ll be easy enough for me to slip into their organization. Though, I’m not the only person who can do this, so why me?”

“You said yourself that they would lose their leverage, meaning they lose their edge on Mustang. The terrorists get a swift kick in the ass as we throw a wrench in their plans, and we get a prepped, and capable undercover soldier who the world thinks is dead.”

“Right,” Riza agrees. “But what does General Mustang think about this? I’m assuming you’ve spoken with him?”

In a tone fit for an Ice Queen, General Armstrong doesn’t wait a beat before she says, “We’ve told General Mustang that we can’t find you.”

“You…what?”

The icy general shrugs her shoulders, unconcerned. “He called, of course, shortly after I arrived here. I couldn’t tell him you were at the wall, not when I knew I’d be commissioning you for an operation like this one, Captain.”

“Find someone else,” Riza’s words come automatically. They are like an oil that feeds the fire building rapidly in her chest. She stands, her leg scorching with pain, her chair falling back with a smack against the floor. “Call him back, and find someone else.” She’s glowering at General Armstrong, rank all but forgotten, her mind distorting with animosity, with frustration, with exhaustion.

“Captain Hawkeye, sit down. I won’t pretend to know what kind of relationship you truly have with Mustang, but what I can deduce from what I see is that if he were to know you’re alive, he wouldn’t keep his distance. He works out in the east frequently, doesn’t he? Do you think he would leave you be? That man is incapable of sending his subordinates off to do dangerous work without getting himself involved and that’s especially true when it comes to you, Captain. Or are you foolish enough to think no one’s noticed? Why do you think the enemy chose you? Not Havoc, not Falman, but you. It’s because anyone with an ounce of intellect is capable of seeing through Mustang’s cheap façade. You’ll do his, Captain, because you know it’s right. You’ll do it to protect General Mustang, this country, and the citizens of Ishval.”

Riza’s nails are cutting lines into the hardwood of the table. “You can’t say that to him. You can’t say that to him,” she counters, her voice weak. “He’ll think it’s his fault. He’ll spend however long he thinks I’m dead detesting himself.”

“We’ll keep an eye on him, Captain. What he does while you’re gone isn’t your concern.”

It is.

“You need sleep, Captain. See yourself out,” Armstrong waves a hand at the door. “Ryder will take you to your own quarters.”

“Find someone else,” the words come out in a snap this time; sharp flicks of her tongue against her teeth. She’s radiating fury. She uses the edge of the table to get herself moving, thrusting herself off of it and causing it to jerk into a crooked position in the room. General Armstrong doesn’t budge. The Ice Queen crosses her arms and watches Riza as she staggers towards the doors.

“We’ll talk about it in the morning, Captain. There is a lot to prepare.”

Chapter Text

General Roy Mustang waits. He isn’t good at waiting. Especially not for his captain, Riza Hawkeye, and so he paces to stave off some of his impatience. His subordinates Havoc, Falman, Breda, and Fuery sit together at a rounded table by a window. Its wooden legs shiver with their nervous movements. Roy can tell he’s stirring up the anxiety in their bellies, but he had told them to go home hours ago.            

“She’s one of ours too,” they’d retorted. Not in unison, but he could gather that the sentiment was universal from the way Havoc had presented it. His cigarette had dangled in his mouth by the ends of his teeth as he spoke; somewhat reminiscent of the way Roy is clinging to his sanity. If he’s being completely honest with himself, he doesn’t want to be alone. He’s silently appreciative of his mens’ presence, and their devotion to their captain.            

Roy counts his steps in his head as he stalks from one wall of his office to the other. 555, 556, 557… The loud ticking of a clock hanging low above a bookshelf keeps him on beat. Captain Hawkeye had placed it there, he remembers, and that’s why it hangs so low. She’d put it up to keep paperwork coming and going on time, so no one taller than she had offered to raise the thing for fear of being held accountable for their work.            

“Havoc, raise the clock.” Roy says now, silently swearing to Truth or whatever other entity exists outside of him that he’ll push a million papers out on time if she’d just call. Havoc, the tallest man in the room, raises the clock, and subsequently his superior’s spirits. Roy’s eyes narrow at the hunk of clicking plastic that now sits high over his head. Equivalent exchange. Timely paperwork for a phone call, he thinks.            

That’s a fair trade, right?            

Roy resumes his walk around the office, tapping his fingers on his desk as he passes it, raking his eyes over his agonizingly silent phone. He can almost hear his captain’s voice in the hum of the anxious quiet.            

“I’ve made it to Briggs, General,” she says. Professionally, though he’ll pick up on the subtle emotion. “I’m okay, Roy,” is what he'll hear.            

“Someone should have called by now,” he mutters, trying to talk over the whisper of her voice in his head. His steps are somewhere in the thousands now. The clock keeps ticking.            

Tick. 3,402.            

Tick. 3,403.            

Tick. Four hours since Captain Hawkeye boarded the train.            

Tick. It takes half that time for a train to arrive at the North City station from Central.            

Roy lets a growl escape from between his teeth. “I’ll walk all the way to Briggs myself if that’s what it takes to get an update.”            

As though he’s said the magic words, his phone shrills in reply. He stares at it for a long moment like he’s hearing it ring for the first time, and every pair of eyes in the room lock onto it. He forces himself to move calmly to his chair, his heart beating in his throat. When he’s seated, he answers. “General Mustang,” he says. It’s a curt greeting, one he uses for every office phone call.  He has to try hard to keep the tone amid waves of trepidation.            

“Yes, General, hello,” General Olivier Armstrong’s icy voice pillows into Roy’s ears and he cools like she’s just dripped hunks of snow down his back. Questions scramble up to the tip of his tongue, pleading to be asked then answered. Where is Captain Hawkeye? Did someone hurt her? Is she okay?

“May I speak with Captain Hawkeye?” he says, a little frantically. He swallows a bit of hysteria and pushes a hand through his hair.            

“General Mustang,” Armstrong begins, “we can’t find Captain Hawkeye.” The Ice Queen says this so matter-of-factly, with seemingly no regard for how the statement should have been phrased to someone as close to the captain as Roy. He starts, his body tensing.            

No, he thinks, or prays, or pleads; he can’t tell.            

General Armstrong fills Roy’s silence. “We stumbled upon the train slumped over in the snow, and filled with dead bodies. However, there was no sign of the captain, and we have reason to believe that she -”            

“Stop,” Roy cuts her off. His head dips into his free hand and he gulps a bit of air, attempting to steady his breaths. He has to take the conversation back a step. He has to process it a second time. He watches the lines of wood in the table as they being to coil and crawl around one another. He feels his stomach mimic the motions and tastes the burn of bile at the back of his throat. His ears are ringing. “You can’t find my captain?”            

He hears a chair screech against the tiled floor before it smacks into it. Havoc is the first to Roy’s desk, his hands splaying out over the desktop, his back arching so he can tip his ear in the direction of Armstrong’s voice. Breda, Falman, and Fuery follow at their own pace, each finding a comfortable distance from which to listen in. Their fear hangs heavy in the air, like the weight of moisture before a storm.            

“We have reason to believe she’s been captured by the enemy.” Armstrong finishes. Roy doesn’t notice the twinge of sympathy in her voice, not while he’s unraveling in his seat.

He doesn’t waste a tick of the clock before he says, “I’m coming to Briggs.”            

Armstrong is just as fast with her retort. “Like hell you are,” she says, all hints of sympathy gone form her tone. “All you’ll do is get in the way of my men. You don’t know how to search the terrain here. You’ll be useless; you’ll need guards, my resources, no. You stay in your warm and cozy Central office while we deal with this, Mustang. Consider yourself barred from the mountains until I’ve cleaned this mess up.”            

“Bullshit!” Roy roars into the line, suddenly on his feet. His men move away from him. “Riza Hawkeye is my captain, and if she’s missing then I will look for her. Bar or no bar, Armstrong.” Her name comes out as a threat. He hopes she takes it that way.            

This is a panic he hasn’t felt in years. Not since losing Hughes on the line from the phone booth has his heart raced so wildly; he hasn’t felt such dizzying terror since watching his captain’s blood leak into the cold concrete, tugging her life away with it. He sets his jaw, and his resolve solidifies. You will not keep me from her.            

“Take it up with Grumman, Mustang, because I’m done here.” Armstrong bites back, snapping the line into silence.            

Roy pauses, hardly able to believe Olivier Armstrong just backed down from a fight, before he slams the phone onto its receiver. “Havoc,” he says through gritted teeth, when he’s sure he won’t bite the tip of his tongue off with how badly his body is chattering. “Get me on a train to Briggs.”            

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir,” Havoc says tentatively. “I heard General Armstrong…and she has a point. Captain Hawkeye might be better found when all efforts can be focused on her.”            

Breda chimes in. “Captain Hawkeye is tougher than any of us, sir. She’d be disappointed in you for leaving the safety of Central if you went.”            

“All you’d get is an earful from her the second she fought her way out of the mountains.” Falman says.            

“It’s going to be okay, General.” Fuery adds.

But Roy can hear the uncertainty in their voices. His fists make loud contact with his desk. “I don’t care!” he says. One of his hands stings with the tingle of the hit and he shakes it out as he makes his way to the doorway of his office, brushing past his subordinates, each step fueling his frustration like kindle to a fire.            

“I’ll melt the snow,” he murmurs, and he’s vaguely aware of the sparks flitting from his gloves as he instinctively rubs his index finger over his thumb. “I’ll torch the trees and I’ll turn the mountains to ash. I’ll find her captors and burn out heir tongues.”            

His footfalls slow into a stop as the tips of his boots reach the threshold to the hallway. Führers don’t react this way. They don’t burn tongues. They just orchestrate the genocide of millions of people, Roy muses bitterly. What are a few tongues? But he knows it isn’t right, he’d learned as much in the tunnels under the city. The tunnels his Central crews still mull through years after the Promised Day, the scar of his flames still etched into a brick wall next to the place where Envy took their life.            

But…Riza. His thoughts fumble with her name. He fist breaks contact with his side and smacks against a wall. How can he sit out on the search for her?           

Tick. The clock mocks him. Tick…tick…tick. With each second, each tick, he sees a new Riza. Sometimes she’s bloodied, or bruised, or both, but she’s always sinking into the snowy mountains, the blood retreating from her skin. She’s blue, or pale, or purple, or some kind of combination of the three. The colors flash behind his eyelids every time he blinks.             

Tick. He put her on the train.            

Tick. This is his fault.            

Tick. I’ve buried one friend. I will not bury my queen, too.            

He snaps his fingers before the clock can click again and it ignites into a flurry of fire. It sputters and crackles as it drops onto the bookshelf below, no longer ticking at him. It hadn’t held up its end of the deal, anyway.            

“I’m leaving,” he rasps. He doesn’t spare his cowering men a glance but he feels their gazes sitting on him. “Clean up the mess.”            

“Where are you going?” Fuery prompts, already poking at the sticky pile of melted plastic.           

“Over General Armstrong’s head,” Roy answers as he enters the hall.

Führer Grumman shakes his head, his long mustache bounding around his face. He hadn’t been in his home, where Roy had looked for him first, but in his office instead, his uniform still clinging neatly to his body. This is unnerving to Roy. It’s well past midnight, and the Führer very rarely kept to his desk after hours, preferring instead to dash away the second the large clocks chimed at the end of the workday. Roy thinks he looks far more disheveled than usual as well. His typical charismatic demeanor has been replaced by something more foreboding. It sends uneasy chills down Roy’s spine.            

“Why not?” Roy demands. The words come out as taught as he feels. He had presented his argument to Grumman as professionally as he could manage, with “sirs” intertwined between his words in hopes that his longtime mentor and friend would side in his favor. Now, though, with a definitive “no” hanging from the Führer’s lips, Roy’s forgotten his manners.            

“You know why, Mustang,” Grumman answers. He doesn’t reprimand Roy for his tone and his eyes are almost sorry. “General Armstrong called here and laid out some very compelling arguments herself for why you need to stay out of the north. These men are after you, and I’m afraid they may be using Captain Hawkeye as a hostage. So if you go north and she is there, gun to her head or knife to her throat, what will you do?” Roy winces. He’s thought about that. It’s all he thought about while he’d been stumbling around headquarters looking for the Führer. Guns and knives and Riza’s scarred, exposed neck flushing pink in the burning cold.            

“Just how much will you give up?” Grumman’s voice whirs through Roy’s ears. Everything. Anything. The Führer stops and leans back in his chair, pulling one leg up over the other and lacing his fingers over his knee. “There are bigger things at stake here than your captain. You must think about why you’re here. Not here, in my office, but here in the military. You have a goal, boy, don’t rush to throw it away. Let the Briggs men do as they do best.”            

“She’s your granddaughter,” Roy snaps. Rage sits in an ugly heap at the bottom of his chest. He’s growing tired of the people around him who are acting so cavalier about the life of the captain. His knuckles ache as he tightens his hands into fists at his sides.            

“That she is,” Grumman affirms. “And I am doing everything in my power to assure she returns to Central unharmed, but everything in my power is only what I can do here, General, and you’d be well off to remember that yourself. You can’t always be motivated by your feelings, you know.”            

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, Roy thinks, but he says nothing. He only glowers at his superior. Knowing he won’t get anywhere with Grumman once he’s made up his mind, he pivots on his heel for the door before the Führer has time to formulate an objection. Or before Roy decides to say something he might regret.

Roy returns to his office with the smoke of his grievance and dread puffing out around him. His subordinates don’t say a word to him, or to one another. They barely acknowledge his return. He drags his leaded feet to his desk where he parks himself, no longer having the energy to get up and move. Time doesn’t pass in ticks anymore but in the slow, ragged drawls of Roy’s breaths. He flicks his eyes to the spot on the bookshelf where the clock had sat disintegrating before he left. He wishes he could burn it over and over again.            

Breda dozes off first. Roy glimpses his head bobbing up and down until it finally falls to the tabletop. Fuery follows some time later, around four in the morning, and Falman checks out just before the sun starts to touch the sky. Daylight is settling in over the soldiers by the time Havoc gives in to his tiredness. Roy’s mind never wavers. The cogs spin and buzz in his head for what feels like days, keeping him up and alert. He sits with his chin on his hands so he can peer out around his office. Sometimes, every hour or so, a streetlight will flicker and he’ll see Captain Hawkeye’s form on the couch directly across from his desk. She stirs and mumbles in her sleep until the flickering stops and then she’s gone, and Roy’s back to swallowing uncomfortable thoughts about where she is and who is hurting her.            

I’ll miss you. That’s what she said to him before she boarded the train. She’d given him the names of pets she doesn’t own as if he were in charge of their care while she was away but he picked up on the code instantly. Her soft hand squeezed his as she said it. Her amber eyes smiled into his. What would her eyes say to him now? He thinks back to the way she’d looked at him when she was dying on a dusty slab of concrete. Don’t you dare try human transmutation. That’s what her glare was screaming at him, but behind it there was immense pain; fear, sadness, goodbyes, and a gentle I love you. He shudders in his seat.            

The night hours drag by until the sun is in the sky. Roy waves people out of his office as they come in bearing papers and news, like they do every morning, and his subordinates begin to wake one by one as the sunlight pours over their faces.            

“Anything?” Havoc asks, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Roy shakes his head. The men take turns rotating out of the office to grab breakfast or wash their face. Roy doesn’t feel like moving, but Havoc convinces him that some sausage and mess hall eggs would prepare him for his journey to Briggs to visit his captain once she’s found. He relents, and manages to shovel a spoonful or two of food into his mouth before returning to his office. Breda, Falman, Fuery, and Havoc are shuffling paperwork at their long, shared desk when Roy falls back into his chair, exasperation making a home in his body. He rubs his face hard, tries to scrub the last twelve hours off his expression.

And then the phone blares to life.

Roy’s quick to answer this time. “Hello?” he says.

“General,” the Ice Queen intones. Roy inhales. Where is Captain Hawkeye? 

“We’ve found Captain Hawkeye’s body, General.” 

Her body?

“I’m sorry to say that she’s gone.”

And then the world stops. Or maybe it begins to move faster, Roy can’t tell because the room is spinning but things are moving in slow motion. He tries to stand but his knees buckle underneath him until he sinks back into his chair. The phone begins to waver in his palm, slipping out of his fingers. He’s mildly aware that Havoc is on him, trying to help him right himself. “What’s going on?” he asks, his brows pulling together in a worried line.

“I will personally accompany her body to Central. I’ve already spoken with Grumman and he’s informed me that it’s you or him who will make arrangements for her funeral, if you so choose to have one.”

“No,” Roy chokes into the line. His vision is beginning to blur and he rubs the back of his hand over his eyes. Gone? “You were supposed to see to her safety,” he says quietly. Then he yells. “She was Briggs’ responsibility! You should have let me go north! I would have found her!” 

“General Mustang,” Armstrong’s voice is oddly placid, even while Roy continues to wail at her. “I offer you my condolences, General. That is all I can do. You will receive her -”

Roy beats the phone onto its receiver once, twice, three times before he swipes whatever is in reach off of his desk. Havoc backs away, his hands up in surrender as though he’s done something wrong. Roy’s heart pumps fast and hard against his ribs. She’s not dead, he thinks. Armstrong is a liar. 

Havoc, wanting answers but not wanting to set his general off, carefully rights the phone and dials the military directory. “General Armstrong at Briggs, please,” he says. A few rings drone in his ear before he’s greeted.

“This is General Armstrong,” a woman’s voice answers. Roy can hear her. He shifts in his seat.

“General, this is Lieutenant Jean Havoc.” Roy wants to snatch the phone from Havoc’s hands and burn it until it erases everything it has relayed to him. He tears his gloves off instead, not trusting himself.

“I hope for your sake that you’re not calling to scream at me too.” Armstrong states. “I know you were also close to the captain. All I can do is let you know that I am sorry for your loss. As I was trying to say to General Mustang, Hawkeye’s body will be returned to Central in a few days. I will come too so let Mustang know he should shape up before I get there.”

“She’s dead?” Havoc speaks like he has to say the words out loud to understand them. She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead, Roy repeats the phrase in his head, testing it against his denial. 

Fuery’s head falls into his hands. “No.”

Breda trains his eyes on the general, a somber look on his face.

Falman begins to tear up. “How…?”

Roy grips his desk. In one swift movement he’s up on his feet and tossing it over. It clatters to the ground, tearing the phone from Havoc’s hand and shattering it against the floor. “It’s a lie,” he says. “General Armstrong is lying.”

“Why would she lie, sir?” Havoc presses. His tone is gentle. Roy doesn’t have an answer. Why would she lie? He feels Riza in his bones, though. She’s nestled into him, like she’s been a piece of his soul all his life. He would be able to feel if she stopped breathing, but all he feels is the rip and tear of his heart breaking. He slumps back against the window facing out over Central. He lets his body slide to the floor.

“I don’t know,” he says. He tastes the salt of his tears on his tongue when he speaks. “It has to be a lie. It has to be. She has to be lying.” But she’s not? 

He can see Riza’s Promised Day eyes in his mind again. Don’t you dare try human transmutation. He imagines General Armstrong presenting the beaten body of his captain to him. Her eyes are wide with whatever horror she saw before vile people took her life. She’s stiff and cold, and her lips don’t move when he presses his to hers.            

Suddenly he can’t breathe and there’s vomit clogging up his throat. He pulls a small trashcan into his hands to catch the breakfast he’d sat for in preparation to see his captain. I will never see her again, he tells himself before he wretches. 

I’ll miss you, she says, somewhere far off in his head. Soldiers begin to litter his office, brought in by the commotion. Someone tips his desk back up, and someone else starts piling papers, pens, and other office necessities back onto it. Havoc hooks his arm under Roy’s and hoists him to his feet while Breda briefs the confused men on the situation.            

“It’ll be okay,” Havoc says, but his voice falters. He hobbles with his general out into the hall, away from the men who were picking details from Breda.         

“Havoc,” Roy practically wheezes. “It won’t be.”             

Chapter Text

It’s well past noon when Riza wakes to a deafeningly dark room. There are no windows in the furtive fortress that is the Briggs wall, so there is no sunlight to spill into her quarters and signal the start of the day, as she’s used to. She props up on her elbows and rubs the sleep from her eyes, being extra careful to avoid bothering her shredded palms. The pain in her battered leg returns in a gradual wave as she remembers, with a groan, that there is a hole there, and she is not in Central or the east. She scoots her back into the wall, careful not to bend her pulsating leg, and flicks a lamp on beside her.

The room she’s in is narrow and rectangular. The dim light of the lamp illuminates a rusted metal desk, a small dresser, and the end of the thin cot that is swallowing her, doing nothing to support her throbbing leg. She wonders sourly if these quarters used to be a storage closet. She’s on the same floor as the medical room, whereas other soldiers are housed higher in the wall, and she’s doubtful of her room’s legitimacy versus theirs. It’s a room for sure…and it’s on the warmest floor besides the one underground, which is just what you need, Ryder had told her when she complained tiredly about the cramped space. She’s sure he isn’t a liar, but “warm” and “room” must mean something different to Briggs soldiers than the rest of the Amestrian population. Her body had held shivers all through the night and her quarters are just big enough for a small child.

It takes her a few moments as her eyes adjust to the soft glow of the lamp before she’s brave enough to touch her feet down on the icy floor. She ignores the hollers of her wounds while she shuffles out into the growing familiarity of the wall’s hallways. Unsurprisingly, the first thing to seize her attention isn’t the biting cold or stinging lights, but the smell of coffee and burning sausage. She pulls the door to her room shut behind her and resigns herself to following the allure of the coffee first, her tiredness at the forefront of her mind. Her stomach roars in protest the farther she ventures from the direction of food, but she presses her lips into a tight line and defies its objections. It only takes a few strides before she’s following the aroma of the coffee across the threshold into the medical room.

“Oh, Captain Hawkeye,” Monroe smiles as she pours herself a cup of what Riza is hunting. Her face looks clear, bright – a stark contrast from Riza’s own face, she knows. She touches the deep leathery bags under her eyes. Her fingers ghost over the bruise that lines her jaw. “Good afternoon. I was getting ready to come and wake you. Your wounds need to be cleaned and the dressings need to be changed.” She gestures for Riza to sit, and although all she wants is coffee, she says nothing of it and obeys the doctor. Monroe unwraps, disinfects, and re-wraps at what Riza assumes is a record-breaking speed.

“All seems to be healing well already,” Monroe places her hands on her hips and admires her work, Riza included. “You’re heading out this evening, aren’t you? All the soldiers have whispered about all morning is this undercover operation of yours, Captain. Everyone seems a little star struck. It’s funny, really, because General Armstrong is not easily roused by soldiers and yet she’s taken an interest in you, hasn’t she?”

“I’m not heading anywhere,” Riza replies coolly. She uses the arms of her chair as support while she struggles into a stand. The pressure it puts on her hands makes her wince. “I haven’t agreed to the General’s proposition.” She doesn’t say so out loud, but she isn’t planning to agree - no matter how many times General Armstrong tries to bribe or guilt her - unless she’s allowed to involve General Mustang. She catches Monroe looking at her quizzically; one eyebrow rises as if she’s questioning the validity of what Riza has just said to her.

“You want some coffee, Captain?” She discards the conversation smoothly, quenching the tension Riza’s words threaten to bring to the room. “I just made it. I know it’s a little late in the day, but boy we all had a long night last night.”

What an understatement, Riza thinks. She wracks her brain but can’t remember the last time she’s felt so deflated. Monroe passes a cup to her and she takes it eagerly. She savors the warmth of the ceramic against the bunched-up tissues of her hands for a moment before lifting the mouth of it to her lips and sipping…

“Oh,” she mutters, recoiling. The drink almost dribbles down her chin as her tongue vehemently opposes it. “That’s, uh…”

“Not very good, huh?” Monroe laughs. She sticks a hand out to Riza, palm up, and says, “That’ll be one hundred cens, Captain.”

Riza looks at her in disbelief. “You tricked me,” she deadpans, placing the cup down as far away from her as she can reach.

“You do what you gotta do here in Briggs,” the doctor shrugs, a smirk decorating her face. “I’ll just open a tab for you, how about that?”

Riza sees a tab as a fair compromise considering all Monroe has done for her, and so she nods in affirmation. She silently hopes to be transferred out of the Briggs Mountains before piling too much on to the tab, however. The place is quickly becoming a symbol of discomfort for her. It was built as a divider, a means to keep Amestris from the neighboring, and overtly combative country of Drachma. It’s wrought with constant strain and Riza feels that in her bones the longer she lingers.

“You know, you ought to go to the lunchroom and get yourself something to eat, Captain. Actually, as your doctor I’m going to have to request that you do so.”

“Is the coffee better there?” Riza mumbles the question, half-joking.

“Not at all,” Monroe snickers. “Take the elevator to the first floor. The lunchroom is at the back of the wall. Here, I’ve got you a pair of wool socks and new boots if you want to treat yourself with some comfort.” She picks the items up off their perch on a stool and holds them out to Riza, who plucks them from her greedily. She returns to the chair to tug them on. A soft sigh breaks through her lips as she wiggles her toes inside their new, fur-laced containers. She hasn’t felt something so nice in days.

Riza’s mind reels with the warmth of wool and the promise of smoking sausage as Monroe helps her out of her seat and to her feet. The craving for coffee is lost in its unsavory flavor, so her sights are set on complying with her gurgling stomach. But before she can make her way to the lunchroom General Armstrong appears out of the wall’s hall to block her path. She’s dressed head-to-toe in customary military blues, a heavy winter coat sitting neatly over her shoulders, her blonde hair curling around her round face. The Ice Queen’s sky blue eyes pierce through Riza’s amber ones, making her feel small in her sweats and thin tank top, but she musters up an uncomfortable smile nonetheless. “Good morning, General,” she says, her tone polite but insincere. “I was just about to get something to eat.”

“What a coincidence,” The General responds. She flicks a blonde curl out of her face. “So was I. Why don’t we go together, Captain? The cooks usually prepare whatever cold-infused rations Central sends, but I’ve requested some venison sausage instead. I’m sure you can smell it. A few of my men went out into the trees before daylight broke and bagged a doe or two. All for you and this special occasion.”

“What occasion would that be, sir?” Riza asks drly. General Armstrong grins.

“Come with me and find out, Captain,” she sidesteps to let Riza slip by. “That’s an order.”

Riza’s hunger fades. Suddenly the inviting smell of sausage that was making her mouth water is now churning her stomach. Her stiff hands ball into fists at her sides. She knows General Armstrong is playing with her autonomy, so she stands her ground, her eyes narrowing, her better judgment hiding out in Central with General Mustang. Monroe backs away from the two blondes, her hands up as though she’s surrendering to their hostility. The Ice Queen is aggravatingly unperturbed.

“Come now, Captain, I don’t have all day and neither, frankly, do you.” Riza grates her teeth. Against the wish of every nerve in her body she saunters forward on wobbly legs, her shoulder brushing innocently against the Ice Queen’s as she edges past her. She goes for the closest elevator as irritation starts to swell in her chest. General Armstrong finds her side too quickly, on two healthy legs, and then slows her pace to match the Captain’s.

When the blonde pair reaches the elevator, Armstrong says, “We’re going up to the fifth floor first. Holden is there, as well as a few other people you’re acquainted with.” Riza scowls at the General’s smug tone. “In any case, I’m sure you’re dying to see your man, yes?”

In truth, Riza isn’t. Since her discussion with General Armstrong the evening prior, she’s not been able to shake the disappointment that’s been pooling in her gut. Holden and his men had kept her safe on the train, but it was also Holden who said the enemy would want her that way. It was Holden who suggested she climb out into the freezing wind and snow. Holden seated himself beside her, breaking her view of her General at the Central station. She was constantly available to Holden last night, in one way or another. She’s terrified of the truth that may come from such a revelation.

It’s embarrassing for Riza that she had been so careless, really, and she knows it’s devastating for General Mustang. She so wishes to call him, to ebb his panic, to stuff her face full of sausage and await his visit to the vast mountains…to her, if she’s being honest with herself.

She’s about to voice her concern for Roy when General Armstrong stops with the click of her heels at a door labeled, in big yellow letters, “HOLDING.” Riza knows instantly that this is where her almost-captors are being held: in a small corridor lined with iron cells separated by flaking concrete, as most holding cells in Amestris are constructed. She feels her pulse far away in her fingertips, loud and overbearing, as the General folds a gloved hand over the doorknob to direct Riza inside.

The holding room is not a large room. Two Briggs guards stand at attention against the dead-ended wall directly in front of Riza, and two are stationed on either side of the door she enters through. Fluorescent lights echo off sickly green walls, creating a hideous color that hurts her eyes when she looks at it. She sways onward towards the first cell, the beating in her fingertips making the gashes in her hands ache.

“Well, well, well,” a vaguely familiar voice slurs. Riza’s heart skips a beat at the timbre of it. She turns her head to her left, sticks a lock of her blonde hair behind her ear, and catches sight of the scarred would-be captor as he’s darting his eyes over her form. He looks different under the lights. She was frightened of him out in the snow, under the blanket of darkness, but here she sees he’s no taller than she, no more fit. His scar glints at her. “Captain Hawkeye sure is a pretty one.”

“You can’t tell when it’s dark out, but I'd heard as much,” another voice adds. An arm reaches out at her from a few cells down the block. “Maybe it’s good we didn’t take her to the boss looking like that. They’d be pissed at us for marring her face.”

“Shut up, you two,” a third voice quips. Riza recognizes this one well. It belongs to the person who had almost strangled her to death outside the train. Her throat tingles. “Just shut the fuck up, okay? We’re not supposed to say shit to these people, not a damn thing, but you guys can’t keep your mouths closed.”

“Who are you?” Riza blurts as she begins to fumble down the aisle of cells. General Armstrong hangs back with the guards at the door, her hand resting calmly on the hilt of her small sword.

“Anyone you want me to be,” the scarred man replies. Someone in the cell next to him chuckles. Riza stops her weak advance when she’s in a position where she can see every face occupying each cell. Her body is twitching with each hard beat of her heart.

There’s a woman in the cell adjacent to the scarred man, her blonde hair short around her plump face. She stares up at Riza from her spot on the floor. Her eyes are a friendly turquoise, but she sports a hostile expression. “C’mon, guys, we almost killed the sweet dog. Let’s just give her what she wants, yeah?” A mocking smile grows wide across her face as she says, "My name’s Vato Falman, Captain.”

“I’m Kain Fuery,” a thin man with brown curls waves at her through the bars of his cell. He’s the one who had reached out at her seconds ago. A chill creeps up her spine as he smiles toothily in her direction, his forehead pressed firmly against his iron bars.

“Jean Havoc,” the strangler speaks up. He’s leaning against the side of his cell like a boulder, thick and jagged, and his grey eyes rake over Riza for a moment before settling on hers. “I think of you every time my temple stings, Captain.”

“Heymans Breda,” another woman introduces herself. She’s short; her dark hair almost touches her knees. She wags her fingers at Riza.

The scarred man startles Riza as he comes at her fast, pressing his face to the bars of his cage, stretching his hand out at her. General Armstrong doesn’t move, but each of the four guards in the room cock their guns in unison. “My name’s Roy Mustang,” he coos at her. The tips of his fingers brush against the fabric of her shirt.

Riza fills with a fiery hatred as Roy’s name slips off the scarred man’s tongue. She wants to wrench his arm down to break it at the elbow. She wants to watch his arrogant features distort with pain...

Just as she is beginning to seriously contemplate snapping the scarred man’s arm in half, her attention diverts to the man in the last cell as he loudly clears his throat. She can’t help the buckle of her knees when she tugs her eyes from the man in front of her and finds the face of Holden at the end of the row. He tucks his hands deep into the pockets of his military slacks, and his brows pull together in an angry line over his eyes. She holds her breath. “Holden?” She exhales.

He shakes his head. “My name’s Riza Hawkeye.”

She looks at him, her mouth falling slightly open as she formulates her reply. Assortments of emotions flood through her in turns; sadness, confusion, shame. She discards them all, choosing to act on a flood of fury above anything else. She stalks as best she can to the last cell, and a guard catches her by the waist before she can get close enough for Holden to grab. “It was you,” she seethes. “You’re the reason I’m here. I’ve been shot because of you." Her voice rises. She’s straining desperately against the arms of the guard, her body is trembling and her leg is screaming. Tears burn her eyes.

Roy’s going to think I’m dead because of you. I’m going to die because of you.

Holden glares at her, unmoved. She shoves herself out of the guard’s hold. “I won’t let you win,” she growls.

“You’re fucking stupid,” the scarred man scoffs. Riza moves towards him, gripping at the wall for support now that her calf has been irritated. 

“If you use his name one more time,” she fumes. “I’ll send a bullet through your temple.” He frowns back at her, his mouth snapping shut. She loses her purchase on the wall and stumbles forward into General Armstrong’s arms. The blondes make their way out of the room, and the General helps Riza to the floor so she can catch her breath. The cold concrete feels good against her pulsating calf.

“Holden started saying that early this morning,” Armstrong answers a question Riza was only just starting to mull over in her head. “I don’t say this often, Captain, but I am sorry. It’s the luck of the draw, and you got the short stick.”

Riza softens at the Ice Queen’s words. “You said I don’t have all day,” she huffs. She captures the General’s gaze in her own. “Where am I going, sir?”

Resembool is alive with the sound of sheep and smell of manure. Riza shifts uncomfortably inside a stuffy wooden box as she feels the train stall into a stop. How anyone thought to place a woman with an injured leg in a very square, very hard crate is beyond her. General Armstrong had been adamant about masking Riza from the public eye as effectively as possible, and as a result Riza was carted down the mountains of Briggs in a large iron water can. She was convinced then that nothing could have been more humiliating, until she and her company made it to the northern train station and she was quite literally dumped into her splintering carton.

She hears a station attendant announce the arrival of her train. Her feet tap imperceptibly against a wall of her box as she patiently awaits her Briggs escorts. Sticky sweat stings the wounds on the back of her head and keeps her hair tucked against her neck. The feeling is smothering and exasperated by a humidity that hangs low in the air, so she leans over to press her lips to one of the “air holes" someone had carved for her. The breath she sucks in from the cargo car of the train is no better than what she gets from inside her musty container. She pulls back and slumps against the wood.

Heavy steel latches unhinge noisily. Riza realizes the sun has gone down when light fails to filter into the car at the roll of the cargo door. People shuffle about around her, scuffing luggage and other things across the floor, and she listens to them wordlessly as they chatter about how much they detest their evening shifts. She’s thinking she feels the same about her work when her box is jerked and she’s dropped a few feet onto a pallet outside the train. The movement causes her calf to pulse painfully. She grabs onto it to stifle the vibrations of the wheels of a cart as they begin to bump along on gravel. 

“That one’s for the Edward Elric boy,” Ryder’s voice echoes from somewhere above Riza’s head. “Be careful with it. Who knows what he's ordered, it could be easily broken.”

Thank you, Ryder, Riza thinks. She has much to thank him for later, out loud. He had been the first Briggs soldier to afford his services to Riza back at the Briggs wall. When General Armstrong finished briefing Riza on details of her undercover operation, she called for Ryder and a few other soldiers who had been out in the snow with Riza the night before. She gave them a choice between picking up slack at Briggs and spending a few months in the heat of Resembool, and Ryder gave Riza a thumbs-up before offering himself to the reassignment. Malik and Scully were quick to follow his lead, and the three men clad themselves in civvies and trekked their way through knee-deep snow for Riza’s sake. Now they’re here in Resembool with her, and she's endlessly grateful.

Someone hauls Riza and her wooden cage up and deposits both much more delicately onto what feels to her as truck bed. The thing dips at an angle when she’s placed on it, and she hears someone clamber around her with ropes clicking against her walls. The truck’s weight rebalances as someone fastens her firmly to the cab. It starts to life just seconds after she feels her three companions file into it. Riza’s nose fills with the bitter smell of burning fuel for only a beat before the car picks up speed and a pleasant breeze leaks into her box. She urges herself back toward the air holes and closes her eyes while the misty night wind sweeps over her face. 

Her elation is only fleeting. Even over the growl of the truck’s engine and the whistle of wind through the wooden air holes, voices drift into her ears. She can tell her men are trying to be discreet. She knows they think that wind and rumbles and the patter of loose rocks against the car mask their words. But she inevitably hears his name coming off one of their tongues and her hands hover around her ears, ready to muffle their voices into unrecognizable mumbles. She had managed to keep him out of her thoughts as she traveled, and she wants desperately to continue to do so.

“I heard Mustang hung up on General Armstrong after she told him the Captain was dead,” one of the men hollers. Riza can’t tell which one but she wishes that they would roll their windows up. “Lieutenant Havoc had to call her back…then Mustang just lost it. What’s rumored is he snapped half his office into flames.”

“Good thing the Führer’s a fan of his or else he'd lose his job, " someone responds in disquieting amusement. Riza's chest tightens and her hands inch closer to her ears. She doesn't want to hear about General Mustang's reaction...and no one at the wall had pressed her to, when the time came for him to react. Even as General Armstrong paced in her office, phone in hand, General Mustang writhing on the other end of the line, Riza kept her mind far away, and people respected her decision to do so. No one uttered his name at the wall, not anyone but the Ice Queen, who Riza spoke to in private for over an hour after her outburst in the holding room. They discussed Mustang heatedly, with Riza pressing incessantly for his involvement. In the end Armstrong's logic triumphed over Riza's pleas.

Riza's fingers find the hooks on the inside of her box that keep the lid locked shut. She unfastens them frantically, and the top swings up and over the edge of the truck bed to rattle against the sides of the car before tumbling onto the dirt road. "Please stop," she wails over the cacophony. Her chest is heaving with shallow, dizzying breaths. "I can hear you.”

"Is everything okay?" One of the men calls upon hearing the crash of the box's lid. Riza says nothing; she only pulls herself up far enough to eye Ryder through the rearview mirror. There is understanding on his face.

"You shouldn't be sitting up where someone can see you,” Malik says, his eyes flicking from the road to Riza and then back again.

"It's too dark for anyone to see her," Ryder assures him. Riza sits her back flush against the wood of the box to give her legs room to stretch out. The wound on her calf burns. She rests the back of her head on the perimeter of her de-lidded container to turns her face up to the starry sky.

He set fire to his office? she thinks. Her hands grip the rim of her box. She watches hazy clouds move over the backdrop of the moon. It's uncharacteristically warm in Resembool for autumn, and it rarely rains this far east, yet there is moisture in the air that starts to collect in her eyes. She runs the back of her hand over her face to smear the tears before they can roll down her cheeks.

General Armstrong decided on Resembool after speaking with Edward Elric only minutes before leading Riza to the holding cells. He'd been frenzied, calling repeatedly, demanding to speak with the general of a military he was no longer a part of. She bestowed on him the truth of the matter after realizing the Elric household could be a fine hideout - a temporary training ground - for Riza. "They have unique skills they can teach you," the Ice Queen had said to her. "You can’t waltz into a terrorist organization that’s that acquainted with who you are and expect them to overlook your affinity for guns. Those boys can teach you how to fight differently, and keep yourself safe.”

Fight differently, huh? Wind pulls her hair off her syrupy neck. How so?

Something heavy slams into the bed of the truck then, kicking Riza out of her thoughts and almost vaulting her out of her box. She pivots in place to stare blankly at a face shrouded by the shadow of the clouds under the moon. The truck jerks to a stop almost instantaneously. “Who are you?” Ryder demands as he stumbles from the cab with his gun in hand. Riza screws up her face. Her eyes strain to see through the frost of light coming from the sky. The person is tall, lean, and carries something in their hand that is shaped suspiciously like a hatchet.

The stranger flips from their position on the bed. They land with a crunch of dirt beside Ryder, who grunts when they kick his gun out of his grasp. Malik scurries up the side of the truck to help Riza from her box. She keeps her eyes on the fight between the stranger and Ryder, who’s doing all he can to keep the assailant’s attention. Scully joins the fray, whirling around the front of the truck to train his gun on the enemy. Malik tips Riza onto his back. “Give me a gun,” she says to him, and he obliges. The weapon feels good in her palm. She curls her fingers around the handle, rests her elbows on Malik’s shoulder.

Her attacker glances in her direction, sensing the Hawk’s Eye, and she loses them as they dip behind the truck and reappear beside her. They use the shaft of the hatchet to knock Malik in the knees, and his legs cave with pain. Riza’s feet touch down on the graveled road with a thump and she wheezes audibly when the motion sets her calf on fire. She recovers expertly, as fast as she had faltered, dropping to the ground so the stranger can’t take advantage of the wound in her leg. Just as she’s fixing the barrel of her weapon on her attacker’s chest, they outstretch a hand to her, and she recognizes their face as they sink to her level in the dirt. 

“I’m sorry,” they say, their golden eyes blinking at her in the dim light of the night. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Alphonse?” she asks, lowering Malik’s gun. Al nods at her in affirmation, blonde hair bounding around his face. 

“Alphonse Elric?” Ryder inquires, striding around the truck. “What the hell are you doing? Where’s Edward?”

“Brother and I thought an initial assessment of the Captain’s abilities would be fair,” Al answers. “He sent me because I fight best between the two of us. We weren’t told that she was injured like this, though…” He offers his hand to her.

“You could have been shot,” she says, ignoring his help. “Worse, actually, is you could have been killed, Alphonse, and then what?” Ryder puts a hand on her shoulder but she shrugs him off. “There’s enough for me to be sick over about this whole operation and I don’t…and I can’t…” she lets the sentence hang.

Al studies her face, his bottom lip quivering with an apology. Riza sees General Mustang’s face behind her eyelids as she blinks, slowly, achingly slow.

“We’ve never been teachers before,” Al tells her, bowing. “We were only trying to do it the way we were taught. I really am very sorry, Captain.”

Riza puts a hand on his head, her exasperation melting away from her thanks to his sincerity. “It’s fine, Al. Let’s just get going.”

Edward is waiting for them on a half-built porch as they pull up in their truck to his work-in-progress of a home. He’s been building the thing since Riza last visited Resembool, almost six months ago, and she notes that he’s come a long way from where he started with flimsy beams and an unstable foundation. She peers at him from around the round curve of the truck’s cab, still mildly agitated by the boys’ "assessment." He waves at her, and then Winry appears from behind him to wave alongside him. The sight forces Riza to crack a soft smile, even though she’s trying her best to be stern.

Al leans over to her, cupping a hand around her ear and whispering, “Brother is trying to grow a beard. Pretend it doesn’t look awful, okay?” He winks at her and she suppresses a chortle. As the truck settles into a stop Al resets himself so he’s kneeling in front of her, and she takes his cue by attaching herself to his back. It feels good to bypass putting stress on her leg, and Al walks carefully to avoid sending any flutter of movement through her calf.

“Hey, uh,” Winry hops down from her porch steps. Al bends back to help Riza touch down gently on the soft grass, and she finds herself being taken immediately into Winry’s arms. “What’s the name we’re supposed to call you again?” she whispers into Riza’s ear.

“Emilia Enfield,” Ed says, his voice carrying across the front yard. Riza’s escorts fan out from the truck, expertly scanning their surroundings. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Nice beard, Ed,” Riza replies from her spot below the steps. She hears Al’s palm make contact with his face. Winry giggles. Ed’s face flushes under his bright porch light. “I didn’t appreciate the little jump scare on the road, you know. But I…I…” she wants to remain firm, to reprimand him, but her throat is swelling and her voice is cracking. She loses the point of what she’s saying.

She feels warm in the presence of the Elrics.

She’s unsure of where the sobs come from.

She grips Al’s forearms on her way down into the grass. Winry follows her, her hands settling comfortingly on her back. Ed makes his way to her, concern layering his face, and takes her shoulders in his hands to keep her from dipping forward. She lets her face fall into him and swipes her tears over his shirt.

“It’ll be okay,” he says. “It’s going to be okay.”

Chapter Text

Roy can climb the hill. He can walk up to the short line of Hawkeyes flanked by two family names he doesn’t know or care about, and he can stand over the freshly turned dirt while they lower Riza’s body into the earth. He can listen to the guns go off, he can hear their wailing, clench his fists, and grit his teeth, but for what?

Being near her cold, hard body won’t bring her back. It won’t put color in her cheeks or light in her eyes. It won’t give the shine back to her hair or make her say his name one more time, please, Riza, please.

They wouldn’t even let him look at her. They brought her body back from the mountains in a black bag. What he was allowed to do wasn’t much but watch as someone split the bag around her face so he could see the blue where pink had been, the bruise over her eye and the few that littered her chin like fireworks in a pale nighttime sky.

He’d reeled back from that. He remembers using the wall to push himself away from her. “General Mustang,” the coroner, a tired looking young woman, had touched his arm. “I know this is hard, sir, but please. We need confirmation that this is Riza Hawkeye, and you’re the only other person she’s listed in her Living Will.”

“I don’t want this,” was all Roy could say. This being the responsibility that Riza had left him. She’d listed all of two people as her preferenced: Roy and her grandfather, Führer Grumman, and somewhere at the back of Roy’s mind he’d wished she would have left it all to the Führer. Grumman would have done fine, he wouldn’t have raised so many brows, he could have walked into the cold, ice blue room and stared into the battered face of his granddaughter and said, “Yes, that is Riza Hawkeye,” and left it there.

But she’d printed both of their names on that paper, and Grumman was unavailable, and he’d said to Roy earlier that day, “Gracia buried Hughes and you will bury Riza, my boy.”

So Roy had signed those papers, effectively giving himself over to the legality of Riza’s death. He confirmed Riza’s cold, dead body was hers. He bought the casket, the headstone, and emptied her apartment. Rebecca Catalina had been there for much of that. She’d rifled through Riza’s things and found old photos, and gifts from years of holidays, and she pocketed the ones that connected her and her friend. “Is it alright if I keep these, General?” she’d asked him as they neared the end of that day. He’d been confused about why she would ask his permission, as if anything of Riza’s was his, but he nodded to her anyway.

“Keep whatever you’d like,” he’d said.

He had to make a decision about where to bury her only a handful of days later. Her father had bought a plot of land back in the east, on a hill that overreached high into the sky and would blot out the sun during sunrise, and Roy wanted to lay her to rest there. She’d be buried next to her mother, and so far away from him that he wouldn’t be tempted to spend his nights with her, so out of his reach that the smell from the soil that would clot around her fine wooden box wouldn’t linger too long in his nose.

And so Roy doesn’t climb the hill.

The chauffeur drops him at a row of trees that frame a thin, rocky path. He can see the morning sun shining down through the leaves, and it creates a pattern on the dirt, and when the wind moves the pattern moves with it and the rocks twinkle like stars. It’s a pretty hill, he thinks, and turns away from it.

The Hawkeye home is where he goes instead. He doesn’t know why, but something draws him there. He thinks that maybe it’s the familiarity of the general store off Quaker and 280, with its high windows filled to the brim with all manner of pistols and rifles. Or maybe it’s the library, the columns out front still tilting with the crumbling foundation, even a decade-and-a-half later. It could be the post office where Riza mailed his academy registration forms for him so his master wouldn’t know; the small gym that seems to have been transformed into a daycare; the liquor store with its mint green paint job; the pool that would turn to a murky brown in winter and vibrant blue in the summer.

In the end it was none of those places, and his chest starts to ache when he sees the trees that curve around the Hawkeye home in a half circle. It starts to ache so bad that he thinks he might be collapsing in on himself, and so he has to stop walking, and he makes a fist in his jacket and plants a hand against a street sign and he heaves in some air.

The air burns like a fire in his throat.

When he starts walking again it’s with a kind of conviction. The Hawkeye house is his now, and right now it acts as his own personal museum. Riza never visited again after she left for the academy, and Roy hadn’t either. He knows how untouched it is. He knows there's over a decade’s worth of dust and grime on everything inside. There is a picture on the mantel over the fireplace of a young Riza and her mother with Berthold’s arm draped around them, because Riza had left it there. He knows the second to last step down the stairs creaks loud enough to stir Berthold during one of his naps in the basement, and the dining table is cracked from one corner to the other from a botched alchemic experiment of his. He knows these things. He knows them, and that’s why his chest tightens with the promise of a breakdown, and why his feet keep dragging him forward.

He can’t bring himself to go inside. Maybe he could have if the house had been transported somewhere else, where the whole of Riza didn’t live around him in a series of flashbacks and a rush of nostalgia. It’s too hard here, he thinks. The woods she used to hunt in every morning as the sun came up leer at him, and they seem to say, She’s still in here. We have her. She lives with us.

Come and take her back.

The house looks more than battered. Half of the roof is caved in, the beams that once supported the tattered, leaky roof now jut out at each other, and reach across a chasm where the living room lies. The front door leans against the door frame, the hinges on the steps glint and wink and inside Roy can see, just where the sunlight manages to reach, a dry mist over the couch, the sharp edge of the fireplace, the rich brown of the floor. Weeds zigzag up the concrete foundation and some break out of cracks in it too, growing halfway up the house and littering the tan brick with rivers of green.

His fingers snap before he knows he wants them to, and he’s made completely aware that it wasn’t the recognizable surroundings that brought him here… It was an immeasurable need for closure. He sends the first flame straight over the threshold of that front door, and it explodes, and he sees those reaching beams splinter and fall together. The second flame goes to one of the second story windows, into the room where Berthold died, and it feels so good to watch that floor flicker, and feel the heat erase that piece of the past. Roy sets the front yard on fire next, the foundation, he melts the paint right off the brick and keeps snapping until the woods quit talking and Ed’s hand is on his shoulder.

“What the fuck, Mustang?” he spits. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Leave me be, Ed,” Roy says.

“General Mustang,” Grumman says, coming around the bend of trees, “compose yourself.” Roy spares his Führer a glance, sees the disbelief and anger so plainly on his face, and then turns back to the fire. It’s eating the house like he’d doused it in oil.

Seconds roll by and as they do, other funeral goers find their way to Roy and the mess he’s made, and he offers no one any explanation. He figures Grumman knows whose house this is, but Ed keeps pressing for details in his ear, loud and unwavering, and soon his unit is there, and maybe they have a clue because none of them say a thing. They stare into the flames like Roy, solemn and silent.

“You’re such a bastard,” Roy hears Ed mutter, but even he stills by Roy’s side and let’s the heat from the fire burn at his face.

General Armstrong orders a few soldiers to find water, buckets of soil, and the aid of willing townspeople. She comes at Roy when she’s done barking her orders, and she slams a palm into his shoulder, shoving him back. “What are you doing?” she hisses at him, and while Grumman’s fury is obvious, Armstrong’s is palpable. “You were supposed to be at her funeral, you massive dumbass,” she says, “and you weren’t. You’ve been here, burning things, being a fucking fool.”

“General Armstrong,” Roy starts, his voice leveled and cool, “back off.” She regards him for a moment, something more than fury flashes across her face, but Roy barely acknowledges her. He looks past her to the fire, to the way the house is bending under its heat, already turning to ash in places. The beams touch and straighten out into one another as the roof falls away from them in clumps. Soon the whole thing will cave in.

And suddenly the nostalgia catches up with him, and he’s dizzied by the memory of the place, by the way the past doubles over on him here.

It’s like a switch goes off in his brain.

Ed’s hand, warm and non-metallic, slides over his back and rests there; not quite a comfort, but better than nothing. It’s cathartic, Roy thinks. Burning this house is like a therapeutic experience for him, and even as his hands catch his face when the sobs come, he feels better after having done it than he did before.

Someone’s arms find their way around him. Winry? It doesn’t matter. Strangers are mingling with his friends and he’s all hefty breaths and soggy hands and the thought occurs to him that generals don’t behave this way but generals don’t fall in love with their adjutants either.

That was where he’d gone wrong.

For one sweet moment, in between the gulps of air, somewhere over the shouts of the easterners as they work to tame the fire, Roy hears her voice. Doubt, she says.

Doubt what? he thinks.

Everything.

Everything, he repeats. Then he wipes the tears from his eyes and looks over Winry’s head to the flames lapping at the morning sky. They wouldn’t let him near her. He was allowed to look at her badly bruised face and nothing else. They had their doctors look her over; their doctors identified her on those mountains. He had his doctor do that once. Maria Ross.

Doubt everything.

Chapter Text

“Sweep!” Ed commands from his spot under the shade of his porch. Riza grunts when she fails to sweep and Al lands the butt of his hand on her sternum. She staggers back, and he hovers in front of her on seemingly weightless legs to let her catch her breath before he starts for her again. “You have to sweep, Emilia!” Ed repeats.

He uses her new name easily, like it’s all he’s ever known.

Riza spares herself half a second to glare at him. She knows she’s supposed to sweep, she’s been working at this drill for days. Her back aches from the persistent training, fresh bruises sprinkle her skin, and her joints feel stiff and immobile. The ghost of her gunshot wound still screams wildly at her.

Al had done wonders for her leg by hastening its recovery with alkahestry, yet a dull pang still lingers there. He takes advantage of this weak spot by going for it incessantly during their spars, making it difficult for her to avoid advances from multiple angles. And she favors throwing punches over landing kicks…

“Ugh,” she gags when his hand hits her in the throat. She’d been so preoccupied with where his kick was going to land that she didn’t notice the incoming jab. She blinks the sting away. Ed sighs animatedly.

“Sorry,” Al chirps breathlessly. A smirk sits comfortably on his lips. “You have to engage that leg though.”

Riza glowers at him over the film of sweat that’s pooling above her eyes. She pulls the hem of her shirt up and rubs it over her face, swiping the blur away. Globs of sweat stain the fabric to a darker shade of blue.

She goes for Al when she regains a clear sight and feigns a shot to his left. He takes the bait and swings his forearm up to catch her, but she pivots on her heel and pulls a right swing instead. He sidesteps away from her as he finds her movements on the periphery of his vision. Sweep, sweep, sweep, she thinks…

…the smell of soaked brick and concrete fills her noise, partnered with the sound of boots sloshing through puddles of rainwater. She feels the smooth, comforting metal of a gun filling her palm; the jolt of momentary terror; she sees drops of rain dripping off dark hair; she can feel the tug of her stiff uniform as she flips into the colonel’s leg, knocking him off his perch of perceived invincibility…

Al’s fist is milliseconds away from connecting with Riza’s gut when she drops low, twirls on the ball of her foot, and sweeps his feet out from beneath him. He thuds into the dirt with a satisfyingly audible loss of breath. She pants beside him, her mind stuck on a cloudy day years away.

“I’ve seen that move before,” Ed says as he steps over to the training partners. He helps Al up from his spot on the ground. “I was waiting to see if you would replicate that.”

“The general was easier to overcome than Al,” Riza says. She stays on the ground, her hands wrapped tightly around her now pulsing calf. “The rain was a helpful lubricant too, if memory serves me right.”

Al dusts his butt off. Puffs of dust and dirt flit around in the air. “She was able to get me after just two weeks of training, Brother.”

Ed makes a face. He crosses his arms. “Yeah, okay?”

“You’ve still managed to do that only once in a decade,” Al grins. His golden eyes sparkle with mischief.

Riza cups her mouth in her hand and laughs. Ed shoots her a look, and she quickly attempts to disguise the laughs as coughs. Al sucks in a snicker.

Ed’s cheeks darken to a heated pink. He screws up his face and whirls his focus onto his brother. “Let’s go a round,” he sputters.

Al shrugs as though he’s uninterested, but Riza can tell he’s instantly revved up for the spar. His stance widens expertly to give him a larger surface area for balance, and his hands move out in preparation for Ed’s advance. Riza has yet to be on the receiving end of a serious spar with Al, and she hopes that she never will be. He looks almost predatory as his eyes narrow at his opponent – at his brother. A smile plays on the corners of his lips.

Ed takes a few steps back, pacing a bit as he stretches his arms out behind his back and rolls his head to loosen any stiffness in his shoulders and neck. Riza shuffles backward in the dirt just as he leaps forward and twists in the air, attempting to nail in a hit on Al’s temple. Al’s quick, though, and he catches Ed’s ankle in his hand before sending him flying over his shoulder with the momentum of Ed’s own movement. Ed almost falters, but plants his automail leg in the ground to steady himself. Stabilized, he rockets toward his brother again.

“Sweep, Edward,” Riza calls to him, a bit smug. “You have to sweep!” She smiles at the golden brothers as she tosses her head back and lowers it into the green grass of Resembool. She fans her fingers out over the damp earth and looks into the blue of the eastern sky, which is pleasantly untouched by smoke or dust. The Elric boys’ huffs disappear into the clouds as she watches them creep across the sun.

Riza’s found that the east holds a charm she hadn’t noticed before as the daughter of a recluse or the bodyguard of a general. She appreciates the quiet, the occasional bleat of sheep, and the hum of trains passing by in the distance. It’s all much more lulling than the bustle of Central, and she sleeps better under the black-blue and twinkling sky than she ever did under the musty, ever-present lights of the city…or on office couches.

She’s been in Resembool for just eighteen days. This near three weeks spent with the Elrics is all it’s taken to convince her that the country of her childhood is something she misses. The large, rickety house she shared with her father and his apprentices isn’t a thing that usually weighs heavy on her mind, but the longer she lingers in Resembool the more often she finds herself thinking of it.

Something like longing settles in her chest as the east reminds her that she is no longer concerned with hunting game in surrounding woods and splashing around in muddy creek waters as she did when she was a child. There will be no forbidden swapping of knowledge between her and the scrawny city boy after the lights go out on a long day of study. She will not cook stew with her spoils from a day of shooting; she will not bring snakes home to let them loose on her housemate’s bed; she will not have silent, but pleasant dinners with the one person she has ever desired such a thing from.

The east she longs for is not the east she knows now. Her priorities have shifted.

After Riza’s sobs under the night sky weeks ago had subsided, Al had made quick work of expediting the healing of her hands and calf. She’d showered plastic-free that night, Winry keeping her company in a small guest bathroom lined with children’s bath toys and flowery wallpaper. Riza worked through every step she’d taken in the past seventy-two hours meticulously as hot water pelted at her back. Winry had broken her recounting with a question.

“What made you decide to do this?” she’d asked, a little shyly. As though the subject may be a sore one.

Riza had thought briefly of the terrorists in the wall’s holding cells. She’d seen the nauseating green behind her eyelids, heard their voices in the hiss of the water through the shower’s spout. She decided rather quickly that she didn’t want to revisit that encounter, so instead she’d shifted the conversation to the cold of Briggs. She talked about her small box, about how badly she wanted to leave the north. Winry had laughed when Riza told her about Monroe’s coffee because, “Ed still complains about that stupid coffee.”

Eastern days pass Riza by like a dream – something she is present for but can never quite wrap her mind around.

Up until her leg was healthy enough for her to put stress on it, Riza had endured late night logistics briefings over the phone with General Armstrong that usually lasted until the sun was kissing the night sky. They left her feeling dizzy and drained, and yet Ed still grilled her any second she had free about Emilia Enfield. She would sometimes wonder if he was testing her patience instead of her knowledge.

The whole of it was suffocating.

It wasn’t long, though, before Riza had become heavily acquainted with her new “life,” and a lifestyle she hadn’t even begun to live. Sometimes she truly feels like Emilia Enfield – more so than Riza Hawkeye. It’s especially so when she looks into the mirror at the hair Al had transmuted from a corn-colored blonde to a light, chestnut brown. Or when she reaches at her hair in the shower and comes up empty-handed because Winry had taken scissors to it until the tips of it barely brushed her shoulders.

“We need something more,” Ed had scrutinized her. His thumb and forefinger framed his chin. His head cocked to the side. “Anyone can change their hair color. You need a more…permanent modification.”

“What else would you have me do to my body, Edward?” she’d asked him, a little exasperatedly, with a little too much bite in her voice. Al had informed her that he might never be able to transmute her hair back to its original shade. What was more permanent than that?

“Nothing that can’t be undone,” Ed had amended. He’d put his hands up in surrender, obviously sensing her dissatisfaction. “We only need people to think it’s permanent.”

Riza had caught his eyes flitting to Winry, who lit up at a silent suggestion.

Somehow, some way, Winry found a way to craft an automail cast. She’d managed to spend an amount of time Riza felt she didn’t have measuring Riza’s arms, and fitting pieces of cold metal to them.

The cast, made of steel and a certain percentage of chrome, coats Riza’s fingertips, forearm, and ends in the crick of her elbow, where it’s tied off with a thick blue ribbon to hide the lack of surgery-induced scarring people with prosthetic limbs always sport. The first prototype took Winry a week to make useable, even with alchemic help from Al. Its fake joints had caught Riza’s sensitive skin when she moved, and so Winry had to draw back to her workshop – a corner of the Elric house’s living room where she kept a desk littered with bolts and screws and blueprints.

The second prototype incorporated a soft spongy material that acted as a buffer between the metallic automail and Riza’s delicate flesh. Sweat wasn’t able to escape through it, however, and so Al had transmuted nearly invisible holes into it and the cast itself.

This third, supposedly breathable prototype was one Riza had been waiting days to meet, although not eagerly.

Completion of the cast means Riza will begin her hand-to-hand training anew. She has basic movements and techniques down, but will need to learn to prioritize the automail arm and move with it naturally, as though she’s had it for years. She’ll be expected to shower with it on, cook, sleep, and more.

She has to be taught to take it apart too, and to put it back together. Thinking of attempting to puzzle more information into her brain makes her head feel fuzzy. How can she be expected to add that to her list of things to learn, to remember? She’s unsure she’ll be effective at dismantling intricate pieces of a very specialized prosthetic with the weight of what feels like a year’s worth of new knowledge floating around in her head.

Sighing, Riza curls an arm over her eyes. Automail casts, new identities, undercover operations…she just wants to sleep, truthfully. Out in the eastern grass, preferably.

But no one will let her rest, not for long.

“Breakfast!” Winry announces from the threshold to her home, pulling Riza from her musings. She wrings her hands in a yellow apron blotched with dark stains from automail and cooking grease. Riza lugs her head up in time to catch Ed pause in his fight, his eyes settling fondly on his wife. Al takes advantage of his brother’s momentary lapse and sweeps his feet out from beneath him.

“Well,” he breathes after Ed has hit the ground. “I win, Brother.”

Ed rolls his eyes. “Whatever,” he replies. “We’re coming, Winry.” He takes Al’s hand, which yanks Ed onto his feet. Riza joins them at eye level, her stiff joints crackling uncomfortably with the movement.

“Oh Emilia,” Winry waves to Riza. “I have something special for you!”

Winry looks so eager; Riza feels she has to smile. So she does, though it’s mostly empty. Al gives her one sympathetic pat on her back before she follows him and Ed into the Elric house. The brothers seat themselves at the kitchen table, where they’re met with plates that are overflowing with breakfast sausage, eggs, and homemade biscuits dipped in honey.

Riza is only able to skim the tips of her fingers over her seat before Winry’s arm intertwines with her own. “You can eat in just a minute, Emilia,” she says, forcibly leading Riza toward her brightly lit automail corner. “If I need to make adjustments, I have to know now. Before the day’s really begun.”

“You just can’t wait to see her in it,” Ed comments through a mouthful of food.

Winry ignores him. She gets to her desk and scoots leftover nuts and screws into a pile at the edge of it. She scoops her automail masterpiece into her hands carefully. It blinks in the light with un-scratched, un-blemished metal. She holds it out to Riza, who sucks in a breath as she holds her arm out for Winry to fasten the pieces onto.

The spongy material is less spongy than Riza anticipated and much thinner, as though it’s adhering to her skin as Winry presses down on it. It suctions against her arm and stays firmly in place when Winry begins to clip lightweight metal over and under Riza’s forearm. She attaches the small finger pieces in their precise sequence: proximal, middle, and then distal. Riza has to fan her fingers apart to allow Winry the room she needs to snap the thin metal together.

When she’s done, Winry pulls back with her hands on her hips and watches as Riza furls and unfurls her fist. She pushes her hair behind her ear, tugs at her shirt, and tries to pretend the metal is her muscle, skin, blood, veins, and bone. “It feels good,” she says.

Winry’s eyes light up. “It looks good.”

“It’s not pinching me,” Riza tells her. “I can even feel a bit of air on my skin. You did an amazing job, Winry, thank you.”

Riza swings her arms up and stretches them above her head. The soft material in the cast drags against her skin almost imperceptibly.

“Hey,” Winry points a finger at the long road winding toward her home. “There’s a car coming this way.”

Riza turns. She hears Ed and Al’s silverware clink against their plates and their chairs scrape against the floor as they move to the large living room window that faces the front yard, and the road. Riza spies Ryder strolling toward the house at a hastened pace, Scully and Malik walking fast from their posts to flank him. Her heartbeat picks up.

Scully, Malik, and especially Ryder never leave their posts... Riza hasn't seen them but once or twice a day since they arrived in Resembool, so to watch them coming to the house so frantically now makes knots of uneasiness come together in her stomach.

The front door creaks open, and Ryder flies into the room. He places his hands protectively on Riza’s shoulders, and blocks her from the window’s view. “Emilia,” he says, a little breathless. She can hear the panic in his voice. “Hide.”

Winry takes Riza by the elbow and leads her to a small space under her stairs, a closet of sorts that would have been used to store shoes if Al didn’t transmute it into the steps specifically for Riza’s use. Riza ducks in with practiced care, having gone through the motions for a situation such as this one before.

Ed and Al were big on running drills.

Ryder, Scully, and Malik park themselves in various corners of the living room and surrounding areas.

“Keep hidden,” Ed tells them. “If any of these officers recognize you it could be bad for us.”

Officers? Riza thinks. They’re military?

After helping to hide Riza’s guards, Al joins her under the stairs. He squeezes past her, shuffling until he’s positioned behind her. He smells like his breakfast and it makes Riza’s stomach growl. “Al?”

“I’m supposed to be in Xing, remember?” he reminds her. Of course he is. He’s always supposed to be in Xing, she remembers, and he'd only come back to Resembool at the request of Ed and, by extension, General Armstrong - they needed his combat and alchemic skill. It would be too suspicious if Al came back to Resembool now when he's made himself a home in the country of Xing with his girlfriend and her family, so his move back to Amestris has been kept a secret. Ed sent his children to Xing three weeks ago so they could visit their Uncle Al, or that’s what he and Winry told the people of their gossipy town. The Rockbell-Elric children and Pinako are really staying in the Emperor’s heavily guarded palace, probably eating too many sweets with May and enjoying buffered knife lessons with Lan Fan.

Riza nods and presses herself to the door to give Al more room in the stuffy hiding place.

She waits as minutes pass in a tense silence until she hears the car stutter to a stop in the yard. Someone knocks on the door. Ed answers, Riza listens to his polite, “Hello?”

Then her heart stops.

“Ed,” General Roy Mustang’s rough voice spills into the air. The sound of it forces chills through Riza’s body. She feels Al stiffen behind her. “Please, let me in.”

Riza presses her hand to the door in front of her. She crushes herself into it, trying to steal a glance at the general through two panels of wood. Al touches her new metallic arm and tries to coax her back. She ignores his urging. Her mind is occupied by the image of Roy tucked sloppily into his uniform. Deep purple bags hang heavy under his tired eyes. He looks thin, unhinged. 

“I don’t see why not,” Ed replies coolly. He steps aside to allow the general’s entrance. Riza’s heart swells at the sound of his boots clicking against the floor. The front door creeps to a close. “Where are your guards? What are you doing here without them, General?”

“I can’t breathe at headquarters,” Roy answers. He rakes his fingers through his dark, but greying hair. “‘I’m sorry for you loss,’ ‘Captain Hawkeye was a colossal loss,’ ‘Your whole team must be hurting.’” He finishes his recanting of typical condolences with a light scoff.

“I’m sure they just don’t know how to interact with you right now,” Winry offers. “Not many people have been around you without her there too.”

Roy chews on his lip. “Surely they can shut up anyway,” he says.

“Are you okay?” Winry asks, a genuine concern layering her voice. “We haven’t seen you since the funeral. You know, since...”

Ed holds a hand up to her and she pauses. Riza’s breath catches hard in her throat. She almost chokes on it. The funeral. Edward and Winry had attended Riza's "funeral" only days after Riza arrived in Resembool. She hadn't had the stomach to ask them about it - or, admittedly, the nerve - but now she wonders, and her mind lingers on the tone of Winry's voice...

Roy takes a step back from the couple, and something like regret flashes over his features. He sets his jaw. Riza waits for him to retort, to say something about what Winry had been referring to only seconds ago. Instead he slides his hands into his pockets and hauls in a breath.

“That has nothing to do with anyone but me,” he tells them. “I just thought…" he shakes his head. "I think maybe she’s alive.”

“You buried her body, General,” Ed reminds him. Roy cringes. Riza clutches at her chest; it’s filling painfully with the threat of a sob.

He buried a body transmuted from a bear hide.

“No,” Roy almost wheezes. “I buried something, Ed, but it wasn’t her.”

Riza slams her eyes shut. She pushes her forehead into the door hard enough to imprint the lines of wood into her skin. The cool darkness of the space under the stairs overtakes the warmth of Al behind her. She feels suffocated, everything that enters her ears is twisted and muffled; the metal on her arm begins to burn.

Quickly, too quickly, her heartbeat skips into a sprint. She isn’t aware that she’s breathing so fast and shallow until Al tugs her into him, as he’s done before, and winds a loose hand over her mouth.

“You can’t make any noise,” he whispers in her ear. “I’m so sorry.”

Ed says something Riza can’t make out over the sound of her rapid breaths.

“I don’t feel right,” Roy gasps. “I don’t sleep.”

“You should,” Ed says. “What are you here for, General?”

“Truthfully,” Roy says. He motions to Ed’s automail leg coming out from the hem of his shorts. “I’m here to see that.” Angry red scars flare out around the buffed metal where it meets Ed’s flesh, like branches sprouting from a tree. Roy touches his eyes. “I sometimes wonder what they would take this time.”

Riza almost doubles over, but Al’s arm winds around her waist and keeps her sitting up. She begins to worm out of his touch, and he pulls back. Her hand finds the spot over her mouth where his had been before, and she catches her shallow breaths in his place.

“You know nothing will come of that,” Ed says, his voice steady. “Whatever you bring back will not be Captain Hawkeye.”

“I know,” Roy responds. “I won’t do it, Ed. I’ll keep looking for her. Dead or alive, I’ll just keep looking. That is all I have left.”

“The country,” Ed says. “You have that. Hawkeye would never forgive you if you let it slip through your grasp, you stupid general.”

Roy smiles. Not his cocky, crooked smile but a jagged, broken one. It’s gone from his face just as fast as it had appeared.

Suddenly, the front door to the Elric house is wrenched open, and Maria Ross is standing in the doorway. She’s panting, sweat coats her face, and her hand is curling tightly over the doorknob. “General Mustang,” she says curtly. Disapprovingly. “You can’t just disappear, sir, it’s dangerous. Edward, Winry, I am sorry to barge in like this. I’m not sure what it is about State Alchemists that causes them to ditch their escorts but, really, it’s not okay.”

Ed gives Ross a small smile. “Nice to see you, Ross. Get the bastard out of here,” he says. The tone of his voice is gentler than his words.

“That was fast,” Roy says, sighing. He gives Ed a small smile and wave before he turns on his heel and follows Ross out the door and into a gaggle of other officers who urge him into his car. Riza’s hand parts with her mouth and she digs her nails into the floor. She wants so badly to follow him.

She sits back into Al until the cars vanish into small hills. The shadows of her guards collecting into the living room signals that the coast is clear, and so she fumbles with the knob to her door to let herself out of the stuffy space under the stairs. “That can’t happen again,” she says to Ed; to Winry, and Ryder, Scully, and Malik. “I can’t do that again.”

Al helps her to her feet.

“Edward?” she’s almost stammering, her chin quivers with a cry she’s fighting. Tears burn the backs of her eyes. She wipes a metal hand over her face, forgetting its there. The realization that it is draws shivers to her spine.

She stares down at her automail cast, feels the sudden weight of several pairs of eyes on her. She turns the arm over in front of her a few times. Ed stalks toward her.

“Come on,” he says, tugging at her shirt. Her tears drip smoothly off the metal coating her arm. “You’re going to spar with me.”

“Edward, I don’t feel like…”

“Come on,” he repeats. “It’ll make you feel better.” He peeks out his front window, making sure no one is around. It’s easy, out on his hill, to see for miles.

When he’s sure the military cars aren’t coming back, he pushes Riza gently out his front door and into his yard. “Arms up, plant your feet. Don’t forget to sweep,” he says.

“Edward,” Riza tries to protest again but he doesn’t give her the time. He comes for her, a bit slower than his brother, and she whips out of his reach so fast that her tears flick off the corners of her eyes.

Riza can hear Winry protesting from the porch, but Ed keeps going at her, determined. “What’re you afraid of?” he asks her between kicks and punches. “You think the general will try human transmutation? Don’t you know better than to underestimate him?”

Riza loses her footing skirting away from one of Ed’s kicks. She almost falls back first into the dirt, but Ed catches her by her metal arm. He ticks his index finger against it. “Fight with this,” he tells her. To Winry he says, “We need the ribbon, please.”

Winry hesitates, seemingly disapproving of Ed’s comfort methods, but disappears into her house anyway and reappears seconds later with a thick, deep blue ribbon. She tightens it around the crick in Riza’s elbow, where the automail cast ends, then rejoins the others on the porch. The ribbon is stiff and tight against her skin. She straightens and curls her arm repeatedly, watching the way the ribbon catches the ends of the cast and masks its abrupt drop off onto her arm. 

“Riza,” Ed steals her attention from Winry’s work with her real name. “What made you decide to do this?”

Six pairs of expectant ears turn their attention on her.

“I’m scared,” she says, firm. The fighting had dried the tears from her eyes. “Scared enough to go after them. I don’t want the country the general and I have fought for to fall to hate...not again.”

Ed smiles and voices no reply. He beckons her into the spar, and this time she obliges. She goes for him first, surprising him by making a move with her still sore calf. He almost misses his cue to dodge and fumbles backwards. He throws his leg up, meaning to land a hit near her jaw, but she juts her metal arm out. The impact rings as a tingle against her skin.

“Good,” Ed says, excitement lighting his face. “The arm’s not ideal, I know, but it does come in handy.”

“What happened at my funeral?” Riza pants the question at him, catching him off guard. He takes slow steps around her, and she turns with him, waiting for a reply.

“You were buried on some hill out in the countryside,” he says. “There were only a few families’ worth of graves, yours included. The stupid general, he…he torched some house off the road. Turned it to ash. The Führer was pissed. General Armstrong was even more pissed.”

“My father’s home,” Riza forces in a breath. “He burned down my father’s home.”

Ed stops moving. “He didn’t say that’s what it was. He didn’t say anything.”

“That’s what it was,” she affirms. “And it’s not like it truly matters to me, Edward, so don’t look so defeated. It belonged to me but my death means it belongs to the general now - or the Führer. They won’t miss the house, and neither will I. Not dead, and not even alive.”

It’s only partially true. Riza had been aching for the house for weeks, but she really won’t miss it. The man who compels her feelings for it doesn’t live there, not anymore, and she doesn’t ache for the thing when he’s around.

The east she knows now is not the east she knew then.

“Again,” she says, bringing Ed’s attention back to their spar. She taps a finger on her automail cast. “I need to use this, right?”

Chapter Text

Riza remembers the burn of the sands best. Seasons don’t exist as far out east as Ishval, and in tents filled to the brim with moist, sickly air she’d hoped for them more than a dozen times. She thought she’d be able to bear the hot, grainy ground better if the dial on her thermometer would drop a few degrees. She would have disappeared into the earth if it had. Suffocated deep beneath the surface, her lungs would have filled with the sands tinged with Ishvalan blood she helped spill. The people she killed would have buried her.

There is a light coming through Riza’s bedroom window that casts eastern heat across her floor. She steps into it, ready and willing, and closes her eyes. She lets out a soft sigh as it stings the soles of her feet. She can almost feel the sand between her toes, the way it crunches and shifts under her weight like an ocean tide. But with the familiar sensation comes familiar sounds: moans of butchered soldiers, pops of rifles, the pleadings of innocent people, the sobs of children. The dissonance lives in her heart. It’s been easier to gag since Riza’s been at the Elric home, where everything is made of the quiet. Resembool wakes every morning to the small chirps of birds, the far-off bark of a dog. She wakes to the sizzle of Al or Winry cooking on the stove, to the smell of dry wood and, when the wind blows right, fresh manure. Standing in the stinging ray of sun, all she smells is melted flesh and the iron of blood. All she hears are nightmares.

She decides to drown the faraway echoes of the past with a glance in her long mirror. Her dark hair doesn’t feel as foreign as it did weeks ago when Al first transmuted it. It had taken her a long while to stop avoiding her own face. But she’d watched as everyone around her erased Riza Hawkeye and drew from thin air Emilia Enfield; a woman who’s troubled past bathed her in hatred. “You need a plausible reason for hating Ishvalans,” Armstrong had said. “You grew up in Central and moved east just before the conflicts began. Your parents lost their lives to Ishvalan refugees as they were attempting to flee to Xing. You lost your arm trying to protect your family.” Riza’s sure that story makes Emilia’s hate plausible, but not justifiable. The Ishvalans killed to defend; they killed out of fear. Amestrians killed to control. She huffs at her reflection, at Emilia. She watches her shoulders bounce with the hard exhale. Her hair just barely scrapes the tops of them. She reaches for where it used to hang over her shoulder blades, right above the bottoms of them. She’d worked hard to grow it out after she last had it chopped off.

Roy will be disappointed to see it’s been cropped again.

Riza lends a long look to her metal arm. It glints in the eastern sunlight. It winks at her. It, her brown hair, and the missing holsters at her hips are constant reminders of what she’s doing. No guns. No General Mustang. No Riza.

He’ll just be glad I’m alive, she amends.

Her eyes skirt to the scar carved into the side of her neck. Roy’s wild eyes live there on her skin, his hoarse cries, the way he almost yielded to the homunculi’s deranged doctor. She winces. How can she have done this to him? What does this choice make her? Courageous, a voice inside her insists. Cowardly, Riza bites back. She’s ashamed to be going back to Ishval as someone else, as a terrorist. Emilia’s aim is to bring pain to Ishval. Riza’s already done that. Will she do it again to keep herself and her general safe? Or is to protect the country and its fragile relationship with its most marginalized citizens?

She decides she’ll blow the mission before she ever raises a weapon to Ishval again. Not a coward.

The rap on her door is abrupt enough to rip her from her thoughts. “Emilia?” Winry says through the door. Riza knows it isn’t possible, but she wishes Winry had called out her real name instead. “I have the dress. And the shoes…and the bra, and lipstick.”

Lipstick? Riza has been anticipating a dress, maybe a pair of heels, but lipstick? She hasn’t worn any since she was a girl playing in the things her mother had left behind. She’s never even worn it on a date, or to military balls with the general. But, she concedes, this is Winry, and Winry is an engineer with her own line of automail. She sets out to put a personal touch on anything she can, Riza included. “Come in, Winry.”

Winry opens the door and peeks around it. Her face is bright and her grin is beaming. She’s holding the lipstick between two fingers, and Riza can see that it’s a deep shade of red. She swallows her dissatisfaction and manages a smile for her young friend. It’s the least she can do considering all Winry has done for her. She hasn’t seen her children in almost a month. She hasn’t seen her grandmother either. Yet she is still amiable. Pleasant. She’s made sure from the moment Riza fell to her knees in the yard that Riza knew the Elrics were family, something Riza hasn’t had since she was a small child. She’ll miss Resembool. She’ll miss food on the table she didn’t prepare herself, and she’ll miss the toys strewn across the floors, and the floorboards that whisper with movement. Riza’s childhood house had - from the moment her mother died until her father’s final apprentice appeared - been a trap. The only sounds it bore were the ones created by her, and occasionally by her father’s frustrated outbursts in his musty cell under the house. In his basement, in the room Riza had always managed to avoid until the night her father decided to finally acknowledge her, to include her in his life. By pricking his research into her skin like she was hot wax waiting to be pressed.

She sometimes lets herself wonder about what Roy might have done if he’d found out sooner. Would he have killed him? Maybe not. Probably not. Roy admired her father, and she knows that he saw her father’s coldness but Roy has always been like a moth drawn to a flame. He can never break free of his incessant need to get closer to alchemy. She’d never made him feel bad for that. Her feelings for him, and his for her, weren’t what he came to her father for. The goal was always to become an alchemist, and whatever relationship they developed was an addition. Like hitting a mark twice.

Still, she can feel the fire of his anger in her back, in her bones there.

“I know you probably don’t want to wear lipstick,” Winry says. She tugs Riza into a sit on a small stool. “But you’re supposed to be seductive.”

Riza restrains a snort.

“I packed a few other things for you,” Winry continues. “More dresses, of course, and a few pairs of shoes I picked up in Central. More makeup.” She winks.

“You shouldn’t give Ryder more to move,” Riza says. “He’s already spent weeks putting my apartment together. You’re going to drive him crazy if you give him too much to cart into Ishval tonight.” He’ll be high-strung enough just getting me there.

“Look, Em, you’re moving tonight,” Winry juts her bottom lip out in a convincing attempt to pout. “I’m going to miss you. I’ll feel better knowing you’ve got some of my things to aid you in your operation.”

“Clever excuse.”

Winry only smiles in reply and tugs a dress off her shoulder. She holds it up the way an auctioneer might. “So how’s this?” she asks. It’s a short, slim burgundy dress. Riza spies a long slit in the side where her thigh will be visible, and a long neckline that will end somewhere around the bottom of her sternum. She swallows hard. Winry turns it around in her hands. “I know it shows a lot of skin,” she says, sensing Riza’s apprehension. “That’s why it’s so perfect! You'll definitely catch some attention with this. Besides,” she goes on tentatively. “The military paid for it and you get to keep it, which means you can show it off to General Mustang.”

Riza raises a brow in disapproval.

“Okay, sorry, I was just thinking that maybe there could be silver lining to this.” She pulls the dress apart by the shoulders. Riza’s breath hitches.

It’s backless. Her scars start to itch.

“Is there any other dress I can wear, Winry?” she asks.

Winry dips her head to the side. “I gave the others to Ryder already. They’re on their way to Ishval. Why?”

Riza wrestles with the urge to blurt to Winry that she’s been scratch paper for an alchemist before. The lines on her back light like a match. She can feel the blisters sprout up over her skin. They travel through the trails of ink and burst over her scars, reminding her where they are. She arches her back against the uncomfortable ghost of a burn.

“My father,” she says. The words are caught somewhere between an exasperated exhale and a confession. She turns and tugs at the buttons of her blouse. She watches Winry’s face go slack in the mirror as the shirt pools into Riza’s lap. She drops the lipstick, the dress, and other items onto Riza’s bed before she kneels behind her. She pulls a hand up, and her index finger follows the lines of Riza’s tattoo like they’re roads on a map. Her hand dips and dives, tracking deadly secrets no one but two men had ever made heads or tails of. She retreats when she reaches one of the burn scars.

“Your father did this to you?” she asks, disbelief clouding her voice. Fathers don’t do these things. Not where Winry is from or as far as she’s concerned, anyway. Riza knows that in Winry’s mind fathers dote on their children like Hughes to Elicia; they cuddle their children when they fall in the yard; they teach them to read late at night when the rest of the house is already sighing softly with sleep. But Riza also knows that the desperate fathers are different. The Shou Tuckers, the Berthold Hawkeyes.

She clutches her shirt tight to her chest. “Yes,” she says. “It’s not as bad as it seems.” The thin imprints of ink were the product of hours of her father pricking at her skin, but the ugly blotches that broke the lines were her doing. “My father was an alchemist who wasted away researching and developing a new kind of alchemy. When he finished his work he carved it into my skin to keep it safe.”

“Keep it safe from what?” Winry asks, her fingers returning to the alchemical map. She picks up where she left off tracing the dark curves. Riza makes a conscious effort to stay still under her touch.

“Alchemists,” she answers. “This alchemy my father manufactured is devastating. It could drive the world to hell if the wrong people came to posses it.” Hadn’t it already done that? She gave the alchemy to Roy over a decade ago and with it he created his own hell. Complete with dead bodies and the screams of victims. Out in the sands of Ishval, she and Roy used flame alchemy to put the final nails in the coffins of hundreds of Ishvalans. And Riza was going to go back, not as a diplomat but as a terrorist. Undercover or not the thought left a knot of disgust in her gut.

“This alchemy you’re talking about,” Winry hesitates. She takes a breath. “It’s flame alchemy, isn’t it? The kind General Mustang uses. He has the flame on his glove, and the salamander too.” She puts a finger on the flame between Riza’s shoulder blades and slides down to where the salamander is nestled into the crease of her back. “You showed this to the general? Or did your father show him?”

“Edward never told you anything about this?” Riza picks her eyes up from where they’d settled in her lap. Through the mirror she can easily see that Winry is struggling with the weight of what has been said to her. “I suppose he didn’t need to. The information must have been pertinent at the time but I guess you didn’t really have anything to with it.” Ed had come to her with a borrowed gun coated in old blood. She’d told him everything, all those years ago.

Winy shakes her head. “He didn’t tell me much of anything back then. He’s not one to divvy out other people’s private business anyway.” She waits. “Is the general the one who scarred you?”

“General Mustang was my father’s apprentice for a time before he joined the academy. I knew him well enough to know that I liked him and his ideals. When my father stuck that needle in my back he gave me the right to his knowledge. So I gave it to the general.” And then I followed him to war.

“‘The Hero of Ishval,’” Winry says. “He used the alchemy you gave him to fight in a genocide.”

“After that nightmare of a war I commissioned him to burn bits of my back so that this alchemy could never be learned by another alchemist. I’m the one who trusted him with research he used to massacre people. The least I could do for them was be sure it couldn’t ever happen again.”

“That’s a huge burden to bear.” Winry’s voice is tinged with sympathy. “You couldn’t have predicted that the general would do what he did. He couldn’t have predicted it either. Everything happened because the homunculi made it happen. It isn’t like you could have refused to fight for them...” But she sounds unsure, even as the words leave her lips.

It’s okay, Winry, Riza thinks. There is no excuse and that’s okay.

“How are you going to hide this from the terrorists? Have you shown this to General Armstrong?”

“No one but you, me, General Mustang, and a carefully-selected few know about this,” Riza assures her. “Armstrong doesn’t need to know. It’s not important. I’m not concerned about it.” Though that isn’t entirely true. Until Winry just did it, Riza wasn’t sure anyone would be able to make the connection between the pattern on her back and the simplified version on Roy’s gloves. But she wouldn’t need to take her shirt off in front of anyone anyway, right? She managed to hide the tattoo during her time in the academy so this can't be much different...right?

“I’m worried about it,” Winry says. Then she stands. “I’m going to take this dress to Al. Maybe he can stretch the fabric over the back with his alchemy. The way Ed used to with Al’s armor. It’ll be thin but it’ll do the trick.” She leaves with Riza’s dress and returns minutes later, her expression more relaxed than before.

“He did a great job,” Winry dangles the dress in the air. Riza admires the high back that will touch the notch of bone between her shoulder blades. She lets herself smile.

Then it fades as she begins to dress.

What am I doing? The doubt creeps through her chest again.

She shimmies out of her pants. The sun is starting to set, closing like a curtain over the first act of her mission. When it opens again tomorrow morning, she will be Emilia Enfield. An Emilia Enfield she hasn’t been before. What will Emilia be asked to do as a terrorist? Assuming she gains the right person’s trust, will she be expected to cut people down? Will she have to make moves against General Mustang? Riza shakes her head in hopes that the thoughts gripping her will jerk away. Winry helps her into her dress, zips the back over her scars and tattoo. She watches herself in the mirror. The dress tugs and presses at her curves, forcing them to stand out. What am I doing?

But she knows what she’s doing. If she pulls this off then Roy will be safe. She will be safe, and Ishval will be safe. She can’t falter, not now, not after the fight in the mountains and the melting of her childhood home.

She probably would have given anything to be a different person at some points in her life. When she was younger she’d prayed to a god she no longer believes in to have rounded cheeks, for her eyes to soak up the sky and turn blue, for her nose to keep from curling at the end. She didn’t want to look like a Hawkeye. She didn’t want her father’s crooked nose and sallow face. And she never adopted those features. General Grumman had told her once that she looked like her mother. Back then, that was the greatest thing he could have said to her. Now, she stares at her reflection in the mirror and aches for her blonde hair; for the automail cast to fall off; for the dress to leave a little to the imagination.

Riza has never seen Ryder so worked up. The first time she’d met him he’d carried her out of the cold ice of Briggs and to Monroe, the Briggs doctor, and he’d been so smiley. When they got to Resembool, though, he’d gone steely. She saw him only when he napped on the Elric’s couch, or when she took breakfast out to him at his post behind Ed’s project of a home. It’s like a switch was flipped in his brain. His eyes always dart from one place to another, over the horizon and up roads, and sometimes Riza misses the Ryder she knew so briefly at the wall. She feels something like guilt for helping to turn him into a stern bodyguard, something he was obviously never meant to be. She leans forward in her seat and places a hand on his arm. His eyes flick to her through the rearview mirror. It’s okay, she urges. But he’s already back to studying the tightly packed buildings of Ishval.

Riza sucks in a sigh and sits back. She’s uncomfortable in the back of the car, in a tight dress that makes her feel exposed. The dusty breeze squeezing through the cracks of the busted-up windows of the car skates over her bare collarbone, over her legs and up her arms. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and she tugs the hem of her dress down lower over her thighs.

Even in the dark Riza knows which bit of Ishval Ryder is steering through. In the daylight everything is misted with sand. It hangs high in the air, always in her hair and settling like snow over small tent tops, pulling them down until Riza worries they may collapse on their occupants. At night it’s cool enough for the city to come alive. Merchants and holy men fill the space between tents and steadily rising buildings. They sell sandy goods – anything Amestris gives them. Canned goods, usually, but sometimes fruits and vegetables too. It had taken the Ishvalans generations to culminate their gardens because the sands this far east were not friendly to life, and so those had been what King Bradley hit first. Roy had the sense to employ botanists early on in his reconstruction project. When the council denied his request, he found them on his own. He pays them with his research funds.

The car fumbles along on the rocky Ishval road that goes straight through the city. Amestris had plowed it to make it for their scientists, alchemists, and military to have a point of reference in the city. Ishval was difficult to maneuver otherwise. Everything was charred; most buildings were still piles of rock buried into the sands. It was easy to get lost in the debris. The road led people from Eastern Headquarters to the temples of Ishvalan priests, to the slums where most military were stationed. It led alchemists seeking a chance to play architect to the Ishvalans who would turn them away, claiming they would rather their city be built by hand than the science that had destroyed it.

Riza had been to the end of the road once before. When she first visited Ishval as someone who had a hand in its reconstruction, she and the general traveled out to the slums that flirted with the desert. She’d thought it smelled like the war. She remembers the bile that clawed at the back of her throat when she saw the children were glinting with scrapes filled with dirt. Their parents and grandparents found her with heated anger in their eyes. Still, she’d brought totes of food, antibiotics, jugs of water. She helped gives baths to the kids, she made soup and broke bread for families, and she tweezed glass and rocks from feet and hands. It had been a start.

Ryder clears his throat. “We’re almost there, Emilia. I’ll escort you to the apartment and then drop Malik and Scully at the bar. Do you remember where it is?”

“I remember,” Riza says. It’s past headquarters, past the rubble, near the slums. The Drooling Dog. A little shack that sits snug against the border to the vast desert that separates Amestris and Xing. Her apartment is a considerable distance from it. She’ll need to hail a ride, but that will not seem overtly suspicious to any onlookers. Besides, she can’t show up to the bar with Malik or Scully. They’re supposed to keep an eye on her as two anonymous men who just so happen to be at the bar while she is. Ryder is the only person from her pre-Emilia phase whom Riza is permitted to interact with. Ryder, and her handler Lieutenant Colonel Miles.

The apartments were one of the first things built in Ishval by the Amestrian government. Plenty of Ishvalans live in them, and plenty of soldiers do as well. Riza had been skeptical about staying in this new, well-known building with people who may or may not have seen her face well enough to recognize her, but General Armstrong hadn’t been concerned. The Amestrian soldiers living in the apartments were field workers, people who erected beams and constructed concrete walls, and Riza had spent much of her time in the east at headquarters, listening to progress reports and giving a few as well. The chance that her neighbors will recognize her is low.

“We’re here,” Ryder says. He settles the car into a park. To Scully and Malik he says, “I’ll be back. Stay vigilant.”

Riza waits for Ryder to open her door. Malik and Scully duck behind her to keep from being spotted by any curious person who may be lurking. Ryder taps her window with his knuckles and she fans her dress out over her knees, her heart hammering against her ribs. This is it, she thinks. Her door creaks open, the battered car sinks and lifts with her weight as she leaves her seat. The noise is awkward in the hum of the night. Ryder takes her arm, and she’s glad for it because her heels are unsteady over the uneven ground. She takes the stairs to her apartment carefully, one hand clamped tight over Ryder's bicep.

To anyone watching, it looks as though she and Ryder are returning to her apartment from an expensive date in one of the larger neighboring cities. She’s certainly dressed for one, and he is too. His suit was tailored perfectly. Al really is good at using his alchemy to alter clothes. He’s a half a foot shorter than Ryder, and yet he’d broadened his coat’s shoulders and lengthened the legs of his slacks. Ed had grumbled only minutely about Al’s suit having been an expensive gift, but Al was quick to remind him that Ryder and Riza’s safety was more important. And it wasn’t Ryder’s fault that he didn’t think to pack formal clothes when he left for Resembool.

The bright light in Riza’s new apartment is jarring after her hours spent driving to Ishval in the dark. She releases Ryder once he’s let the front door creep to a shut behind him and rubs at her eyes, dully aware of the multiple voices fluttering around her in whispers.

“Emilia Enfield,” someone says, and she blinks hard against the light, feeling like she’s trying to see underwater.

“Yes?”

“I'm Lieutenant Colonel Miles. We’ve met before.” He offers his hand. Riza takes it. “I’m sending you to Drooling Dog with Sergeant Reynolds. You’ll arrive with her like she’s an old friend, and then part ways when she leaves with Malik. She’s never worked the east before so there’s no chance she’ll be recognized. Scully will stay in the bar until you’ve either made contact or left.”

Reynolds steps forward to take over shaking Riza’s hand. Her vision begins to solidify and she sees Reynolds is dressed similarly to herself, and the realization that she isn’t the only person on display in the room is comforting. “Nice to meet you,” Reynolds says in a charming rasp. Riza notices that she’s pretty, with blue-grey eyes and deep honey colored hair. Her cheeks dimple when she smiles. “I do this kind of work a lot. Drachma is my station of preference, but General Armstrong came to me with a proposition and, well, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be a part of something like this. Defending one of General Mustang’s subordinates means he’ll owe me one.” She winks.

“The Drooling Dog is supposedly Jaeger’s favorite bar,” Miles says. His voice carries the same cool authority that General Armstrong’s carries. The room stills. “You’re not to go near it after tonight, Ryder. You’ll leave this apartment with me when we get the signal from one of my men on the roof. Bostic, Royal, Zuniga, Garza – you were hired because you’re good at being invisible. You’ll tail Reynolds and Enfield. When Reynolds leaves the bar, Bostic, you’ll follow. The rest of you become Enfield’s shadow. You’ll be her messengers, her compass, her map.”

“Wait,” Riza says. She wasn’t familiar with over half of those names. “Who’s Jaeger?”

“That’s what the bastard calls himself. Jaeger. The noise on the street is he’s the guy who hates General Mustang enough to target him.” Reynolds crosses her arms. “No one knows his real name or what he looks like. Most of what we know is just what we’ve heard from bartenders, a few civilians. The Drooling Dog is just a lead, honestly.”

“How will I know if I’ve found him?”

Someone else speaks up, a small woman with a shaved head and gloved hands. “He’ll fish for your feelings on the reconstruction, most likely. If you catch his eye, that is.” Her eyes flick over Riza. “I don’t see that being a problem. Anyway, if you tell him you hate it, or that you want the general dead or something, he’ll probably just tell you who he is. Anything to get a girl into bed, if that’s the way he swings.”

Not happening.

“All of his moves against us have been erratic, sloppily-planned. He behaves more like an entitled child than a calculating terrorist.” Reynolds adds.

“He’s still a terrorist. He’s the most dangerous man in this region when General Mustang isn’t around. Approach with caution, Enfield, and don’t move on your own.” Miles’ tone is stern, controlled. He demands the ears of everyone in the room. “We run the risk of involving eastern soldiers if we cause too much of a stir. I’ve heard General Mustang has been sniffing around with his own informants. If we give him a reason to mobilize, I don’t think he’d think twice about doing so. Covers could be blown, lives could be lost if that happens.” Miles’ eyes find Riza’s. Five other pairs follow.

“Is he here now?” Riza says. If they’re going to anticipate it then she might as well ask.

“That’s unimportant,” Miles answers.

“He came to the Elric’s house in Resembool, I’m sure you know. I didn’t blow cover then and I won’t now.” Riza remembers how hard that had been. Trembling with her hand over her mouth in a crawlspace that felt cold and suffocating as Roy stood in ruin just feet from her.

“He’s here,” the bald woman shrugs. “I tailed him this afternoon. We’ve gotta keep tabs on where he is, what he’s doing.”

He and Riza can’t cross paths. Of course they’re tailing him. She sighs, admittedly relieved that someone she can communicate with has a direct line of sight on him. How is he? She wants to ask but the words dissolve on her tongue. Now is not the time. She’s standing at the center of a group of people who are putting their lives on the line for her, and they deserve her unwavering attention.

Miles clicks his heels together and though no one is dressed in military blues, everyone responds.

“No mistakes,” Miles says. “Don’t drop the ball.”

Riza soaks in the people around her. Reynolds, Ryder, the four lean, small people who she assumes must be Bostic, Royal, Zuniga, and Garza. She’ll discern who is who later. Her eyes find Captain Miles’ red ones. His hair falls free from its usual tie at the back of his head, and he’s dressed in tattered robes so he blends in. Riza snaps a hand up in salute. Her gaze never leaves his.

“Stay alive," she adds.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

I killed his best girl. The declaration vibrates in the sands under Riza’s feet. Then it floats in the air, travels in the ground, and is carried throughout Amestris over roads, into ears, into his ears, and through tunnels until it loops back to sit in the satisfied smirk on Jaeger’s face. He looks at her with a kind of vulgar amusement, like he’s waiting to be praised for his cowardice, selfishness, dirty, lowlife, garbage -

“You did, did you?” Riza prompts, and breaks the urge to ram her palm into his nose. Her skin is crawling under his touch but she’s plagued by her own amusement despite the sensation, the anger. She was under the impression that convincing Jaeger she was someone else would take more effort than she’s so far exerted, but it appears to her now that his head is so inflamed with his own ego that he’s willing to forgo caution to impress someone with his supposed murder of the formidable Flame Alchemist’s best girl. Never mind that he’s touching her right now, and feeling her life beat into his fingers. “You killed Riza Hawkeye?”

“It was in the papers,” he says, “didn’t you see that? ‘Captain Riza Hawkeye killed in terrorist attack at the base of North City.’ Quite a read. There’s even a picture of General Mustang next to the column. He looks so…defeated,” the word shutters into her ear, “and like someone’s just stripped him of his very being. It’s so satisfying. I have copies I can show you.”

“He’ll come for you,” she says with too much bite in her voice. The promise had come from somewhere in her gut, and it had come without warning. She backtracks, quickly. Emilia wouldn’t have said a thing like that…not in that tone, with all the venom. “That’s why you’re asking how I feel about the Flame Alchemist?”

“Yeah,” he says, and pulls away. He eyes her as he does, and one of his brows raises. She can see the cogs turning over in his head, possibly processing the way she had just spoken to him. Her hand grips her automailed forearm. She hasn’t begged for a gun so hard since Briggs. “You’re not, are you?”

“No,” she says truthfully.

“All right, then,” Jaeger rolls his head around on his shoulders. His men lower their weapons in response. He runs a hand through his hair and for a moment Riza’s reminded of the way Roy does the same, sometimes to push the stress out of his head but mostly to act as though he’s uncaring, seemingly relaxed even when he isn’t.

Jaeger moves in ways that make Riza feel uneasy. She isn’t afraid of him, not really, not right now, but his movements are those of someone who has nothing to fear. He stalks around like he’s got everything figured out - the way Al would move around Riza during their mock fights, all wide angles and sloppy footwork. He’d known he would beat her, he was so sure he would make her fumble, and he always did until she had swept him off his feet that day and he landed with a thud in the dirt. He hadn’t seen that coming because she was an inexperienced hand-to-hand opponent and that made surprising him easy, but Jaeger was just a man facing the efforts of a military, of the Flame Alchemist, of General Roy Mustang. There was nothing he could have up his sleeve that Roy couldn’t sniff out and burn up, so why was Jaeger so confident? What made him so indifferent to the forces he was surely going to face?

It couldn’t just be the men on the periphery, those guards. There had to be more to this man that Riza wasn’t seeing, or hasn’t been shown yet, and the she wills herself to linger on the feeling of uneasiness in her gut because she didn’t do that back at the Central station, or on that train, and it’s how she ended up where she is now. Jaeger not recognizing her isn’t enough for her to let a fraction of her guard down let alone feel amused by his ignorance. People in this region fear this man for good reason, she reminds herself, and I should assume caution when in his presence at all times.

“Jerry,” Jaeger addresses a man with squared shoulders and an ugly, deep scar over his right eye where his eyebrow should be, “find Marsh and let him know it’s done. I want the team to head back. There’s nothing to do tonight,” he eyes Riza, “not anymore.”

“What was there to do?” Riza asks, and tries not to sound too interested. She adds an inflection to her voice like the ones Roy’s girls use when they go on their dates with him. It makes everything that comes out of her mouth sound like a tease, and Jaeger responds with a grin.

“Come back with us and we’ll tell you,” he says, playing along. “I won’t talk about it out here. Let’s go, sweetheart.” He offers her his hand.

“My name’s Emilia,” she tells him, and ignores his hand.

“Emilia,” he tastes the name on his tongue. “That’s pretty. A pretty name for a pretty girl.” He looks down to his hand and then back to her before he pockets his hand. His head cocks a bit to the side. “You said you’d come with me willingly. Where’s that willingness, Emilia?”

“I have friends in the city. If I leave without letting them know where I’m going they’ll get military police involved.” They won’t. They know where she is now, they saw her go down the hill and they would be watching and waiting for her to come back up, but she needs to touch base with them before she leaves. She has superiors to answer to and can’t disappear on them.

Jaeger watches her, a strange calculating look on his face growing, and shrugs his shoulders. “All right,” he says, “you’ll find me when you’re done.” An order, not a request.

She nods, but stays put in her spot in the sand. She doesn’t want to risk them following her back to the apartment, and so she waits for Jaeger’s men to move ahead of her. Jaeger is the last to go, his hands still tucked deep into the pockets of his pants. He pauses halfway up the hill to turn back to her. “You don’t want us to know where you live,” he says, “but we already do, Emilia, so why don’t you go ahead and go there?”

Fear slithers up her spine like a snake. Of course they know where she lives. They wouldn’t approach her without knowing that much, and they had to have followed her out to this water tank from somewhere. She wonders how closely they watch her apartment. Have they seen the people creeping from her window to the roof? Do they know Ryder’s face? Reynolds’? The possibility twists her insides.

But her guards haven’t seen anything out of place. Bostic hasn’t either. Surely if they had they would have said something.

“Right,” Riza says, and moves, “of course you do.”

She can hear him chuckle quietly behind her as he follows her up the hill. It feels like she’s being tailed by a ghost, something there that may be a threat but she can’t touch it or stop it. Not yet, she reminds herself. But when Jaeger is near her she feels like she’s been knocked off balance - he’s the physical embodiment of something foreboding. He’s a violent promise, a massive question hanging heavy in the air. What will he do? Is he just playing with me?

At the top of the hill, her feet sinking into the sands, Riza parts with Jaeger against the glow of the merchant’s lights down below. He holds his hand out to her again like he’s saying let’s shake on it. He’s daring her to leave and never come back, she thinks.

Or this is a sign of respect, she hopes, and takes his hand in hers. He grins at her, his teeth glint in the yellow lights, and says, “Your friends, that man and those women who always come and go,” he tugs her closer, “fuck up and you’ll watch them die.”

Ah, she thinks, there it is…that bloodlust I felt when I first saw him…

“That’s callous of you,” she manages to keep her voice firm, “but I won’t fuck up so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

He lets her go. She wraps her hand around her forearm.  

“I sure hope not,” he says, and turns away. Riza watches him descend the hill, some of his men flank him and others go separate ways, tucking their weapons away under their shirts, in their jackets. They won’t go through the merchants near those military police, and Riza tries hard to track them as they leave, but she can’t keep up when they fall into the dark, parting from the lights like waves against rocks.

It doesn’t matter. She practically stumbles down the sandy hill as she begins to run for the road, wanting nothing more than to get back to her guards and send them after Jaeger. She needs to confirm that they’re safe, and she needs to call General Armstrong and Miles and she has to leave, and go to wherever Jaeger will be. She has a feeling she knows where that is. She’s only been to a few bars in Ishval since she’s been in the city, and Drooling Dog is where she’s been most. He’ll be there, where he’s apparently always been, watching and waiting for her.

The road full of merchants is a welcomed sight. Riza’s panting hard by the time she reaches it, and she has to slow a bit to weave herself through the crowd of people like a dog through a tightly-packed herd of sheep. She can’t get the picture of Jaeger’s face out of her mind, and the way he’d made her feel relieved and then terrified, like he’s playing at a game she doesn’t know of yet.

Sellers try to stop her and she has to put her hand up at them, pausing momentarily to let someone cross her path or avoid tripping over a child. When she’s made it from one curb to the other she takes off again, that feeling Jaeger conjured up in her gut serving as fuel to keep her feet moving one after the other. The hot hair whips through her hair, cools the sweat as it comes to her skin, and she glances in the direction of eastern HQ and hopes that Roy isn’t there, and if he is there she prays Jaeger doesn’t know. The idea that a man like him could be so close to a man like Roy makes her stomach drop, and she wills herself to go faster.

The streetlights of her complex shine like beacons. She slows once she falls into the warm glow of their light and doesn’t start running again until she’s in the stairwell, climbing two to four steps at a time to get to her front door. She swings that open hard on its hinges when she reaches it, and she hears someone from the roof call out to her. “Em?”

Riza throws half her body out the window and yells, “Follow him!” into the night air. To her surprise, no one argues. She watches her guards stick to the wall like frogs until they’re at the fire escape just a floor below Riza’s. Royal gives her captain a small salute before they descend the ladder that leads to the next fire escape, and sink into the darkness of an alley.

Riza is heaving in air loudly now. She can see just how far she’d run as she’s looking out at the merchants from her window. Adrenaline, she thinks, and then remembers Jaeger and pushes off from the sill of the window. She needs to call Reynolds so Bostic can fetch Miles and Miles can phone General Armstrong. I need to -

But the feeling of something whizzing past her face stops her. It’s nothing but an old habit that makes her reach for a gun at her hip, and when there isn’t one she curses herself for letting the precious seconds tick away. By the time her hands have searched her hips then traveled back up to curl into fists in front of her face, whoever had thrown whatever at Riza was standing by the door and blocking her only fast exit.

“I know who you are,” they say in a sing-song voice, their long, dark hair swaying with the toss of their head from side to side. “Captain Riza Hawkeye.”

Riza lowers her guard minutely. “I’m not Riza Hawkeye,” she says, though unconvincingly. This person has caught her off-guard.

“You can’t fool me,” they say, “because I’m Jaeger’s version of Sergeant Chloe Reynolds.”

Riza swallows a bought of anxiety and weighs her options in her head quickly, so she wastes no time on emotion. This person could be lying about knowing Jaeger, but whether they are or aren’t is mostly irrelevant. They know who Riza is, and they know who Reynolds is. If they don’t work for Jaeger then this knowledge they’ve acquired is good as dirt because Riza is sure he won’t take information like this at face value from just anyone. However, if this woman does work for Jaeger then Riza and her team are in trouble, possibly jeopardized.

I can’t let them leave this apartment with this information intact.

In as swift a movement as she can manage Riza drops to the floor and grips the abandoned bourbon bottle she and her friends were drinking from just an hour earlier. She doesn’t have any other thing to use as a weapon, so it will have to work. The intruder rushes Riza fast, and she flicks small pouches open at her sides and Riza can see the metal glint in the light coming through the window as the first knife is shot toward her. She manages to side step the jab and launches the bottle upward into the intruder’s arm. They recoil with surprise and almost trip onto the couch. Riza takes a few steps back and holds the bottle out by its neck like it’s a sword.

“Who are you?” Riza says.

“You’re not really in the position to be asking me anything, Captain,” the intruder answers.

“How do you know our names?”

“I’m good at my job,” they say. “I have to be.” Then they bring their arm up and Riza doesn’t know what they’re doing until their wrist flicks hard, and everything’s suddenly coming at her in slow motion as she watches the second knife come slicing through the air toward her. It lands deep in the flesh of her thigh, and she buckles under the searing pain of the hit. She wrenches it out from her leg just as soon as it has made a home there.

“You just gave me a weapon,” she gasps, still not giving herself time to pause, “thanks for that.”

Riza hurls the bottle onto the wall behind the intruder, knowing it won’t hit them but hoping it steals their attention. She doesn’t handle knives regularly and knows she can’t beat this person head-to-head, but if she can distract them then she might be able to land a significant blow. There’s a thud and then the bottle shatters, sending bits of glass all over the couch. Riza tries to move the moment she notices the person’s head turn, but just as she’s planting her foot forward they’re already refocusing their attention on her. They kick hard at the fresh wound in her leg and she goes down on one knee. The pain brings nausea with it.

“Your spunk is fantastic,” the intruder says, and she twirls her knife around in her hand. “I guess it’s only fair that I tell you my name, I suppose, since I know yours and you tried so hard to keep it a secret. I’m Gina.” She gives Riza a military salute. It’s lazy and mocking.

“Okay, Gina,” Riza gulps in air over the throb in her thigh. She readies the knife in her right hand, not knowing what to do with it but trying her hardest to pretend she does, and her metaled arm curls around the front of her abdomen. She doesn’t want to risk taking another hit, especially not anywhere vital.

“Did those Elric boys teach you to defend with your automail arm?” the intruder coos. Riza blanches. She does not like that this person knows who she is, but she is furious that they know the Elrics were involved in any of this. She is furious, and terrified.

“You leave them out of this,” she almost growls. Those boys, Winry, their children… “They have nothing to do with whatever it is you’re doing with me.”

The intruder plants the heel of their boot on Riza’s chest and pushes back on her, hard. Her back hits the floor with enough force to take the air right from her chest and she heaves, the knife coming out of her hand against her will. Her opponent plants themself on top of her, straddling her abdomen, and they lean into her face. She can feel their breath on her when they speak. “What you’re doing,” they say, “is foolish at best, and a death sentence at worse. Go back to your general, Captain. Be safe together or die together but leave Ishval to Jaeger.”

Riza would speak but the fire in her thigh has spread to her chest and it’s suffocating. She only turns her head and coughs, gasps for air. The intruder thrusts her third knife an inch into the floor in Riza’s view and then backs away, and leans against the couch that is decorated with shimmering pieces of amber glass. When Riza finds the energy to sit up she’s met with the face of a young woman, highlighted by dim moonlight.

“Gina,” she huffs, “you’re not going to kill me?”

“You’re not going to abandon Ishval, are you?” Gina prompts.

“I’d sooner abandon the general,” Riza says, and Gina scoffs as though she doesn’t believe her. Who is this woman? Riza wonders. She’s odd, for sure. She showed up aggressive, with an intent to kill, it seemed, but here she was sitting across from Riza after having put a hole in her, behaving as though she suddenly became bored with what they had been doing.

“I thought you’d be an asshole,” she says, “but you’re fucking decent, of course.”

“You truly work for Jaeger?” Riza says, and takes her flannel off to rip apart one of the sleeves. She uses the knife she’d let loose and is unnerved by how easy it is to slice through the thick fabric like butter. She clenches her jaw as she tightens the piece of her clothing over her seeping wound and the ache claws its way through her body in unpleasant waves.

“Yeah,” Gina answers, “and I was supposed to come here to test you or some shit.” Gina reaches up and flicks a lamp on next to her. Riza flinches at the mess her apartment has been made into: thick glass glittering everywhere, blood drying into stains on her carpet. She squints in the light at the woman in front of her. Her hair is a deep, dark brown that looks black on the first glance, and she has a sharp jaw and piercingly blue eyes. Her cheekbones are high, her face shaped like a heart, her lips full. She looks as beautiful as she does fierce, just like Jaeger, but something inside Riza senses an authenticity to this woman that she didn’t find in Jaeger. Where Jaeger was an endless pocket of doubt, Gina wears her intentions on her face, and that settles the jittery twitch of Riza’s body some.

“Test me?” she inquires, and Gina rolls her eyes.

“Or some shit,” she repeats. “I told you. I’m his version of Reynolds. He finds people to add to his little club and sends me out to get information on them. Usually he doesn’t have me fight them in their home but you must unsettle him in some way because he was adamant about me beating the shit out of you.”

“Charming,” Riza says, and looks down to the blood soaking the piece of her flannel. She almost groans. “Why didn’t you tell him you know who I am?”

Gina had been looking at anything but Riza until this moment; the floor, the wall, the window. But her eyes land on Riza’s now. “You’re Riza Hawkeye. You’re the best shot I’ve got besides General Mustang himself.”

Riza sits on that for a moment before asking, “Best shot for what?” Gina shakes her head.

“I can’t tell you yet, Captain,” she says, “but know that I’m not going to tell Jaeger who you are.”

“You came here to hurt me,” Riza says, and gestures to her leg. “He ordered you here to kick my ass, and you did so so effortlessly, like you enjoyed yourself, but here you are saying you’ll keep my secret. Why should I trust you? Why shouldn’t I pretend I do and call for my superiors the moment I walk out of here?” She’s admittedly angry, mostly frustrated, so there’s a bit of enmity in her voice. What is going on?

“I couldn’t receive an order like ‘beat the shit out of her’ and then go back to him with you untouched, could I?” she says with some condescension that rubs Riza the wrong way. Then she sits forward, her legs crossing underneath her so she can rest her forearms on her knees. “You’re all beat up, Hawkeye, but when I take you to him he’ll get you patched up. I can tell him you’re one hell of a fighter even though you’re actually just mediocre, and he’ll believe me when I say you’re to be trusted. I can get you the in you need, if you’ll let me. I’ll meet your other guards personally. Bostic, Royal, Zuniga, any of them. They can trail me, they can sick Armstrong after me and I don’t care. You said you won’t abandon Ishval, and that’s enough for me to know you’re exactly who I need.”

Riza just blinks at her. She’s on the verge of breaking out into a fit of laughter, but she holds it in. This is incredible, she thinks, and comical and…fantastically original. She shifts to try and stand but the movement brings discomfort crashing down over her and her body feels heavy with all she’s been through in the last hour; Jaeger, his daunting, exhausting presence, and the apprehension-fueled run back to the apartment that left Riza feeling as though she were ten years older. Gina was the icing on the cake, that extra plus sign tacked onto a grade, and the inch-deep hole in Riza’s thigh is the cherry on top of it all.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to escort me to Jaeger by carrying me on your back?” she asks as sarcastically as she can manage. Gina rolls her head in that same way Jaeger did out in the sands, and Riza can feel her brows touch together over her eyes. To her that’s a mannerism that would be unique to someone, like an inherited trait or one you picked up from a close friend. She lets that uneasiness permeate her again, just to be safe. Gina dusts microscopic pieces of glass off her baggy pants and lends Riza a hand. Riza takes it, and exhales hard through the pain as Gina wrenches her roughly to her feet.

“I expect you to omit the part where I stabbed you when you brief your general at the end of all of this,” Gina says. “I’d rather not be scorched.”

“Why does everyone assume General Mustang would burn them if they hurt me?” Riza puffs out some air to move the bangs sitting over her eyes. Her grip moves to Gina’s forearm, then travels to her bicep to slip over her shoulders hesitantly. Gina takes her weight effortlessly and they begin to move forward, Riza hopping on one leg like a child playing with chalked boxes on a sidewalk. She feels like she should be singing a riddle.

“Riza Hawkeye and Roy Mustang,” Gina says, almost like she’s talking to herself. “I’ve never heard it any other way.”

There’s silence as Gina helps Riza down the stairs, each one bringing an eruption of agony up through her feet. She should be sitting on what Gina had just said to her, and she should be preparing to face Jaeger again but there is no room for those things in her mind right now. She can focus on the pain and nothing else until she’s stepped off the last step, and Gina turns her sharply toward the alleyway.

“Forgive me for being uncertain,” Riza says, “but I’m not quite comfortable with disappearing into an alley with someone who’s more my enemy than my friend.”

“You can’t hobble around in front of civilians and military, Captain, and I’ve got a car just a few blocks from here. Hang tight.”

Riza allows the quietness to return for a moment before she says, “Emilia.”

“Right. Emilia.”

The car is close but to Riza it feels miles away. The blood loss is dizzying, and she’s aware that the way the streetlights are blurring before her is not a good sign. She’s fairly certain no major artery was struck, but she can feel the warm drainage of blood coming still in a steady flow. It begins to dry and stick to her fingers when she presses her metal hand over it to try and slow the bleeding as she walks. She almost falls a few times, but Gina’s hold on her is strong and when the car finally comes into view Riza is glad to slip into the back seat. She’d pocketed the knife she used before and used it again now to replace her makeshift tourniquet with fresh cloth from her other sleeve. Her hands shake as she ties it in a cross over her wound, and as the car starts to life she lets a small whine slip from between her teeth. “Dammit,” she pants.

“We have a good doctor,” Gina says, and peeks at Riza from the rearview mirror. “She’ll fix you right up. I wouldn’t hurt you bad enough to kill you. That isn’t what Jaeger wanted, and you would do me no good if you were dead.”

There is no energy left in Riza to retort, but there are questions bouncing around in her head. She falls back against the seat, tired enough to resign herself to whatever it is she may be getting driven into. Perhaps Gina is lying and taking Riza to Jaeger to be kept as a hostage to lure Roy. He’d surely come, gloves primed with an army on his heels, but that can’t possibly be what Jaeger wants. She remembers the care he took when approaching her by the water tank, and the feeling she had that he appraises situations, ponders his options, his moves. He wasn’t erratic like Bostic thought, and if he takes Riza now after Roy thinks she’s dead he has to know that would send the general into a frenzy. Riza’s sure Jaeger wouldn’t want to mess with a man who would blaze through the whole of Ishval to find his fallen subordinate. There isn’t a way Jaeger would win there.

So what would bringing Riza in do for Gina? She says she needs her, but for what? And wouldn’t it have been easier for Jaeger to take her behind that hill, where it was dark and far enough away from the growing suburb that no one would have heard Riza protest? What could he want her beaten down for? The prospects are endless and they all knot tightly in Riza’s chest. She closes her eyes and tries to see the general there behind her lids, but all she sees is red, and fire, and the hurt in her thigh. She sighs and opens them again, knowing from the time the car spent moving forward that they were getting close to their destination - Drooling Dog.

By the time the car rolls to a stop Riza is more inclined to sleep than to move, but when Gina yanks her door open and tugs her out by her wrists Riza’s suddenly jolted into attentiveness. The lights in the Drooling Dog are off, and the sign out front is tipped on its back to read CLOSED in usual green letters that shine black in the light from the lamp hanging by the front door. She eyes the sign on the roof, the sloppy letters dipping off-center to the right, and the slobbery tongue of a big-eared dog lulling in a pink lump over the yellow “D.” She wants to drag her feet, but knowing the man in this building wants her beaten, and probably bullied the bar owner into closing down for the night delivers clarity to her senses and she stands on two feet, feeling the dried blood tug on the cloth at her thigh, and slips in through the front door.

Riza hears Gina whisper a warning to her as she breaks their contact, but she doesn’t care. She’d been drained of her practiced stoicism over and over in the last month-and-a-half, and the man responsible was seated at a table not five feet adjacent to her. She catches his eyes in hers and a toothy grin spreads wide over his face, touching both his ears. He pats the seat next to him and calls to her. “Emilia,” he says, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

She means to stalk over to him, but instead she wobbles. He looks amused as he watches her and when she reaches him she slams her metaled hand on the tabletop. His glass shakes, the men sitting across from him reach simultaneously for whatever weapons they may be hiding at their hips or under their arms. Jaeger raises his hand to them, that stupid grin still holding on to his face, and they relax.

“You’re angry, sweetheart,” he says.

Riza might have told him she was furious, not angry, but her head suddenly feels tight and she’s falling just before the blackness overtakes her.

Chapter Text

Riza wakes to the thrum of voices wafting painfully into her ears. Her eyes aren’t even open yet and the dull light filtering through her eyelids is enough to bring the beginnings of a migraine to the front of her mind. She can’t immediately place where she is or what she’s doing or what happened to her but she remembers a dimly lit room that hummed to life when she stomped over its wooden floors to... to … The fingers of her left hand grind together in a metallic song as she twitches them, and someone hums a response.

“There she is,” they say, and Riza’s disappointed by the unfamiliarity of the tone. “That was stupid, you know.”

Riza feels a tug at her thigh that shouldn’t bring a deep ache but it does, and the fiery sensation forces her eyes open, and the sudden thrust of herself into a blindly yellow light pulls a whine from her lips as she thrusts a forearm over her face. Someone laughs at her. The sound is low but friendly.

“You know, I’ve been stabbed so many times in my life that I’ve lost count,” the person says, and Riza groggily makes a connection between the voice and a catalogue of names in her head: Gina. “But I’ve never passed out from it.”

“What sort of person says something like that? As though being stabbed isn’t a big deal just because it’s happened to you before?” Riza says, then squints over the hill of her arm and adds: “As though being stabbed multiple times isn’t a big deal.” Her voice feels dry as autumn leaves, and it claws over the valley of her throat like a rake.

“It seems we’ve had vastly different childhoods,” Gina says, but Riza thinks that maybe they have not, and then her back starts to prickle and she sits up, the thought of an old, obsessive father suddenly bursting through her mind like a heavy man on thin ice. She twists her arms behind her back to feel at the cloth there and sighs a relief. Then the headache comes.

“Dammit,” she groans in a whisper, and when she looks down and away from the light she catches sight of the gaping hole in her thigh. There is still wet blood in the pit and it sits, viscous and daunting, uncovered by her soiled shirt sleeve. Gina’s hands are hovering carefully above it, a bottle of antiseptic held between her fingers as easily as one of her knives. She shoots Riza a dangerous grin before pouring a bit of the clear, sour smelling liquid over the crater in her leg. Riza throws her head back against a tiled wall and forces her palm down over her mouth so she doesn’t cry out and further embarrass herself. It all comes back to her then, as her chest tightens and her insides bunch: Jaeger under the moonlight; Gina raining knives down on her; Riza fainting from the burden of it all.

“There’s a good soldier,” Gina says, and pats the spot just above the wound that feels as though it’s boiling. By the time the pain starts to subside Riza’s hyper aware of her pants echoing around in a room too small to be the same one she’d passed out in. She surveys the space through watery eyes.

“You brought me to a bathroom to clean my wound,” she deadpans. Said bathroom, as far as she can see, is moist and grimy like the woods she used to trudge through every morning outside her father’s home. “It’s grossly dirty.”

“Jaeger wanted to strip you down out there and sew this thing up with the fishing wire he keeps in his jacket pocket,” Gina slides a first aid kit out from the cabinet under the sink. Its door hangs slanted on one-and-a-half working hinges and Riza thinks absently, I know the feeling.

“He was going to pour whiskey over it,” Gina keeps going as she dabs at the mix of medicine and blood oozing from the heated break in Riza’s flesh. “He’s decent as a medic, I’ll admit, but I couldn’t imagine you’d trust me much if I let him nurse your wounds on the floor of a bar.”

“I don’t think it would matter,” Riza says. “I don’t trust you much now.” Gina chuckles.

“That’s fair,” she says, and takes from the kit a wad of cotton. She shows Riza sorry eyes before she spreads the wound apart with her fingers and pushes half the ball inside. Riza grits her teeth hard enough that she can hear them crunch together in her head. Gina rips a wad of gauze apart with her mouth and fastens a strip of it tightly to Riza’s thigh, and somehow the pressure lessens the pain and Riza tips forward from the wall, sweat collecting over her brow.

“There,” Gina says as she rocks back on her heels. She rests her elbows on her knees and her chin in her palms. “That’ll have to do until we can get you to Opal.”

“Who’s Opal?” Riza inquires, and rubs hard at her eyes.

“Our doctor,” Gina says. Her face falls then and she shoots to her feet like a bird taking flight. There is a story on her lips, perhaps waiting on the tip of her tongue, and for whatever reason she squashes it. Riza doesn’t press, she just tightens her hand around the neck of the sink and works at hoisting herself off the floor like a wobbly toddler.

So much for not embarrassing myself.

Riza glances to the patterned window in the wall as she rises. It looks like it’s been frosted over with ice but she knows the air outside is dry and warm. It’s a small rectangle rimmed with thick white boards and the darkness outside lays a canvass for the light pillowing down from the bulb hanging on a precarious wire above her head. She can see her trials plainly in her features there. Her new brown hair looks green in the faded reflection, all tangled undergrowth and knotted ends, and the bags under her eyes are black and heady, telling to anyone who has ever been jostled around the countryside, gaining cut after bruise after scrape. It pleases her to see that at least her eyes carry her indomitable nerves in them, and she turns restlessly away from herself to run the water in the battered, orange-and-grey-stained sink. It comes out a muted yellow at first but once it rights itself Riza cups her palms and splashes it into her face.

She hears Gina rest against the door. It creaks and caws under the pressure of her and Riza eyes the woman from a corner of the mirror above the sink. She looks rather bored, maybe even a bit sullen, and the mood has come abruptly at the mention of her Doctor Opal. Still, Riza doesn’t wonder aloud. She brings her face back into the sink to dip into the water pooled in her hands again, and she keeps her face as submerged in her hands as she can until the water’s all trickled out from between her fingers. Gina taps her shoulder with a wad of paper towels.

“Let’s go,” she says.

Riza’s thigh is feeling much better supported with the rough and tough gauze coiling around it, but still she needs to lean on Gina to move about. It reminds her of her time at Briggs, where she went along on her leg as best she could and still couldn’t manage to plant a weighted foot on the ground for a week or two at best. She laments the thought that now she might possibly be somewhat incapacitated for as long, and this time she’s deep in the belly of her her enemies. The enemy beside her grips her elbow to pull her into her. Gingerly, Riza notices. She rests an arm over Gina’s broad and bony shoulders and lets her free arm hang loose. Gina pulls her weight up with an arm around Riza’s waist and they’re off, both limping as they bump against each other’s form with every step they take.

Riza likes the open bar much better than the bathroom. Jaeger has dampened the lights by fastening lanterns to his small corner instead of using the bulbs planted in the ceiling, and she’s able to see better because of it. She rounds the bar table’s corner and spies him, his mouth open in a hearty laugh, his glass jolting around in his hand as his slender body shakes. It’s easier to scrutinize his features in this place, and the dimples in his cheeks and his unkempt hair don’t do much to quell the anxiety she feels when she sees him. Being near him reminds her of being on her father’s table in that dank basement, waiting with a ribcage full of air for the needle to hit her skin and scar her for good. Her back stings her again and she tugs the hem of her shirt down cautiously.

“Emilia,” Jaeger calls to her and she almost jumps in Gina’s hold, the tip of that needle inching closer to her flesh. “Gina, bring her here.”

Gina don’t , Riza wants to plead, but she doesn’t. She’s silent and compliant like a toy soldier. Jaeger could shape her limbs any way he pleased and she’d let him; he could lay her path out before her and she’d walk it; he owned her now, as far as he was concerned. She knew she would do everything in her power to retain autonomy as best she could, and she knows even as Gina deposits her in the seat next to Jaeger and his arm slinks around her shoulders that she won’t touch Ishval for him. I’d sooner abandon the general , she’d said, and that was the cold truth then and now and always.

Jaeger jostles her lightly. “You got stabbed and you fainted, sweetheart, but you’re here,” he says. “I’m impressed.”

“I’m not quite so,” Riza grinds out automatically. Gina slides into the seat across from her and shakes her head imperceptibly, eyes wide. Jaeger touches Riza’s head to his gently and his fingers find the knots in her hair. She stills under that cool touch of his, the lust for violence passing from him to her in the electricity between their skin; like synapses firing over one of their spaces, Riza receives his intentions via an invisible message, clear and poignant.

“Listen,” he says, his breath casting the warm smell of whiskey into her nose, “I know you’re angry, but you’re going to have to get over that.” He tugs on her hair, just enough for it to sting. She keeps her eyes on Gina, who just sinks deeper into her seat and sips at the drink in front of her. “You’re mine now, and however I’d like to treat you is up to me. You’re going to grin and bear it, yeah?”

What is it Riza wants to say? Fuck off, perhaps? It doesn’t matter. Whatever her wanted words are are only playing on the tip of her tongue and shoved apart by what comes out of her mouth, strained and, to her disgust, obedient: “Yes sir.”

“Good girl,” he says, turning his mouth to her ear. “That’s what I like to hear from my men.” She shivers. He releases his vice on her hair and her head bobs from the drop in pressure. She lifts her face to Gina, who looks apologetic, and to the two other men at the table, who look at her hungrily. She feels like a skewered deer in a pack of wild dogs; leashed, and so scared she’s afraid to move.

Jaeger clears his throat. “You know if Marsh is on his way back to the Flour, Richard?” Gina pushes her drink toward Riza, who sips at it with trembling fingers, taking in more than she probably should. She doesn’t know what it is but it burns beautifully in her throat. She passes the glass back to Gina when she’s had her fill and listens as intently as she can to the conversation starting to blossom around her.

The man who must be Richard drags on his cigarette. “Last I heard, yeah,” he says nonchalantly. His bulging shoulders jut out like hills against his shirt. “Must have been a success this time too.”

Jaeger taps at the table with a long, bony finger. “I sure hope so,” he sighs, “because I’m not particularly fond of Marsh’s mistakes. It’s getting to be tiresome.”

Marsh. Richard. The Flour. Riza repeats names she hears repeatedly in her mind like she when she’d marked the exits of this bar when she first stepped into it. He’d called someone Jerry out by the tank, she reminds herself, eyes going glassy as she falls into her thoughts. Gina waves a hand over her face.

“Earth to Emilia,” she says, wagging her hand. “I think you need some sleep, my friend.”

Jaeger looks to her. She can see him on her periphery, and she’s ashamed to realize she can’t look at him.

“I’m sure you are tired,” he says, feigning sympathy. It hasn’t happened until now, when Jaeger puts his hand on Riza’s thigh and presses over the healing hole there: she begs for the comfort of Roy then as she hisses through the pain, and deep in her chest she aches for him. This man carries the air of her father with him, and the air of hatred and lust and greed and she hadn’t handled those alone. Not back then, so how can she do it now? She grips her metal forearm but her automail does little to satiate this particular need. Jaeger pulls back when he feels he’s made his point, whatever that may be.

“How’d you get that?” he asks, plucking her fingers off the cast over her left arm. She moves them for him, just to get her hand out of his touch.

The story of Emilia Enfield comes back to her in a series of flashes. She can almost feel the cool surface of the phone wrapped around her face from her ear to her jawline, like half of a helmet. General Armstrong’s voice fills her head, all grainy and muffled by the less-than-stellar phone service of Resembool. “I got caught in a scuffle during the war out here.” East. And that isn’t really a lie, is it?

Riza fiddles with the thick blue ribbon above her automail cast and continues, “An Ishvalan tried to cut it off but only made it as far as the bone, and by that point the arm was gone.” She may have improvised on this part, but Jaeger seems content with the answer anyway. He takes a swig of his drink and nods to himself, like she’s answered some unasked question.

The table is compelled to silence by the end of Riza’s short tale, and she looks from Gina’s satisfied expression to the bored ones of the other men to Jaeger’s blue eyes striking through her like daggers. He looks elated, like he’s won the lottery and is finally knowing what it feels like to cradle hundreds of bills in his hands. Riza gets the feeling that he’s assessing her again and has an urge to look away from his watery gaze to something else, anything else. She doesn’t. She holds strong, like Roy would do, and just as she’s about to open her mouth the phone rings and her body shivers, and lets off some trepidation she didn’t know she was harboring. Jaeger smiles and turns back to his drink.

“Gina, get the phone,” he says, and Gina does. Riza listens to her converse quietly with whoever is on the other line - Marsh, Riza thinks she hears that name - but her eyes stay on Jaeger. Her attention is on him and the way the tendons in his forearms bulge against the sleeve of his jacket, and the way the sinew in his thin hands branches out near the surface of his skin like vines. This man is all muscle and bone and secrets and cunning. He’s the thing that keeps her from Roy, and the thing that keeps progress from Amestris, betterment from Ishval. She wants to steal a fork from the center of the table (the kind waiters and waitresses place on opaque napkins after every party leaves and before a new one arrives) and drive it deep into his eye or his temple or his throat. She has this sudden and intense urge to kill him because he’ll ruin everyone and everything you love but it’s squashed like a bug between her fingers, its irregular blood and guts staining her skin.

Gina returns as Riza is finding her mental footing again. She realizes she didn’t listen to a word of what the woman had said to whoever was on the other line, but if Gina is really her ally then she assumes she’ll know soon all the same. Jaeger stretches an arm out over the lip of the booth, across Riza’s shoulders, and brushes his fingers over the side of her neck. “What did they have to say, my lovely Gina?”

Gina slides into the booth. The man next to her mirrors Jaeger’s pose, his arm draping behind her. “Marsh made it back. He says he wasn’t followed,” her eyes flick to Riza, “and that we’re clear to head that way.”

Jaeger’s thumb draws a lazy line from the shell of Riza’s ear to her collar. “How’d everything go, though?”

“Marsh says there were no complications.” Gina looks like a puppy who has had a hand raised to it one too many times. Her body is still but Riza sees the flinch, the indication that Jaeger scares her too. The mighty, knife-wielding Gina. “Well, on his end. He says Garrett dropped the ball.”

Jaeger stiffens beside Riza. His thumb and forefinger find the bony brim of his nose. “Garrett. I can’t punish Garrett if I haven’t punished Marsh. These MPs are making our work hard, too hard.”

Riza checks a few things in her mind as Jaeger goes on: Garrett, work, punishment.

“I’d spill their filthy military blood all over Ishval’s pretty new streets of it didn’t incite that wretched Flame Alchemist.”

Riza’s thigh starts to thump like her blood’s pulsating in her veins. It hurts, and she tries to still the pain with more pressure. Military blood , she thinks wildly, inciting the general’s wrath… The general. The need to hear his voice comes spiraling into her mind again and she reins it in and swallows hard at the lump that sticks to her throat.

“You always tell us to be patient, sir,” the big man says. He takes a drag on a cigarette and blows the smoke out into the orange light of the room. It twirls in the air until it separates and disappears, leaving only the stale stench behind to burn Riza’s nose. “He’ll get his.”

Jaeger’s whole palm is against Riza’s cheek now, his fingers around her chin. “That he will,” he agrees, and looks down to Riza’s lap to see her metal hand suctioned to her thigh. He pats her face once and withdraws his hand. “We ought to get you to see our little Opal,” he says, “before that thing goes bad.”

He’ll get his. Riza doesn’t hear much of what Jaeger has said to her. She eyes the curved lines of the wooden table below her and wants more than anything to be more brave than she’s being. Roy’s not dead and he won’t be dead , she reminds herself, and then the words from that homunculus come tumbling into her like a strong wind, stinging and full of dust… The words that had broken her once.

But that had been a lie. She thought it was true but it was a lie, and this is a blatant wish; just a thing these people want but Riza won’t let them have. Not Ishval, not Roy’s life - it’s why she’s here, keeping still under the slimy touch of Jaeger and the grimy look in his mens’ eyes. She sets her jaw, and looks as sweetly as she can into his face.

“I think that’s a good idea, sir.”

It’s almost comical to Riza that she’s transported with a pillowcase over her head. How many stories did she read as a child that included scenarios eerily similar to this one? Except most of those had been kidnappings and Riza had not been kidnapped. She was riding into the arms of her adversaries like they were a lover she hadn’t seen in days. Like they were-

Roy

-an old friend or someone who’s come back from the dead. She shifts uncomfortably in her spot between two men who might actually be boulders ( Jerry , she thinks, and Louis ) and one elbows her, urging her to be still. The jab is light but sets her body alight with a stab of pain anyway, because this is her norm now and there's a hole in her leg and she’s sure her ribs and back are bruised. She sinks into her seat until her knees touch the seat in front of her and her neck and chest make a right angle, her head sliding down the back of her seat like she was a pouting child.

And she is pouting, really, because she had hoped to see where she was going. She supposes that will have to wait, however, and if she’s retained any piece of the Riza she was before becoming Emilia then she knows she has the patience to figure some things out tomorrow when she’s slept and maybe even showered.

Riza has counted to five hundred three times, and to twenty-three once by the time the car comes to a stop. Fifteen hundred and twenty-three seconds , she asses. That’s roughly twenty-five minutes from Drooling Dog to the Flour, if that’s where I am.

Someone jostles her out of her seat, yanking her by the elbow as Jaeger warns them to watch her head. She’s removed from the car the way criminals are tucked in; with someone’s hand over her head and their other hand locking her arms behind her back. She’s ushered forward a few steps into another person who smells faintly like scented oils and the smell makes her turn her face up in disgust because it’s part of his smell, and he takes her by the arm and waist and guides her himself, like a treasure, to wherever it is he wants.

He could shove her off of a cliff right now and she wouldn’t know what was coming for her until she was hurtling down into a canal or a pit of sand, her body shutting off before she got too close to the ground.

There are no cliffs, though, and Riza’s made aware of the familiar clicks of guns settling in peoples’ hands as she moves on slowly. She hears gears turn in doors that must be similar to the heavy ones in Briggs that separate different wings of the fortress from each other, because their whine is the same when they swing open on hefty hinges. She wonders about how Jaeger might have found a way to imitate doors that way, then thinks of the military man Holden and shies away from the musing, not wanting to know that some other soldiers could be supplying Jaeger with seemingly unimportant details like how a Briggs door might work in case they had needed to storm the place and find the general’s best girl themselves.

“Take it off, Jerry,” Gina says.

“Jaeger?” The man who must be Jerry questions his boss, so much like a dog who begs to be praised. Jaeger shrugs against Riza’s shoulder, and her pillowcase is sloughed off just as she’s wincing into the white light of what looks like the bottom floor of a hospital.

Only it isn’t a hospital. Cars (some fully assembled and some in pieces) sit on elevated platforms in neat rows lining the walls of the square room, and the tiled floors are a blinding white that doesn’t soak up the gaze of the fluorescents but instead reflects it back so it looks like there’s color to the air, and that color is green and blue and dull reds and whatever else one of the cars might be painted. Just in her first sweep, even with the wet in her eyes from the ache-inducing light, Riza lays eyes on eighteen people. Some are worrying the cars and some are standing about with their hands in their pockets, chuckling and sharing cigarettes and pounding on each other’s backs. Riza’s reminded vaguely of the boys she studied with at the academy. They had been just as boisterous and just as willing to work for people who would only utilize their talents and punish them for their misuse.

Doors with tinted windows decorate the left side of the space, and Gina steers Riza toward one, snatching her right from Jaeger’s grasp.

“This can’t wait,” she tells him matter-of-factly. He doesn’t argue or reprimand her, he only sees them off with a wave of his hand before moving diagonally to another door along the wall. Riza notes it’s octagon-shaped window and the massive brass slab with a printed “J” on it. “Opal’s going to fix you right up,” Gina tells Riza in her ear as her arm snakes around her waist. “Don’t be alarmed if she hates the shit out of you though.”

Maybe that’s his office, Riza thinks, and then what Gina had just said wafts into her mind like an afterthought: “What?”

“You’ll see.”

The Flour’s medical room is extensive. The door is a small rectangle, but the room itself is wide, expansive, almost a fourth of the size of the shop that makes up the nucleus of the Flour. Cots are stationed into specific squares of the floor’s tile, their legs fashioned to the floor with bolts and chains that make Riza shiver. Directly in front of the door are a wall’s worth of cabinets that stretch from floor to ceiling. She wonders offhandedly about what might be inside. Her nerves are lighting up like a match as she thinks about it, suctioning the air from her lungs to burn intensely inside her chest. What’s inside is medicine and gauze and tape, she tells herself. This isn’t a torture chamber. Her leg whines with the promise of needles and thread and more of that awful smelling antiseptic and she amends, Not that kind of torture chamber.

She dwells on the stinging pain of the glass being tugged from her palms back in Briggs, and the packing of her gunshot wound and stitching behind her head. Her whole body is tense with the agonizing anticipation of again feeling that pain by the time Gina drops her into a cot, and she cages a breath in her chest like she’s preparing for some phantom doctor to dig into the hole in her thigh right then.

“Wait here,” Gina touches Riza’s shoulder gingerly. “I’m going to get Opal. Don’t touch anything, okay?”

Don’t touch anything? Riza looks about the room again. There doesn’t seem to be much to touch. Whoever occupies this space - Opal - is meticulously clean. The only thing striking the white space are those chains and nails at the feet of the cots, and Riza has a sinking feeling that they aren’t there because Opal wants them to be. The walls not packed with cabinets are mostly bare except for a few sinks, toxic waste bins stabled into the plaster, and stools with boxes of gloves balancing on their edges. Riza pushes her bangs from her face and wishes she’d find a way to quit turning her body parts into pieces of swiss cheese.

It didn’t go all the way through this time, she thinks bleakly, and then she chuckles to herself. It’s a bitter sound. She feels bitter, sitting again in a medic’s room because of Jaeger. Her stomach is again full of a tasteless broil of emotions that she was once able to nullify with the power of her own will. She’s back east now, though, and the desert has a way with her head. It puts her back into those late teen years where she drove bullets into eyes, skulls, ears, and where she all but begged at Roy’s feet for him to mutilate her back. She tugs again at her shirt. How easy would it have been for Jaeger to see her tattoo back at the bar? Gina? Opal could decide Riza needs a physical, or Jaeger could order one and then what? Surely the scars would be recognized for what they were by Opal: burns, and from there would they make the connection between Riza’s salamander and Roy’s? Gina said Opal would hate Riza, so that puts Riza in a tight spot...doesn’t it?

Riza’s kicking her boots off onto the pristine floor as the door in front of her reopens. She has to bite her lip to keep the gasp in.

Don’t be alarmed if she hates the shit out of you though.

Gina’s hand is intertwined with someone else’s, and as they both move through the threshold Riza’s drawn immediately to the dark skin and red eyes and white hair. “Opal,” she says aloud, and those red eyes shoot to hers like bullets and Riza feels the sting of hatred from that gaze. It comes automatically, like a reflex, and Riza’s sick to realize that her hair isn’t blonde and her eyes aren’t blue but this woman recognizes her for the Amestrian she is anyway. There had been a smile on her face, toothy and warm, and it falls now. Gina is fast to shut the door.

“Gina,” Opal says, carefully pulling her hand out of Gina’s. She keeps her eyes on Riza. “You,” she says, taking tentative steps in Riza’s direction, obviously not sure who to address first. When she’s close enough that her thighs almost touch Riza’s knees she swings to the left.

“You didn’t tell me she was his ,” Opal says, and washes her hands in one of the sinks. Riza smells the stink of antiseptic again.

“I didn’t have time to,” Gina responds. “I’m sorry, Opal, I know this is unfair. But you knew we needed one of them. It had to be her or him, it can’t be anyone else.”

Opal finishes up at the sink and shuffles gloves onto her hands. She’s quiet as she maneuvers through the cabinets behind Riza. There’s a small clink of glass on glass, then the cabinets are clicked shut and Opal’s there in front of Riza again. Riza looks to Gina who’s rubbing hard at her forehead, and then she looks to Opal. Opal, who’s short with a pretty, round face and cropped hair and intelligent eyes. I’m sorry , sits heavy in Riza’s mouth but it tastes like ash. She swallows the urge to say anything at all. Opal tugs a stool close and sits her instruments on it: antiseptic, of course, and gauze and wraps and a needle fashioned with fine wire. She beckons for Riza to remove her pants, and she does. She shuffles out of them carefully and Opal helps her do so, her touch feathery over Riza’s wound.

Opal starts working in that silence. She wipes Riza’s injury with a tea-colored liquid that stings but doesn’t burn, and Riza’s hands curl instinctively into the thin fabric over the cot. Opal is gentle, but as the old dressings are removed from Riza’s leg and the dried blood is wiped away she can see the angry red of her flesh screaming at her. She has no medical training, but even to her the area looks hot with the promise of an infection. Opal tuts, throws a disapproving look to Gina, and then sets her eyes on Riza again. This time, though, there is no animosity.

“This is going to fucking hurt,” she says. “Gina waited almost too long to bring you back to me. I have some stuff that’ll flush that bacteria out like dirty water down a storm drain.” She takes a deep brown bottle and pops its lid off before dumping some of its contents, without warning, over Riza’s leg. Riza all but wails in pain, her head flying back, her body filling immediately with the heat her raised heartbeat is pushing to her skin. Eventually the intensity of the flushing subsides and Riza picks her head up to catch sight of Opal already working with delicate fingers to suture her wound. The needle zigzagging in and out of her flesh feels like nothing now that her nerves have been shot, and a good fist-sized spot of her thigh has been rendered numb.

When she’s finished she pads more of the dark tea-stuff over the sutures and sticks a wad of gauze to it with wrappings. “Thank you,” Riza breathes.

“Don’t,” Opal waves her off, the anger feeding her eyes again. “I do my job whether it’s Jaeger or Gina or one of Mustang’s men,” she eyes Riza as she tosses her unused supplies into one of the waste bins on the wall. “I’m a doctor, Captain, first and foremost. And my girlfriend is right when she says we need you.”

“How did you know who I am?” Riza asks as Opal starts to feel at her hurting ribs. She surveys the bruises there and asks Gina to fetch her more wrappings.

“Jaeger is obsessed with you, but he’s never seen you in person. I have,” she says. “I was living where your terror reigned all those years ago. I remember your eyes, and I remember his too.”

“Will anyone else?” Riza speaks to Gina now. Gina shakes her head.

“I wouldn’t bring you here if I thought so,” she says. Then Riza winces as Opal covers her contusions from one side of ribs to the next. Softly, like she doesn’t want to cause Riza more discomfort. She rummages through a drawer afterward and presents Riza with green scrubs.

“Jaeger’s going to want to see you and I don’t think he’d appreciate you walking around in tattered and bloodied clothes,” she says. “Take a pair of my scrubs, I leave them here specifically for patients anyway.”

Riza slides the fresh pair of pants up to her hips as best she can without standing. She ties them off near her belly button and watches Opal and Gina as she sheds her shirt and replaces it with the clean, scratchy scrub top. She feels odd having just exposed her back to the air when there were people who hate her standing at her toes, but if she doesn’t want anyone to go prying around her back then she thinks it’s best to remain as little suspicious as she can manage. She carefully removes herself from the cot and stands on one leg. The thanks she has for Opal dies on her tongue as Opal leaves the room, the dull smell of antiseptic following after her like a shadow. Gina sighs.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“No,” Riza runs her hand over her face. “She has every right to what she’s feeling.”

“Of course she does but I still could have warned you,” Gina says, and then hooks her arm around Riza’s waist and they’re off. The gait they create is familiar for Riza after the many times they’ve moved together in the last couple of hours. She wants to ask so many questions about why she’s needed, and she wants to know more about Opal. She knows she has no right to some of that information so she excuses the curiosity from her mind and focuses on keeping her balance while Gina guides her to the room Jaeger had escaped to the moment they set foot in this weird, unnerving place. Gina raps on the door when they reach the room with the brass “J”, Jaeger asks her what she needs, and she replies: “I have Emilia.” Then she looks to Riza, a knowing look in her eye, and Riza becomes concerned about what is on the other side of the door. When Jaeger gives permission, Gina pushes the heavy door open.

Jaeger’s room is different than Opal’s. Amestrian flags hang heavily on the walls on either side of his desk, which is large and littered with newspaper clippings, pens, and blue pieces of paper that he covers in paper weights as Riza all but trips into his space. Everything is darker in this office, she notes, and the walls are stone and the floor is dirt and concrete and hard, like him, and she finds herself missing the ominous white of the medic room. Jaeger smiles at her.

“You look tired, sweetheart, but better,” he says. He lingers on her for a moment before realizing - in the same second she does - that there is a fourth person in the room, tall and muscular and blonde and his blue eyes are oceans of exhaustion, but when Riza locks hers with them she sees the energy of recognition. He gets close to slack-jawed, then snaps his mouth shut and Gina gives Riza a small shake like she knows.

“Where are your manners?” Jaeger chastises him. Then: “This rude lackey of mine is Marsh, Miss Enfield. He was just briefing me on his latest visit into the city.”

His hair is longer, stretching into his eyes and down to his ears, and there is nothing between his teeth and he’s growing a beard and still the sight of him makes Riza’s knees go weak with relief, but also fear and confusion.

Havoc.

Chapter Text

Roy’s head bobs over the stack of papers between his hands. The tug on his neck always brings him back before his forehead hits his desk and this, it seems, has become his norm. He doesn’t sleep. He rarely leaves his offices, even, because she visits him late at night. She comes to him in that sweet spot between being asleep and not; when things aren’t lucid but he isn’t dreaming, and it’s a welcomed pain. A punishment, he surmises, for all the bad he’s done and the good that he’s lost by losing her.

Riza, but he doesn’t say her name.

Maria Ross is a fine adjutant. Roy had begged the burly Armstrong for her sometime after her funeral, when his hands were still shaking like he’d just snapped her house into ash. He feels like that all the time - like he’s just closed a part of himself and let it soak into the earth like melted snow. It is an agonizing thing to always close his eyes and see her there, bruised lips and skin tinted blue. His head ducks again and he pulls up sharply, his eyes still closed, and runs a hand through his hair. Her, she, he fidgets with a button on his jacket absently, because maybe if I distract myself I can find the courage to say her name.

Riza, but it’s there just on his tongue, hot as lava, searing and boiling until it becomes permanently embedded there.

Yeah, Maria Ross is a fine adjutant. She doesn’t pull the office curtains in the morning, though, and she’s not so insubordinate that she breathes down Roy’s neck until he’s scribbled his name over the two dozen documents requiring his attention at any given minute. Documents that aren’t categorized into piles on the corner of his desk, planted there neatly with their corners slightly turned so he can grab them easily. Sure, she’s fine, but she’s not her .

Riza. Fuck .

Roy taps his phone with his finger. He spends a lot of time waiting on the phone, he muses.

His men are scattered and he did it this time, beckoned by some whisper of her voice into his ears. He runs his palms hard over his face and thinks, not for the first time, that it doesn’t feel like she’s dead. His heart’s still beating, after all.

He looks up and into his new Central office (he switched with General Ivan, a grizzly man who never spoke, and smiled even less but found a grim one for Roy, buried somewhere with his empathy) and it looks like a tomb to him. Dust spirals in and out of the light from Fuery’s lamp like a soft rain that turns to a mist, coating the surface of the air in small reflections of the yellow from the lamp, making the room glow orange from the staining on the desks and, truly, it looks as though an ancient Aerugonian should be resting here. His own lamp is loud against his periphery and he rubs his temples to mitigate the pain that starts to blossom there.

Fuery stops tinkering with the lump of transmission equipment in front of him. “You okay, sir?” he asks. His tone belies that of a genuine question. He knows how the general is, always.

“I’m tired of waiting,” Roy admits, and eyes his phone. “Ross or Breda, I don’t care. I just want a damn phone call.”

Fuery holds that statement in for a moment before he starts to work the parts of his heap of wires and metals again. Roy narrows his eyes at it, unable to discern what goes where. The not knowing things, that’s what really gets him, he thinks. He wishes he could use his own two hands for everything. Why shouldn’t he? Fuery has nothing to do with his sins in Ishval; Breda doesn’t either; neither does Havoc or Ross. But here they are risking their asses for him, sweating under the light of a lamp for him. He lost Hughes and he lost her and that killed him, it broke him in half and sawed his soul to pieces but these people were holding him together by the tips of their fingers. They were doing everything they could to cement his sanity for him, and that fills him with shame and guilt.

Fuery is about to speak when Ross flies into the room, the frantic pace of her heels setting the silence on fire. Roy starts when he notices she’s carrying a large envelope and for a moment he’s thrust back in time to the last time he spent alone with her, his face inches from that scar tissue on her neck. He pushes the thought aside and orders Ross to stand at ease.

“What is that?” he says, and Fuery’s face lifts from the table.

“From Veronica, sir,” Ross says, then adds breathily: “From the guy who won’t leave her alone.”

Breda.

Roy unfurls his hand for the thing, which stings when he touches it. The contents could be anything: the decimation of the east, the proof he needs to finally put her away for good. He’s not ashamed to see his hands are shaking as he opens it, thumbing along the edge to rip it along its seam. His breath comes in slow beats, shaky but rhythmic, as he slides a thin stack of photos from their dark place inside the envelope. There’s a small white piece of sheet paper that reads:

If she looks familiar to me, then she must to you.

-B

Roy’s first thought is that he’s glad Breda is safe, and his second thought hits him like a sudden snow storm. He’s cold all over, the heat gone from his fingertips, his ears, his nose. It’s like he’s been transported to those mountains in Briggs where she died, standing on the precipice of a high cliff where the wind chill freezes instead of cools.  

The pictures are grainy all right, but Roy can see it. Her sharp jawline, her gait, those eyes. Her hair is dark, not blonde, and her arm’s glinting in the light and parts of her are obscured by a number of civilians weaving around her but still he sees , and a part of him is screaming as he fingers through the pictures, each beating life into him better than his heart has done in weeks: It’s her. Her, her, her.

Riza.

“Phone him now,” Roy says, and he’s standing, and Fuery is standing. Ross cranes her neck over the desk. Fuery’s breath hitches in his throat. “Get Breda on the phone now.”

Chapter Text

Riza breaks Havoc’s daze with a question.

“What is it that we do here?” she says. It’s a chore to take her eyes off Havoc, really. He’s the bridge between her and her general, rickety and swinging a hundred feet over a chasm, but guiding them together nonetheless. He’s a part of her past she’s been craving as badly as he might crave a cigarette right now.

Everything Riza had wanted to ask Gina suddenly falls out of her head like marbles and tumbles to the stone floor under her feet to shatter against it like glass. She’ll have to pick up the mess later, getting on her hands and knees to painstakingly sweep the shards back together, but for now she’s only interested in what Havoc has to offer her. Her head starts to swarm with so many fresh questions that she barely hears Jaeger begin to speak, or notices the tug Gina gives her shirt sleeve. Why are you here? she wants to shout. Who knows you’re here? Who authorized this? What have you learned? Where is Fuery, Breda, and the general? Amidst the conglomeration is a wonder that stands out above the rest, sitting on the front of her mind like someone sits at the edge of a poolside diving board, carelessly swinging their feet over the drop and waiting to fetch the courage needed to jump: Is the general okay?

That is the thing that threatens to slip from her tongue if she acknowledges Havoc right now. Is the general okay? Is Roy okay? She gives her head a small shake and returns her attention to the people around her, feeling as though she’s allowed her composure to slide away as she’s flipped her mind inward. Havoc’s not looking at her anymore, but Jaeger is. His smile is almost a sneer when he says, “Emilia, darling, did you hear anything I just said?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I’m very dizzy,” Riza lies automatically. Jaeger regards her with bright eyes, ones that could be soft except for the edges where they narrow, and sharpen, and might sting if she got too close.

“That’s all right, sweetheart, I have no problem repeating myself,” he says. He leans back in his seat, the rounded top of the chair bulging around his head like curved horns, and starts to sift through the blue papers on his desk. The room quiets until the only sounds are that of the muffled clanking of tools on metal from the white room beyond the door. Riza worries for a moment that Jaeger can hear her truth in that silence. It’s like the chaotic noises outside his office are being made just for her by his spies, his little infiltrators. It makes her back tingle until he speaks again.

“You see this?” he says, and holds a thin, blue sheet wrought with white lines by the tips of his fingers for Riza to see. She nods, squinting from her place by the door. “We build cars. We sell cars to the wealthier people here in the east. Mostly military, though some are Ishvalans who’ve done well for themselves by pledging their allegiance to the dogs. It’s not much but it gets us enough money to keep this place running. We can pay the alchemists who work for us this way,” Alchemists? Shit. “and I can keep my guys fed and clothed.”

He stops, knowing she wants more. He has given her the bare bones and she wants the muscles and nerves and their roots and the synapses that keep it all moving. What is it we do here? isn’t building cars, it’s something else. He smiles.

“As for our objective, well, you’re going to have to work for that information.”

“Work?”

“Everyone here works for their place in my world,” Jaeger says, and gestures to Havoc. “Marsh is a scout. He goes out into Ishval and creates havoc for me, among other things. Gina is a scout, and a damn good one. Her girlfriend, Opal, is a precious field medic and my lead doctor here at this rugged fort. Monica is a transport; Richard’s a scout; Jerry is an alchemist.” He stops abruptly to cup the back of his neck in his hand like there’s an ache there. He rolls his head on his shoulders just as he’d done by the tank, and how Gina had done in Riza’s apartment. His face screws up and he looks like he’s thinking.

No, Riza thinks, he’s plotting.

“Now that I have you I’d say I’m up to thirty-seven little helpers, myself excluded,” he says. “You’ve yet to be tested,” Tested? “but judging from how little Gina managed to mince you up I’d say you’ll be another scout of mine. That would put me at seventeen scouts,” he starts counting on his fingers and mouthing names, “ten transports, seven medics, and three alchemists.” He steals the corner of a paper and writes the numbers out in a lazy scrawl.

“Thirty-seven is good,” he says, “but a few more alchemists would be better. You wouldn’t happen to know any alchemy, Emilia, would you?” He says it in a tone that belies the way his eyes are stabbing at her.

She smiles sweetly at him and says, “I’m afraid not, sir.” He deflates, and she’s unsure about how she should read the disappointment in his face but it doesn’t sit right in her. Gina speaks up.

“If she’s a scout then she can help us find alchemists, Jay,” she says, “so don’t start thinking that snatching her up was a waste.”

“I’m not thinking that,” Jaeger replies. “Every time we bring someone here I hope they know some alchemy. It would be helpful to our cause.” He eyes her, then Havoc, then leans back in his chair and flicks a hand at his door. “I’m preparing for a meeting so why don’t the two of you show Emilia around? I think we’re done here for now.”

“Sir?” Riza says, and Jaeger hums but his head has fallen back to his blue papers, and he doesn’t look up at her. “I’d like to go back to my apartment. If my friends come by it in shambles the way we’ve left it then they’ll involve military police and I’m not sure curious MPs are what any of us need.” Havoc glances to her out of the corner of his eye, and when Riza’s made sure Jaeger hasn’t shifted his gaze from his papers, she nods to back at him.

“I don’t mind taking her back into the city, sir,” he says. The sound of his voice sends waves of warmth through Riza’s body and she hopes, and begs that she can get a moment alone with him. His tone is bored, like he isn’t eager to go anywhere with her, like doing so would be a chore but she knows that’s an act for Jaeger. Havoc has questions swimming around in his head too.

“I’m sure you don’t,” Jaeger says, and dismisses Havoc with another wave of his hand. “Take Gina with you too. I’m uncomfortable with so much back-and-forth in one day but Emilia’s right. MPs snooping around would be problematic, and more so if I had to kill a few. Gina will let you know who could be on your tail, if anyone.”

Gina tucks a piece of her dark hair behind her ear. It’s the same shade as Jaeger’s. “He’s right,” she says. The fingers of the arm she has wrapped around Riza’s waist tap against her side in a seemingly meaningless way, but Riza picks up on the message. Let me come along because I have things to say, is what Gina’s telling her in those movements. Riza runs her fingers along the blade of Gina’s shoulder in response.

Let’s go.

“I’ll bring them back in one piece, sir,” Havoc says, and bows as he turns toward Riza and Gina. Riza sees him in full then, in a tattered and dirtied long sleeve with buttons missing along the top. His green slacks are tucked into his combat boots, which are caked in old mud and carry the tang of oil on them. He has a yellowing bruise under his right eye that makes her stomach ache, and she can see more bruising along his right forearm where his sleeve has been rolled up to the elbow. She has a sudden and strong urge to reach out at him and push his bangs from his eyes just to be sure they’re still a striking blue and not yellowed like the rest of him. He looks as though he feels like doing the same to her, but also like he’s wrestling with seeing a myth come to life; the ghost who haunts his superior’s mind.

As he passes them Havoc’s eyes dart to Riza’s patched thigh before he shoots Gina a decrying look. Gina can’t respond but when she turns she touches him with her elbow. Something silent passes between them then and Havoc sighs, and Riza watches the beginnings of his anger retreat from his face. She has a feeling they’ll be back.

Havoc leads them through Jaeger’s door and back into the white room with all the cars. More people have gathered here with glasses of beer and sticks of steaming sausage and old, chipped dining chairs Jaeger’s men probably found while doing whatever it is they do in the city. Circles of talkative men and women have taken up residence in the more open areas of the space, and their laughter flies up and up to the roof, and Riza follows the sound with her eyes like she’s following the ascent of a bird. “What is this place made of?” she asks, and gazes at the stone ceiling overhead. It’s coated in stony spikes, each like miniature mountaintops hanging upside down and waiting patiently to come down on someone, and tear them in two.

Maybe this is something he needs his alchemists for, Riza thinks, and then shudders.

“Pieces of old buildings and a really big rock,” Gina answers. Then, more quietly, she says, “We’re close to that stretch of desert between Amestris and Xing.”

Right, that makes sense. Drooling Dog is close to the slums, and the slums are close to the desert, and the Flour is twenty minutes east of it all. It’s a genius placement for a hideout, Riza thinks, since no Ishvalans live out this far where the land is more rock than sand.

“Which car should we take?” Havoc asks Gina. They’re pulling a right toward the Briggs-like doors set into the white walls, and Riza’s leg whines with the sharp movement.

“Ouch,” she says. Gina widens their turn.

“The darker the better,” she says.

The heavy Briggs doors scream on their hinges as Havoc pushes them open, and directly on the other side of them where the cool nighttime air is eating up the heat there are people with guns. Big, threatening looking pieces of metal and brass that Riza had only ever seen plastic prototypes of and that Roy had proactively banned military from carrying in Ishval. How Jaeger managed to get his hands on such a destructive tool is beyond her, but she worries again that his alchemists may have something to do with it. The gun-wielders are clad in black pants and black long sleeves with hoods that fold over their mouths and forehead, leaving only a rectangular hole for their eyes. As the door shuts behind her and steals the light, Riza loses sight of them. All that’s left of their presence is the small shift of their weapons; a familiar ticking sound of gun pieces settling together with movement.

It’s not a far hobble to the car where Gina drops Riza delicately into the passenger seat. Riza leans back into the cushion and stretches her leg as best she can, feeling the sting of her wound but letting it move throughout her muscles and disperse until the exploding pain becomes a forgettably dull ache. She thinks offhandedly that she needs a shower as she runs her fingers along the clean pants of her scrubs. Her hair is sticking to the sweat at the back of her neck and she can taste the salt of old sweat over her lip when she runs her tongue along the body of it. She smells like dirt. “Ugh.”

“You all right, Emilia?” Gina plops into the back seat and leans forward to rest her chin near Riza’s face.

“There’s a hole in my thigh,” Riza deadpans as Havoc works to start the car. Once it’s running, he jerks his door shut roughly and fixes a glare on Gina through the rear view mirror. The car starts to move over the grainy earth and all Riza hears for a few long minutes is the crunch of small rocks and piles of sand until Havoc slams his fist into the steering wheel.

“You didn’t tell me,” he says, and the statement is for Gina and Riza both. He softens when he focuses on Riza alone, finding her eyes in the dim light of the headlights reflecting off their surroundings. “You should have told me.” The car slows to a crawl and her stomach twists at the way his lips have turned down into a frown, and the glint of tears pooling in his eyes. She feels the threat of tears come at her too, and she takes his hand in hers just briefly to squeeze it, and reassure him, and apologize. He returns the favor before refocusing on the road.

“You stabbed her,” he says to Gina, a tinge of venom dripping from his words. Gina ignores him, and lights a cigarette and takes a drag on it, then blows the smoke out in his direction.

“Jaeger told me to kick her ass,” she says, “and if I hadn’t she’d be worse off. You know this, Marsh. He would have thought it very suspicious if I hadn’t actually beaten her in a fight, and then she should would have had to go through those damned trials of his,” Gina sucks on the cigarette again, “and you and I both know that tough as she is she’d be toast.”

“Trials?” Riza asks.

“Jaeger likes to make newbies fight his seasoned scouts. It helps him figure out when someone’s cut out for the field or not.” Gina says. She bends over the seat to offer Havoc the cigarette. He smokes it while it’s still pinched between her fingers and then she falls back into her seat when he’s done, and snuffs the thing out on the sole of her boot. Riza waves a hand over her face to try and fan the smoke away.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was alive, Gina?” Havoc says.

“Same reason she didn’t tell you, I’d imagine.”

The cab falls to silence. All those questions Riza wanted to ask in Jaeger’s office come apart and leave her mind, fluttering around her like feathers. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to ask about Roy now.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Captain?” Her eyes snap up to his, which are on the road ahead. His mouth has set into a hard line now. She feels bad all over again; guilty. There is pain in his voice and she put it there. There is frustration rolling off of him in waves and she put it there. She bunches her pants legs into her fists and sets her resolve. Havoc deserves an explanation.

“I’m here undercover to extract information that could lead to the arrest of Jaeger,” she begins, “and if the general knew I was here he wouldn’t have stayed away. That’s why we couldn’t tell anyone close to me, Havoc, it’s too risky. Seeing you’re here is a relief, but it also frightens me. These people want us dead and you could be killed if they find out who you are, or worse they might do to you what they planned to do to me. They might torture you and then leave what’s left of you for the general.”

“That’s what they were going to do to you?” he asks, his eyes lighting like a fire and again going to Gina. His hands are wrapped so tightly over the steering wheel that Riza can see the lines of his knuckles straining against his skin and she touches his hand with hers, urging him to relax. “They were going to torture her, Gina?” he says.

“Probably,” Gina says. “Can you think of a better way to get Mustang on his knees?”

“I can’t think of a better way to get the him to turn the Flour and everyone inside to ash,” Havoc replies. Riza winces at the thought and goes on with her account.

“I went to Briggs, but a few miles south of North City my train was turned over in the snow by some of Jaeger’s men. There was a brawl and I got shot and cut up my hands a bit,” she fingers the light scars, “and I would have been caught if General Armstrong and her men hadn’t been patrolling in preparation for my arrival. They apprehended the terrorists and ran me to the wall to get treated for my wounds.

“From there it was decided that we would take the opportunity to pretend I died in the mountains so I could use my skills to come here, and do this. I went to Resembool and was fitted with an automail cast to make it seem as though I’m missing an arm. Al changed my hair color. I was ordered not to breathe a word of life to anyone who knew me before unless they were cleared by Armstrong. I fought to include you and the general and everyone else, believe me, Havoc.”

“I believe you,” he says automatically. “The Chief’s going to rip Armstrong a new one, but,” Havoc grins, and it’s not a mischievous one like Riza’s used to. It’s broken like a shadow over rocks, and it’s heavy with so many things she has yet to hear him say about what he’s feeling; how everyone else is feeling; how Roy is feeling. Havoc’s a vault with everything Riza craves tucked inside, and the key is dangling above her head, agonizingly out of reach. “He’s going to be himself again. We’ll get him back once he finds out you’re alive.”

Riza’s chest tightens. “He can’t find out I’m alive, Havoc, not now,” she says. “If he did then everything I’ve done up to now would have been for nothing. He would have gone through another Hughes for nothing.”

Havoc’s ghostly grin falls, and a bleakness takes its place. “This hasn’t been another Hughes,” he says. His eyes are looking somewhere beyond the road ahead, like he’s become a part of a scene she can’t see, and the sight of him in the moment leaves her breathless. “It’s like he’s been hollowed out.”

“We’re almost there,” Gina says. She breaks their conversation effortlessly, and before Riza can ask Havoc what he means, and some place inside of Riza is grateful. She doesn’t like how empty Havoc’s voice sounds when he talks about Roy. “Marsh, she’s Emilia,” Gina goes on, tapping their shoulders as she mentions them. “Emilia, he’s Marsh. There is no room for the past here.”

Riza thinks of how impossible that is. Ishval is her past; it and Roy, and inevitably sometimes her father too, and the way his eyes sunk into his face and his bony cheeks stood like high peaks on either side of his equally bony nose. When she was fighting in Ishval, though, she never thought of him. She was too busy paying attention to the way the lines of old ink in her back would ignite and the flame would creep on top of her, tracing the circles in waves of heat and leaving only the taste of charred bodies in her mouth. She’d tried to wash that flavor from her tongue so many times she was sure she’d never taste anything again.

She tries to bury the memory now as the car comes up on her large apartment building. It’s been only a few hours but she feels as though she hasn’t been here in days, and her head starts to ache when Havoc parks and she realizes this night has gone on for an eternity and it was barely the start of everything. She wants to fast-forward to a future where Ishval is safe again and where she doesn’t have to worry about sustaining injuries that require layers of stitching.

“It would look suspicious to a scout or transport or whoever may be out here if I stayed in the car while you two went upstairs,” Gina says. “So it would be super if one of you could leash your pups long enough to keep me from being fatally shot.” Riza turns to look at her, a brow rising. Gina’s knees are high up on the seat in front of her, and her chin is tucked into her chest. She gives Riza a childish smile. “I stabbed you, Emilia, but you’re alive. Let it go already.”

“If I were you I’d be less concerned about being shot by these guys and more concerned about the general lighting you like a match for sticking a knife in his captain,” Havoc says, his face mirroring Riza’s. She’s happy to see his eyes return to his present surroundings; to hear his voice come back the way it’s always been.

“Emmy’s already said she won’t tell,” Gina says, righting herself.

“Only because I can’t handle the general’s dramatics,” Riza says, and rolls her eyes. She opens the passenger side door and means to step out onto the concrete but stops her leg mid-swing, the pain forcing her to still, exploding throughout her thigh and hip. Gina appears on the curb, her hand coming out to catch Riza’s, but Havoc forces his way into Gina’s space and pulls Riza out by her forearm himself. She falls into him and he drapes an arm over her shoulders and down her back to hitch her up by the waist.

“That’s my job, Marsh,” Gina whines as she shuts Riza’s door.

Riza won’t say it out loud, but it’s easier to move with Havoc than it is with Gina. He doesn’t have hips that knock into hers, and he’s tall enough and strong enough that he can lift her as they move so the stress she has to place on her thigh dwindles to nearly none. They take the stairs together slowly, Riza going along on one leg as Havoc helps her gingerly over each stair. She’s grateful for him, and she clings onto his shirt with both fists and relishes the stability she gains from it. By the time they’ve reached her front door, she’s flush with his side and a bit sweaty, but glad to have successfully done this much.

Riza hears voices from her place in the hallway. They sound far off and distant, as far away and blurred as clouds. Havoc’s help up the stairs was a godsend, but still pain rolls around from Riza’s thigh to her hip and back again, forcing its way into her mind and muddying her clarity. She’s huffing a bit by the time she registers that Havoc’s opened and then shut the door behind her and suddenly her face is met with pair after pair of eyes. She doesn’t look at them, instead she studies the glass swept into an untidy heap at the wall opposite from the couch and the blood decorating the tan carpet and the light from a lone lamp pushing against the dark room. Her eyes find Miles’ first after she’s done her sweep. “Hello, sir,” she says.

His arms fold tight over his chest. Ryder comes at Riza carefully and untangles her from Havoc’s grip. “Are you okay?” he says, taking on her weight. He pulls a bit at the sleeve of her scrub top, a thousand questions fighting to leave his tongue. “We know where the hideout is now. We just didn’t know if you would come back from there, but once Royal and the others came back to this mess they called us back here, and we’ve just waited.” He sounds so defeated that Riza reaches up and puts her palm on his chest. She releases some pressure there and he sighs, almost bringing her in for a hug but palming her face gently instead. “You can’t do that,” he tells her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She looks from Bostic to Reynolds, Royal, Zuniga, and Garcia. “I’m so sorry.”

“Who is that?” Garcia snaps, wholly uninterested in the reunion. She points to Havoc and then her finger falls to Gina. “Who the hell are you?”

Havoc waves a hand in the air and moves to the left to block Gina from view. Riza sees Reynolds palm the butt of her gun. “That’s First Lieutenant Jean Havoc,” the words explode from Riza’s mouth in a flash, “and the woman behind him is Gina. She works for Jaeger, she knows who we are and what we’re doing, and we had to bring her along. She’s been nothing but helpful,” she lies, remembering her thigh and the secrets Gina kept from her.

Miles turns angry eyes on Riza. “Someone get a gun on her,” he says, flicking his hand toward Gina, and then to Havoc he says: “Lieutenant Jean Havoc, what are you doing here?” Havoc abandons his place in front of Gina to get closer to Miles as Reynolds shifts left enough to line the barrel of her gun with Gina’s form. Gina sighs and puts her hands in the air animatedly.

“We’ve seen Breda around but I have never seen you,” Zuniga says. “We followed some of Jaeger’s men out to that big rock a few hours ago and didn’t see you then either.”

“I’ve been here for about a month,” Havoc begins, and suddenly Riza can’t hear anything but what comes from his mouth. He goes on. “General Mustang sent Lieutenant Breda and I here weeks ago. Breda’s kind of like my handler, except not. He’s been the general’s eyes on me and the east since after the funeral,” Riza’s breath catches, “and when I can spare time I pass information along to him, but I can’t spare the time often.”

“Does Führer Grumman know about this?” Miles probes. Havoc shakes his head.

“Honestly, sir, it wasn’t supposed to go this far. I was approached by Jaeger and General Mustang and I decided I’d stay here to take the bastard out. This whole mission was built on opportunity, and it’s my understanding that whatever it is you have Captain Hawkeye doing here was built on opportunity too. Does the Führer know?” he repeats Miles’ question with patronage.

After a beat, Miles answers: “Yes,” and Havoc laughs once, like he’s coughing from inhaling something hot, wicked, sticky.

“That’s rich,” he says, and his atmosphere changes from condescension to ire. “No wonder the guy was so composed during the funeral, but everyone’s got the general in the dark, huh? He had an emotional breakdown out there, you know, and the Führer and General Armstrong acted like what he did was outrageous, but everyone who would miss her most has been left out. You guys were even careful enough to keep her from Falman and the guy lives in North City.” Havoc’s voice starts to rise. Riza reaches beyond Ryder to take his arm in her hand. He doesn’t relax, and he feels hot to the touch, and she sees the heat shoot up his neck, anger and bafflement staining the skin there. “It’s like a chunk of the general has been hacked off. Me, Fuery, Breda, and even Rebecca have been trying so damn hard to dig him out of this thing he’s in. He’s so convinced she’s alive, and if she’s gone anywhere more populated than this area I can promise you Breda has spied her, and then the general will know she is. Breda would recognize her. The general sure as fuck would too, even in a picture. You guys wouldn’t, and Jaeger and his goons wouldn’t, because maybe the dark hair and the weird metal thing over her arm can fool people who haven’t seen her every day for the last ten years but we have and it doesn’t fool us!”

Havoc’s shaking. Riza leaves the shade of Ryder to go to him. “Havoc,” she says. She stands in front of him and beckons for his eyes on hers. He looks at her, his bottom lip quivering, and she’s reminded of every other time she’s seen him lose his composure. She knows the tears are piercing the backs of his eyes, and she knows this man loves his general like she does; fiercely. Havoc’s watched Roy bend to the two greatest loses of his life, and this time he did it in an unfamiliar part of the country, away from his friends. She takes his hand and unfurls his fingers, and runs a thumb over his knuckles. He doesn’t still, his strings don’t come undone and let him loose. This would have been enough to quell Roy’s disorder, but Havoc does not respond to Riza in that way. Soothing Havoc with touch is not her job, and after a moment he stops her with a hand on her shoulder. She tries to read his face.

“Rebecca’s here too,” he says, and his ferocity now makes more sense in her mind.

“What?” she says.

“She’s transport.”

Riza has to search her mind for what that means, and when she finds it a gross fury starts to boil in her gut. “You don’t tell me anything, do you?” she whirls to Gina, who shrugs noncommittally.

“I didn’t know whether you already knew or whether it was something that would have affected your decision to go to Jaeger with me,” she says.

“That’s selfish,” Riza seethes.

“This whole thing is selfish, Emilia,” Gina says. “Your whole presence in the military is selfish. You being alive…even that’s selfish,” her tone is placid, but her words are cutting. Riza backs off.

“Rebecca’s here,” she repeats, and Havoc nods.

“There’s something else,” Zuniga says. “General Mustang is here too.”

“Why is that important?” Havoc asks. “He’s here regularly.”

“No,” Zuniga looks right at Riza, “he’s not at headquarters. He’s here in the heart of Ishval.”

Chapter Text

Riza is glad that briefing General Armstrong isn’t her job. Miles is having a time of working through the evening with her. He approaches the subject of Roy being in Ishval carefully, with a small voice, and Riza sees him wince and hold the phone an inch from his ear after he mentions Havoc and Breda. She can only imagine what sorts of things the Northern Wall is saying (no, probably screaming) on the other end of that line, and she sinks further into her seat to escape the thought of it.

Riza sits snugly between Havoc and Ryder. Ryder has a hand clasped over her good thigh, and her bad thigh is lightly touching Havoc, who is hugging the arm of the couch to keep from putting unnecessary pressure on his captain’s wound. Even as scenarios are racing through her mind like dogs on a track, Riza’s exhaustion still finds a way to catch up with her. Fainting isn’t like napping, she thinks. You don’t wake up refreshed, you wake disoriented and with a headache and feeling as though you haven’t slept in weeks. Fainting is like running from one end of Central Command to the other on an empty stomach. Fainting is malicious.

And so, inevitably, Riza’s head bobs. Her temple touches Ryder’s shoulder first, and he pats affectionately at her leg and she wakes. Then, minutes later, her heavy head falls to Havoc, and he doesn’t stir her. He shifts into her slightly to give her more surface area to rest on, and pulls his arm up and over the rim of the couch. Her breathing starts to slow, and as she starts to sleep she hears a ringing in her ears and Miles’ voice coasts in on it. He’s calming General Armstrong, and he’s contradicting her worry, and it reminds Riza so much of the way she handles her general. She smiles to herself. Miles and General Armstrong’s relationship could easily be a duplicate of hers and Roy’s, but probably without tattoos and Ishval and neglectful fathers and the earth-spinning love that burrowed into her chest over a decade ago and never left. She frowns.

Why is Roy in Ishval? So far he’s kept to the command center and gone no further and that had suited everyone fine but now he’s parading himself around enemy territory - so close she can almost feel his presence in the air - and it terrifies her. And what was it Havoc had said? Something about Riza going to populated areas and being spotted by Breda?

“Like the bars and the merchant line to the east of this building?” she says in a voice thick with sleep. She mumbles it into Havoc’s side. His ribs go up and down against her cheek and lips as he breathes.

“What?” he says, his breath catching.

“You said Breda would spot me if I went anywhere more populated than here,” she explains, recalling Havoc’s earlier outburst. “I go bar hopping every night, and I went and bought oil from a merchant earlier this evening.” Hours ago, she whines inwardly. It feels like it’s been days.

Havoc stills under her like a frightened animal. Miles has stopped talking and now waits, his red eyes trained on Havoc. The entire room quiets as though everyone is waiting to hear some wild revelation - as though they’re all trying to hear one another breathe. Ryder’s hand lifts off of Riza and slides down his face. Bostic, Royal, Zuniga, and Garcia look to one another wordlessly with shame coloring their faces a pale white. Reynolds drops her aim on Gina just slightly, her eyes falling hard on the floor, her arms most likely aching. Gina lowers her arms and rolls her head around on her shoulders, taking advantage of the lapse in controlled tension to relieve some of her own.

“Breda’s seen you,” Havoc says, his muscles twitching in his side. “The general must be here because he’s seen you too. Breda sends him things…photos and names…”

Riza is so tired. Her body feels like it’s got bricks hanging from it. Her eyes sting when she opens them and ache is doing cartwheels between her leg and hip and the bruises on her ribs are settling so when she breathes they smart and still some strength manages to find her. It comes so fast and so hot it feels like someone’s injected adrenaline into her bloodstream and she sits up and winces as she loses her vision in the second her blood pressure drops from the sudden movement. Ryder steadies her with a hand on her lower back, but she doesn’t need it. She stands and crosses the room to Miles and takes the phone from his hand. He doesn’t try to stop her.

“General Armstrong,” she says into the line, “what should I do? What do you need me to do, sir?”

“Stay out of his way,” Armstrong’s voice comes out like a crunch, like it’s uncomfortable for her to speak. “You’ll be near the border so that shouldn’t be much of a problem. Führer Grumman and I can handle him on our end. It never should have come to this. We were foolish to think Mustang would send his men out here to oversee things now, but he’s been doing that for years. We figured he was going along with old habits, not scouting for you. We should have been more careful.”

“Yes, well,” Riza starts, “what’s done is done, sir.” Part of her is annoyed and another smaller part of her hopes those around her can tell. They all dropped the ball, her guards and the Ice Queen and Miles, and now they will have to clean up the mess. “I should be made aware of any movements of General Mustang and his men from now on, sir. I think that would be for the best.”

“As do I, Captain. And I think it’s time I pull my Drachman informants out of there too for the time being,” Armstrong says. “This Jaeger could get suspicious with Mustang suddenly prowling around like a hungry dog, and the less people out there connected to you the better. Tell Miles I want Bostic, Zuniga, Royal, and Garcia at the foot of the wall forty-eight hours from now. Reynolds and Ryder can stay. Perhaps they’ll make collaboration with Breda an easier task.

“Speaking of Breda, have Reynolds find and brief him next time he’s alone. I want him let in on everything. It’s better he knows so he can stop his snooping, and so he can help us derail Mustang. It’s not wise to let him go on believing you’re alive whe-”

“If he’s seen a picture of me, sir, then he’s mostly certain I’m alive,” Riza interrupts the general without thinking, without minding rank or her tone. They’re going to have thrown Roy a bone and then snatched it away from him just like that, like he was a dog to tease. It doesn’t sit well in her stomach, and in her current state of exhaustion she’s perfectly content to let everyone in the room know why. “I’ve been a part of his personal and professional life since we were young, sir. He knows I’m alive so all you can do is keep him busy.”

Riza feels a collective intake of breath from the others in the room as they wait for the phone to explode in her hands. But General Armstrong only sighs heavily into the receiver, and everyone deflates just as soon as they had tensed. “All right, Captain. We’ll keep him busy.”

Roy feels flat, like the air around him. He can taste salt and a crisp wetness on his tongue. Since when was Ishval so humid? It wasn’t really, but he is sweating and panting and…frantic. He feels hot and damp. She was here and he keeps willing his eyes to see her but they don’t or can’t and it’s frustrating and mildly disconcerting. And he doesn’t want to stop searching.

He knows he shouldn’t be wandering the streets like an MP or a civilian. There are people out here who want him dead, but they had wanted Riza dead too and that was infinitely more terrifying because it meant she’d escaped them once and now she is near them again, possibly in their grasp or just out of it. The idea makes knots of disgust in his belly and his pace quickens. He can hear Ross struggling to keep up behind him.

Every face he passes turns to him. Military men who recognize him out of uniform salute, some open their mouths to speak to him but he doesn’t stop to say anything in return. His eyes never focus on them because he’s scanning the face of every woman like he needs to look at them to survive. He’s been underwater for over a month, clawing at his throat and grasping for the surface but never getting air, never getting rid of the agonizing burn in his lungs until he’d seen her in those blurry photos. Now he’s burst free from the water’s surface, grown out of it like a stalk of bamboo, and he’s taking in air like a starving man inhales food. He’s frenzied and determined.

Roy’s about to round a street corner when Ross tugs on his shirt sleeve. “General Mustang,” she says through heavy breathing, “I don’t think us being here like this is a good idea, sir.” She’s tense. Her body is wound up like one of those Jack-in-the-box toys and her eyes keep shifting from his to the movement of the people around her and he worries for a moment that she might pop out of the lid at him, and that her finger might spasm against the trigger of her gun when she does. He puts a hand on her shoulder.

“I have to find her,” he says.

“Why don’t we go to the trainyard first?” she offers. “We can talk with Breda there. He knows where he last saw her, and we don’t. At least then we’d have a secure starting point, sir.”

Roy knows Ross is only urging him toward Breda because she wants him out of plain sight. It’s fair, and it’s smart, and it makes sense but he doesn’t want to go to the dark trainyard. He wants to find his captain.

“No,” he says, not unkindly.

“General,” Ross narrows her eyes. Roy feels an uncomfortableness swell around him. It pushes against his arms and his face, pulls goosebumps from his flesh, and he realizes that it’s the people of Ishval keeping their distance, crossing the street to stay away from him. He is recognized here as easily as the sand is, even when he’s so casually dressed. “Please, sir.”

And so Roy concedes with a minuscule nod, and Ross visibly relieved. She leads him through the shadows with her hand at her hip where she’s hidden her gun, and his shirt sleeve in between her fingers. Her grip there is unwavering like her resolve and Roy is ashamed when he thinks of what he’s done to this young woman. He pulled her from the Führer’s detail for…what? His reasoning was protection but all he’s done is keep her further than arms length and put a visor up around his eyes so he can’t see her, or the things around him…or the absence of his captain.

And Ross is so sincerely concerned, but Roy can’t bring himself to open his mouth for her in any meaningful way.

He follows behind her wordlessly. Ross is less married to Ishval than he is and so she keeps to the streets she knows - lighted ones with few alleys and more square stucco houses than families to fill them. She angles her body so that her torso covers Roy’s as they go. She is a dutiful bodyguard, probably better than Havoc would have been, and that fact alone should make Roy feel more secure in his decision but he only feels like a child might when they choose a toy and wonder how their play might have gone if they’d chosen different. He could have sent Ross into Ishval instead of Havoc and then he’d have a best friend by his side instead of someone who was a distant ally - a woman he cares about out of necessity but doesn’t know. Guilt crackles up his spine when he thinks, not for the first time in the last month, that it would be easier to lose Ross in Ishval than Havoc or Breda or even Catalina.

Ross’ hand tightens on Roy as she spins a corner and urges him to mimic her. The tips of his boots touch the thick islands of street light spilling out onto the sidewalk as his back hugs a rocky wall and a little ways off he can hear the screechy timbre of old trains on old, rusted tracks. Ross will lead him to a trainyard disconnected from two others, which are clumped together with rows of trains and tracks lining up into fence posts labeled with what it is the train carries: mulch, coal, food. Each yard is dusted and ancient but only two still work meaning only two are well lit and patrolled. Some light manages to sneak from the first two train yards through cracked windows of the third, unused train station and over its head but it’s never enough to reveal the animals or, in this case, people crouching about between the lines of discolored trains. Roy hasn’t been to the train yard since first stationing Breda and Havoc in Ishval but as he nears it he can see it in his mind’s eye like a place of refuge - where secrets are answered and no one feels conflicted or confused. He hopes to see Breda there. He begs to see Breda there.

And Breda is there. Roy spots him as the graveled city spits him out from the cracks between buildings and he’s standing, his hands deep in his pockets and brows furrowed, in a starfish of light that tapers at the edges into darkness. Roy listens for voices nearby but there is nothing but the silence of abandon. Ross lets him go and he strides past her to catch Breda’s attention.

“General,” Breda says and smiles, but there are worry lines deepening in his forehead. Roy frowns. “I figured you’d come out here, sir, but I was hoping you wouldn’t. I’m surprised the photos made it to you so quickly. I’ll have to buy the girls some drinks,” he laughs, “because they sure are working overtime.”

“We all are,” Roy says, his voice low. We all love her.

Ross puts herself back-to-back to Roy and Breda’s eyes follow her, his brows finally rising out of their burrow of uneasiness. He lifts a brow as if to say, You dragged her out here? It’s a little accusatory, this face of Breda’s, but Roy ignores it. He can’t be bothered about the danger he’s brought Ross into when she wouldn’t have had it any other way anyway. She is quite dutiful…

“Have you seen her again?” Roy asks.

Breda shakes his head. “I haven’t, sir, no,” he says. “You looked for her?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

Breda sighs. “This is giving me a headache. If she’s dead then she’s dead but the finality of her death is missing. The military buried her but we know from experience the military can bury a corpse under the wrong name. I wasn’t sure until recently, but,” he pauses and scuffs his fingers over the rough stubble on his chin, “that woman sure looked like her, sir.”

That is the truth of it, isn’t it? Roy took one look at the grainy photos and he knew. Her face came together so clearly in his mind like it was ingrained on his eyelids but really it’s there on his soul. Not in the way soulmates in stories are but in the real way - the way people you’ve known are a part of you; the way you keep them alive even when they aren’t around anymore by picking up their idiosyncrasies and replaying them through your own actions. Recognizing Riza in that photo came as easily to Roy as recognizing himself in a mirror or in a murky puddle on one of the pothole ridden roads of Ishval. The tips of his fingers start to buzz in his pockets and he rubs them together numbly, itching to be back in the city and searching for her. In the lakey shadows over the dirt of the train yard Roy sees himself locking eyes with her, the world fading to a cottony blur around him except for her face, and she stands still in the commotion of bodies bumping around her near the merchant line until he’s in front of her. In his daydream he can touch her and she’s warm and real and underneath his hand her blood is thrumming with life. He’s going to kiss her right there in front of civilians and MPs and his men and in this dream he doesn’t care, but Breda’s voice pulls him back to his real life, back to the train yard, and his fingers keep buzzing away against his pants pockets.

“I don’t think we’ll get ahold of Havoc any time soon,” Breda says quietly. Patrol has rounded on the other side of the broken old train station and Breda, Roy, and Ross shrink away from the light until their almost pressed against one of the old trains. Roy feels unsteady as the rocky dirt spills out from under the soles of his boots. The flashlights and low chatter of the patrolmen fade away quickly and Breda starts up again. “We can tell him to keep an eye out once we get a chance. I won’t let this slip between our fingers, sir. I pro-”

Ross stiffens at Roy’s back, her hands come up next to his bicep and under his shoulders. Breda turns, Roy’s eyes flicker along the sharp line of darkness where the floodlights from the neighboring train yard don’t reach. There had been a snap; the sound of a large gun cocking and the echo of chuckles. Roy feels around in his pockets but his gloves aren’t there. He doesn’t bring them into Ishval.

“General Mustang,” someone whispers from the dark. Breda’s arm goes out in front of Roy protectively and Ross creeps slowly like a cat, her eyes never leaving the thing she can’t see in the veil of the dark. A cloud passes over the moon and Roy can see, with little clarity, the blue-grey figures of three people. One is the size of a small boulder, his hair hanging untidily over his face. The other two are smaller, more Roy’s height but thinner, less lean muscle and more bony, and weapons glint mischievously in their hands. “Whatcha doing out here, huh? Ruining our fun, that’s what.”

“Who the hell are you?” Breda asks. He’s sliding his own weapon from his hip slowly and in the cover of the train’s shadow. There is a thick cut of light coming out from between to train cars, probably two feet wide and six long, and the three people step into it, all wearing grins that show their teeth. The boulder-like man is weaponless, with an Amestrian flag stuck thoughtfully onto the collar of his shirt beneath his large, square chin.

“Riza Hawkeye,” this boulder man feigns a bow and the sticks on either of his sides laugh haughtily. Roy makes as though he’s going to go for the guy when both Breda and Ross stop him with their hands to his chest; Breda’s palm and the bony back of Ross’ knuckles.

“Fuck you,” Roy snarls. It’s unlike him to lose himself so quickly and in the corner of his eye he sees Breda twitch in place a little and then shake his head and drop the hand that had been going for his weapon. They are not the party with the upper hand here.

“That’s rude,” the boulder says. “Jaeger told me to say that if I ever ran into you and he’s my boss so it isn’t like I could refuse. You understand, don’t you? You know all about following orders unquestioningly, don’t you?” The gun wielder on the boulder’s left is a man with sallow eyes and a pale face, and the bones of his elbows jut out uncomfortably against his skin. He raises his clunky heap of metal in his arms and Roy thinks for a moment that they might just fall off into the dirt the way an old branch comes apart from a tree. The wielder on the right is a woman with long blonde hair and a pretty face. Her eyes glisten in anger under the chalky light coming through the old and splintered windows. Roy sets a stare on the boulder-man.

“You’re Jaeger’s? What do you want?” he says.

“Nothing,” the boulder says, and shrugs. “I came out here to sneak into that yard,” he jerks his head to his left, in the direction of the other two yards, “and I got lucky to run into you. What’s a general of the prestigious Amestrian military doing out here in a civilian’s clothes? Without an entourage and whatever else it is they give they big dogs out here.”

“If you don’t want anything with me then leave,” Roy says, his patience simmering away. He hasn’t forgotten how to throw a punch since he’s learned flame alchemy, and he isn’t afraid to do it now even with the obscene guns making themselves known. He suspects that is exactly what this man wants, though - an invitation to strike.

“I want to kill you where you stand,” the boulder says, “but that’s not my place. Besides if we kill you then Captain Hawkeye will have nothing left to live for. What’s the point of having a bit of fresh meat around our hideout if she just starves herself to death once she’s seen your corpse?”

Breda’s fingers dig into the flesh of Roy’s chest. Ross pushes against him. He feels magnetized all over, like he has to move forward, go forward now right now past these goons and out to the Flour because, suddenly…what if she’s there? What if he can’t find her in the city because they took her? What if? What if she’s there?He’s never quite felt like she was dead. When her blood was tattooed on the stone floor under Central he felt his own fall away with it and as her pulse was slowing his slowed too and he knew and knows that if her heart had stopped beating there in front of him that his would have stopped too. This time was different. This time is different in that his heart hasn’t stopped. His life kept going beyond hers and that seemed so unreal to him. It wasn’t until the picture that he was sure, but the funeral solidified the idea in his mind: she’s alive, but she’s not in their grasp. She’s not, she isn’t… She can’t be.

“You don’t have her,” Roy says, and in his being he knows he’s right but the way the man’s lips twist and slither across his face to form a grin puts a pile of rock hard doubt in Roy’s gut.

“She’s got a tattoo,” the man says, his dark voice scraping against the dusty light coming off the creaking posts, “with big, leathery scars over it.”

Roy stalls, his vision blurring, his pulse coming quickly and uncomfortably through his body. He says, rather desperately: “Anyone could figure that out by going through her personal files. She’s had dozens of physicals in the military since she joined.”

“She flinches when I touch it,” the man goes on, ignoring Roy. “Which reminds me… Is her pain tolerance usually so lo-” Roy lunges forward over the chasm of darkness and is in the man’s face before Breda or Ross can stop him, his fist curling into the tattered, wind-whipped clothes of someone who lives in the grittiness of Ishval. He can feel Ross’ hand on his elbow pulling him back, begging him to retreat, but Breda doesn’t move. He’s an angry pillar in Roy’s periphery, boxy and stout and fuming. The sticks at the boulder’s sides lift their weapons but Roy doesn’t budge.

“You don’t have her,” he growls. A part of him really believes that, and a part of him is chanting it in the back of his mind like a prayer. They can’t have her because if they do he will be nothing, no one; a hollowed man with hollow eyes and love left in the ashes of a house fisted in trees. Behind his eyes his head is reeling and his thoughts are pummeling against his skull, pumping ache into his head, down his neck, into his shoulders.

“How long until you fall in love with that one?” the man jerks his chin in Ross’ direction and then chuckles, his breath hot and acrid in Roy’s face. “We can’t find Havoc or Catalina. We can’t touch Falman because that blonde bitch up north has got her men on his doorstep. Can’t touch Breda thanks to the MPs you’ve got prowling around. Fuery and Ross are always with you or Führer Grumman, aren’t they? So all we have is your captain, and if we’ve gotta let the world believe she’s dead so we can keep her longer then so be it. But we have her, General, and until you pack up your shit and go home we’ll keep her, and we’ll eventually take them all.

“Or we could always pay that old woman a visit. Her name’s Christmas, right? And the Elrics live relatively close. Edward’s got some kids now, yeah? It would be messier if we went after people who aren’t military, Mustang, but we will. We’ll strip those Elric brats right out from under their daddy’s nose. We’ll go to Xing and fuck Alphonse up too. We have everything to lose in this fight.”

“You touch anyone else close to me and I’ll burn you until you wish you were dead.” Roy is shaking with fury now. But the man under his touch is calm, aggravatingly so.

“If you want proof that she isn’t dead and that we have her,” the boulder says as he plucks Roy’s fingers from his shirt one by one, “then do what needs to be done, Mustang.” He leans in close so he can say directly into Roy’s ear where no one else can hear him, “Dig her up.” He barks a laugh then, and Roy’s stomach drops to his feet.

Roy lets go. He gives the boulder a shove. The thought of digging up Riza’s grave had never crossed his mind, and now here it is and he sees himself so clearly breaking the earth and pulling nothing out of it. He would feel so relieved to find she isn’t there…so relieved, and so angry. And so scared. Where is she?

“You could trade yourself for her,” the man says, and his flanks snicker. “We could take you back with us right now and then let her go.”

“You don’t have her,” Roy says again with more finality. He wants so desperately for that to be true. “Jaeger is a showoff. He blew up a train to get to her. The whole country would know if you had her because he’d let meknow because what’s the point of a hostage if your target knows nothing about it?” The boulder-man’s face falls. “She got away from you. Maybe she’s dead and maybe she isn’t but she got away. So you can tell Jaeger I’m coming for him.”

“No, Mustang,” the man says and starts for that sharp line of darkness where he’d come from. “Jaeger’s coming for you and everything you love.”

Chapter Text

Maria Ross’ boots sink into the earth like rocks in water as she struggles to keep up with General Mustang. He moves upward like a working horse, his back rounded and the muscles in his thighs pushing outward against his soaked slacks. Ross thinks that he’s the most determined man she’s ever seen - his focus is never bent or broken these days. Even as the wind rushes over the inclination and brings gravel and the sting of dirt to his eyes he keeps his chin up and target in sight: a small grave just feet from the peak of the hilltop and to the left of the rocky pathway.

Ross remembers this hill weeks before when it was green and the sky was milky blue and the sunlight wasn’t harsh but it tinged everything’s edges in yellow. She remembers the burning house too and the people she had to fend off from General Mustang as he walked away from his mess. The fresh air of the country had been eaten up by the gray-black smoke and the nauseating smell had plucked at her stomach, and at those of the townsmen as well. They had shouted angrily at the general and Ross had wanted to coil herself around him and take all of the beratement in his stead because it isn’t fair.

General Mustang had saved her life ( and risked his career to do it ) when he was still a colonel freshly transferred from Eastern Command to Central. As far as Ross is concerned the man is as selfless as he is dedicated. But she knew when he requested that she join his team that she was going to be a placeholder for something bigger - that he had other plans for more seasoned officers. Being a bodyguard suits her fine and so she’s never complained but the general has warped into someone - something - unfamiliar. He was an acquaintance before and now he’s practically a stranger. It’s as though a ghost has taken over his body and stolen his fluidity, his bright eyes, and the color right out of his face. It twists Ross’ insides to know that a man she admires and respects has been hurt so badly that he’s starting to lose the core of who he is.

“I thought Brigadier General Hughes would be the worst,” Fuery had said a few days after the funeral. He sat across the desk from Ross and fiddled absentmindedly with a radio, screwing and unscrewing the same nails as he thought. He shook his head. “Hawkeye dying was never a possibility in my mind.”

“I don’t know any of you well,” Ross had leaned forward to talk quietly and still be heard. General Mustang had left the office but she didn’t want him to return and hear talk of his captain. Fuery could get away with it but Ross had still been new and unsure. “but I want you to know that the general is my concern now. Whether the threat is emotional or physical.”

Fuery had stopped his worrying of the radio. Light glared against his glasses. “Can you bring Captain Hawkeye back to life?”

Ross flattened her back on the chair. “I cannot.”

“Then you can’t bring him back to life either.”

Ross almost comes down onto the butts of her hands now as she slips on mud. She’d let her mind travel too far into the past and lost her footing for it. General Mustang glances at her and then keeps going, his hands buried deep in his pockets and his feet somehow unwavering in the waves of mud rolling down the hill with the rain. Ross puts a hand out as a visor over her eyes and watches her general go higher and higher until he’s a blur in the harsh storm, his form being cut into pieces by the stark white slant of rain. It’s uncannily similar, Ross thinks, to what Riza Hawkeye’s death has done to him.

Ross lowers her hand and follows General Mustang’s tracks the rest of the way. She plants her feet in the impressions he leaves behind in the soft earth and finds it’s easier to move when she can propel herself upward this way. The chill of the air is almost painful this time of year as winter’s jaws come apart and clamp down over the whole of the country, pillowing most of it in a biting cold. She can feel the water ice her down to her bones. Her lips are turning purple by now, she assumes, and once she’s reached the plot of land where the general is he takes a look at her before peeling his coat off and offering it to her. She wants to protest but it’s lukewarm and she pulls it over her head to protect her ears and cheeks and chin from being further frosted by the rain that she believes should be snow by now.

Ross waits like that in the downpour. The only sound is the splattering of the rain in puddles that fleck her pants legs with mud. Occasionally she hears thunder but it’s muffled, and she counts the seconds between it and the lightning that precedes it and decides it’s far off - probably as far as Resembool or Ishval. Storms like this used to scare her when she was small but her father had taught her that seconds were miles and the thunder was far away and more often than not the lightning was even further. As she got older she enjoyed more and more sitting by the window and watching the lightning come down faster than the rain. It would cover her in white light and suddenly she could see everything that the dark had hidden from her - lampposts, potholes, and sidewalks. Things became clear when the lightning hit.

Lightning skips along in the clouds and she counts now, her breath getting caught in the general’s coat and warming her lips, “One...two...thr-” Thunder smashes against her ears. “General,” she says as the sound rolls away, “what are we doing here, sir?”

General Mustang doesn’t answer her but tugs a thick bundle of sticks from one of his pockets. They look like the wooden ends of brooms, only shortened. From his other pocket he reveals a handful of coiled metal. He kneels down into the sloppy mud and places the things there, and then his hands come together and there’s a flash of blue electric light and he stands up again as the lightning comes, holding his newly-made shovel in a knuckle-whitening grip. His face is illuminated for Ross in the that piece of a second when the lightning exists and suddenly she knows, and the confrontation from the train yard comes to flood her mind like a gutter.

We’re here because of what that man said , she thinks wildly, and General Mustang is going to...he’s going…

Ross can see him coming apart like the way a flower blooms - from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head his whole self is peeling away, forming layers of leathery petals. He’s panting, little threads splaying around his seams, and he’s putting everything he is into the eyes held against her headstone. He’s putting everything he is into her; into Riza Hawkeye and he’s leaving nothing for his own self.

“General,” Ross says, and drops half of his coat to grab for the shovel. He moves it from her reach and she looks down and swears the soil is moving under that headstone. She looks and she sees in her coldness and her anxiety the worn face of Captain Riza Hawkeye, her cheeks caving in and the bones of her face coming out of her skin like hard, menacing snow-capped mountains. “Please don’t, sir,” she begs him. But the petals are falling, dripping with heavy, cold rain. There is no one here to catch them or fold them back against his frame. The only person who can is buried six feet under the ground, her skin shrinking against her bones.

“Wait for me by the car if you can’t handle this, Ross,” Roy tells her. His tone is as cold as the winter storm and as far off as the thunder. He puts the tip of his shovel over the earth pregnant with his captain and starts to dig, pulling clumps of mud up and depositing them on the other side of the grave. Ross wants to leave but her eyes are glued to what he’s doing, and the impossibility of it, and the madness . General Mustang, prestigious in every right, is quickly caked in mud up to his knees. His hair is usually so carefully unkempt but now it lay against his temples and forehead in clumps, and hangs like fat black caterpillars over his dark eyes. Each time he jabs his shovel into the thick earth Ross sees more and more of his composure chip away.

General Mustang works fast, and in a few minutes he’s made a hole large enough to drop himself into. He’s a foot closer to his dead captain now. He cuts off walls of muddy earth to give himself more room to stand and as he flings wet dirt out into the rain the wind sends some back to him, giving his face freckles made of mud. Ross thinks that he looks small in his boxy hole, so unlike General Roy Mustang. He’s shrinking away from the reality of the world, his back and legs and face and hands muddied and black with soaking wet dirt and grass roots. Lightning unfolds overhead and the thunder follows close on its tail, less than two seconds away now, as the general drives himself deeper into the ground.

Ross is sick to see the mud on his face shine red when lit up by lightning. He looks like he’s tearing into a carcass and for all Ross knows, he is. For all he knows, he is. She stands over him for however long it takes. Eventually his hands start to crack and bleed and he paints the shovel in his blood and Ross knows he’s going to blister there, need a medic, and then what? He’ll tell them how he injured his hands? He’ll go to Central still soggy and with the sight of a rotten Riza Hawkeye floating around in his head and Ross isn’t sure he’ll come back from that. She swallows hard and it feels like she’s just dunked ice cubes down her throat. I should do something, she tells herself, I should stop him. I need to stop him.

But Ross can’t stop him. She’s close to literally being frozen in place from the cold and she is afraid to approach the Flame Alchemist in his moment of vulnerability; she does not want to intrude on something her soul is telling her is private. “Why don’t you just transmute it all away, sir?” she urges instead, because his hands are going raw and some voice in the back of her head is telling her he has to do this. It’s just like the house - it’s how a man who has never properly grieved in his life grieves. It’s how he moves forward it’s how he comes to terms it’s how he punishes himself it’s how he replaces the comfort she isn’t here to give it’s how he copes with lost lov-

“I wasn’t here when they buried her,” he huffs, “and so I don’t know exactly where she is.”

Still, Ross watches the general’s hands obsessively. They are his first line of defense and he’s shredding them. As the hole gets deeper and wider he switches positions to explore every centimeter of the space with his blood-and-rain-drenched shovel. He barely seems to notice the pain in his hands and the thought crosses Ross’ mind that Riza Hawkeye would have made him stop half an hour ago; she would have made him stop before he set his first boot into the mud.

“General, sir, it’s time to go,” she says and bends over to take the back of the general’s collar between her fingers. The moment she does is the moment the head of the shovel strikes something hollow and decidedly wooden. General Mustang places his shovel on the edge of the hole that now sits above his shoulders and clasps his hands together a second time. They hover along the length of something, the blue light mingling with the white of the lightning. He drops his arms to his sides when he’s done, and his hand rips through his hair and Ross, compelled by gross curiosity, steps forward to see what he’s seen.

She peers into the hole with one leg at its edge and the other planted firmly a foot away to keep herself from tumbling in. It’s deep, a little under six feet, and Roy stands on an untouched pile of mud at one end and at the other is half of a dirtied casket and inside there is… nothing. Ross looks at the general disbelievingly like he’d come by earlier and stolen the corpse to prove himself right, but she knows that isn’t true. She squints at the headstone to be sure, but the deep ridges read easily: RIZA HAWKEYE. And all at once Ross feels her pulse kick against her skin, and goosebumps rise along her arms and the back of her neck, and there’s a muted scream coming out from the space between her lips as a whimper: “Captain Hawkeye,” she says, her breath shuddering. Her hands start to shake at her sides.

“She isn’t here,” the general says. Ross rocks back on her heels away from the empty coffin...and away from the general. His hands come up to clamp over the edges of the hole he’s dug himself in like he plans to lift himself out. But he doesn’t, and his fingers disappear into the mud as he tenses, and his back arches, and when the thunder goes off he goes off with it, roaring at the empty casket. His scream sounds like it could rip the sky in two and Ross can’t take it. It’s not loud but it’s powerful like the snap of his fingers and the image of the burning house in those pretty green trees. It sounds like he’s trying to call someone back to him; like his desperation has bubbled to the surface and made itself known to the countryside, to Central, to Riza Hawkeye. Ross covers her ears and the general’s coat falls to the mud to lay limp and sad at her feet.

And Ross sees the general truly fall apart then, the petals going flat around him, ripping him into slices. He lets his knees go out beneath him until he’s hanging by his arms, his body collapsing where hers should be, and seconds later the thunder bellows and he bellows again with it. Ross eats every word of the captain’s death and buries them deep inside of her. She wants them far away from here and the place where the general has fallen beneath her feet. She wants them to be buried six feet under ground and mourned by no one; she wants the general to have his captain and be stitched together again.

Lighting flies. Ross thinks: I get it now, Fuery. I understand this, General Mustang.

The general’s knuckles are touching the mud by the time he’s run out of breath, and when he manages to pull his fingers from the earth he’s shaking, shivering in his anger and the cold. He’s saturated with mud and and rain water. “General,” Ross offers tentatively, “you should get out of there. We should go back to the car, sir.”

“We should go to Grumman,” Mustang bites back.

“You’ve just committed a crime, sir. You ruined a grave. I don’t think going to the Führer is a good-”

“I DON’T CARE!” The thunder punctuates his scream. The heat of anger froths from his mouth and bites at Ross’ heels and she sees it twist and ghost around in the air. Roy looks to her like a rabid animal. His whole body is made of tension and the tendons in his neck stick out as the rainwater pulls the collar of his shirt down. The faint scarring on his hand speaks, the old holes in his palms whisper, The c aptain is alive. The captain, the captain the captain she’s

(possibly in enemy hands)

alive.

“My captain is alive,” he growls to the empty grave. The rain starts to slow and now it comes down in sloppy cenz-sized pieces that are fat and glittering with ice. Ross sees them outline the general like stars when the lighting goes purple-white in the sky. They freeze there around his frame, like the cold has stilled them midair, and they look bright like fire. A fire so hot it feels cold until it’s burned through your skin and you pull away frightened, your hand sizzling.

Ross crouches near the grave and puts her hands on the general’s shoulders. There is no searing heat. “I’ve got your back, sir,” she tells him. “We’ll go to Fuhrer Grumman. I’ll make sure that Captain Riza Hawkeye is returned to you.”

“I’m sorry,” is all the General says in response.

Chapter Text

Roy turns slowly under the dusty light coming through the dead and broken windows. Sweat glues his heavy uniform to his frame but when the wind turns up loose grains of sand it’s cold and wet. He has never been to a beach in his life but there is unmistakable salt in the air and the coolness of the breeze is exactly as he’d read in travel logs and novels. He wants to go outside and see whose sand this is: Ishval or the ocean, but something tells him to wait and to see.

This place he’s in looks like it used to be someone’s home. There are dirty pots in a cupboard whose door is swinging precariously from one squeaky hinge. There are mugs turned over on their sides on a wooden table layered with sand. If he looks up Roy can see the jagged ends of beams coming out of the stucco roof like exposed bone. There is sunlight spilling out from the breaks in the ceiling and cracking the leather of the sofa and the chair in the corner of the living room. Roy stills and wonders what he’s here for.

Then something yellow blots the corner of his vision and before he turns to see what it is it appears in front of him. She’s shimmering with sweat and her long blonde hair is sticking to her forehead and the back of her neck. Her military jacket is open in the front and her slacks are dusted with sand. She grips the edge of the doorframe and pants into the quiet of Roy’s mysterious, abandoned home.

“Captain Hawkeye?” Roy is tentative, formal. He wants to scream her name and bury his face in the dampness in the crook of her neck but her brown eyes are wide and cautious and telling him to be wary. He becomes concerned. “Are you okay?” He takes a step forward - something he wasn’t able to do moments before - and the captain steps forward too. He can see the ring of her jacket collar is stained with sweat. Has she been running? he thinks. From what? From who?

A name comes to him, unbidden: Jaeger.

And then Riza is in his arms. She hooks her arms under his and grabs at his back, pulling at his jacket and pressing her face into his shoulder. He hugs her to him like she might float away if he ever let go and things come rushing at him in the moment he starts to stroke his fingers through her hair: trains, a man coming out of the shadows, the purple and frozen face of -

The Ishval-ocean houses’ walls start to melt away, capturing Roy’s attention. Outside, beyond his embrace with Riza, screams fill the space where the quiet used to be.

“What’s going on?” he whispers onto the crown of her head. “Where are you?”

He’s dimly aware that she feels like nothing. There is no weight in his arms. She doesn’t feel warm or cool - and then, all at once, she does. Her body bucks into his, there’s a pop! echoing in the chaos outside, and suddenly Riza becomes very heavy. She loses her grip on Roy and starts slipping, and Roy crushes her to his chest and feels it; a hot wet tumbling out of her back in waves. Roy steals a glance at his hand over her shoulder, and if the whole world were in black-and-white the color there would still be legible, dangerous: blood.

“Captain,” he says, his hand smacking onto her blood-soaked back as he fights to keep her standing. “Captain, hey! CAPTAIN!” He looks into her face and her eyes are open but unseeing. The blood is pumping through the space between his fingers unbelievably fast. Has she been shot? his thoughts whirl. He rakes his eyes over the glass-less windows. They are melting with the rest of the house, going slowly in clumps to the sandy floor just as the captain is trying to do. There is no one on the other side of them. There is only a storm of grey dust and sand.

“Help,” he says, his eyes on Riza again. The blood turns the sands beneath his feet to an ugly brownish red. He hears a rush of water. “Help! HELP ME!” There is no one. The screams from before have been drowned out - the world is silent again except for Roy’s frantic pleas and the soft itch of granules against the houses’ battered frame.

“Tell the general…” Riza says suddenly, her voice feathery, “tell him…” Her breath is coming in shallow gasps. Roy feels her chest pick up and then fall into him each time she breathes. The ground below takes her lifeblood greedily even as he’s trying to cup it in his hand. She looks at him with pale lips, her eyes shimmering in the wet that pain brings.

“Captain?” Roy takes her face in his hand. “I am the general. I’m right here.”

“Tell General Mustang...tell him…”

“I’m right here, Riza! Please!” Desperation winds around Roy’s throat and chokes, and squeezes. Riza blinks slowly at him.

“Tell General...General…

...General. General Mustang!”

Roy wakes with a start. Lieutenant Ross is rocking his knee back and forth forcefully from her spot behind the wheel. Her eyes are locked onto him and full of worry. Her face is taught. There are deep blue-black bags topping her cheeks. Roy sees her and sobers from his dream eagerly, more than ready to rid himself of the captain’s pallid face and blank eyes. He’s been having dreams like that one torturously often and they always leave him feeling stale, deflated. His mouth tasting like sand.

“Lieutenant Ross?” Roy’s voice comes out hoarse and scrapes against his throat. He’s slumped against the back seat and when he tries to sit up his drying-but-still-wet clothes tug on his skin. How long has he been asleep? How long has Ross been driving? The last thing he remembers is slipping and sliding down a muddied hill toward a car. He doesn’t even know when he fell asleep, and that perturbs him. “Where are we?”

“We’re here in Central, sir,” Ross says. She’s watching him warily.

She must have driven all night. Roy frowns.

“You were groaning in your sleep, sir. I would have woken you sooner but I had to wait until I could park.”

“Why didn’t you wake me so I could drive, Lieutenant?” Roy finally manages to sit straight in his seat. The movement causes his head to pulse with dull pain. He catches his temples between his hands and runs his fingers in circles over them. Then he hisses and draws his hands away, watching as early afternoon light illuminates them as raw and reddened as he’d made them the night before.

“You needed the rest, sir.” Ross simply looks at him. The whites of her eyes are pink and watery. Her clothes hang loose over her arms and shoulders. She shivers in her seat.

Roy studies his hands. He can see his old scars underneath the film of dried blood and graveyard soil. Shit , he thinks. These hands are his greatest weapon and they look like ground beef. He’d rubbed the skin right off on the sloppily-transmuted handle of his shovel. He needs to see a medic - he probably needed to see one hours ago. “Go home and sleep now, Ross,” he says. “That’s an order.”

Ross is quiet for a moment until Roy opens the passenger side door; carefully, just using his fingers. “Yes, sir,” she eventually concedes. Roy can tell she does not want to leave him alone, but exhaustion is a powerful thing.

Roy feels the cold wind of an early winter afternoon bite and chew at his damp body as he exits the car. Ross has considerately parked at the foot of the tunneled entrance to Central Command and he thanks her internally for that. His eyes jump over the steps leading to the lifts before they go, magnetized, back to Ross. She salutes him and drives off sluggishly, as though there were a million other things she’d rather be doing. Roy considers her as she goes, the vehicle spitting cottony clouds of black smoke out as she urges it forward. I’ve got your back, sir…

He hopes she sleeps well.

“General Mustang?” Roy tears his eyes away from the retreating car and follows the sound of his name. As he turns he realizes his neck is stiff and so he moves choppily, his hands aching in the icy breeze, his torso going numb. “What are you…?”

It’s Führer Grumman. Convenient. He looks prestigious and pristine in his uniform - he looks so well guarded with his black-suited men at either arm. His eyes regard Roy with disgust, with confusion. One of his hands reaches outward and then falls limply to his side. “What are you doing out here looking like that , my boy?”

Roy instantly prickles in anger. Here is a man who is all knowing and all-powerful in many ways and he’s comfortably protected, comfortably shielded from the chaos of terrorism in Ishval, comfortably allowing his granddaughter to...what, exactly? Where is she? With Jaeger? Slinking around Ishval with fear burrowing into her back? Stars burst in the corners of Roy’s vision and bring with them a flood of hot, unrelenting fury. Roy staggers a bit in his place on the sidewalk like the force of this emotion has struck him dizzy. Führer Grumman steps down from the lift in interest, his old eyes worrying over Roy’s physical state, but Roy holds his hand out at him.

“I saw her ,” he says, paying no mind to whatever prying ears may be lurking nearby. The words are boiling on his tongue; searing and heady. He has to let them out. He wants to scream them at the Führer. He wants to grab the Führer by his collar and shake him until his teeth rattle. “I met someone in Ishval last night who had a lot to say about her too.”

Führer Grumman doesn’t respond for a long minute. His shifty eyes survey his surroundings and then he motions Roy forward in a ‘c’mere’ kind of way. The old man is cracking like that sofa in Roy’s dream. His face is made of deep ridges and tired lines. Roy thinks on his own physical markings of aging and tiredness and wonders if it’s worry that’s done it to Grumman; or guilt. He moves toward his Führer and each step fills him to the brim with distrust. It leaves a hole in Roy’s chest, this uneasiness over a man who has taught him so much. He is readying himself to disregard what the old man says but then Grumman speaks, and Roy is left without breath: “So you have. What of it, General Mustang?”

Roy’s heart stalls hard in his chest. I knew it. IknewitIknewitIknewit. The soil from Riza’s fake grave grits against his teeth. He sees her falling from his arms in that dream and he needs, he feels, he’s frenzied: “Where is she?”

“We’re not sure,” Grumman says. Roy’s pulse roars and he bites the inside of his cheek to keep from manhandling the leader of his nation. Grumman’s guards turn hard as stone at the man’s sides, probably noticing Roy’s whitening knuckles. His fingernails are delving into the tender flesh of his palms but the pain doesn’t register. “You saw her in Ishval, perhaps - maybe,” Grumman goes on. The sunlight cuts angles over his face and he looks conniving, mean. “But that can’t be where she is.”

“You’re full of shit,” Roy barks. Any other soldier would be reprimanded for insubordination. Roy is only met with an indignant stare from a longtime mentor. This is another game of chess, nothing more. This is a game between two men who have played and played and played and understand each other’s moves expertly, intimately. “Let’s pretend for a minute that I didn’t see her with my own eyes,” Roy recalls the fuzzy photo of the woman with a glinting arm and deep brown hair, “and let’s focus on what happened to me last night. I was approached by one of Jaeger’s men. He said they have her. He mentioned her tattoo. He teased that they’re hurting her.” Roy’s voice goes hard and strained like a cord. It pains him to think of the nameless man from the train yard putting his hands on the captain. It makes him ferociously angry.

Now it’s Grumman’s turn to look stunned. He stands halfway up the steps to the lifts and his boot slips down from the lip of one to land hard on the step below. His hand grips Roy’s shoulder and pulls him forward. “They do not have her, Mustang,” but there is uncertainty in the Führer’s tone, “so let it go.”

“Why would you have me bury her when you knew what that would do to me? Why pretend she's dead and then admit it now?" Roy’s voice is level, but he’s snarling. His teeth are bared and he feels rabid, uncontrolled.

“Because she probably is dead, General.” Führer Grumman’s voice does not waver; it does not break on his words. It is emotionless, steady, practiced; it tests Roy's patience. “We couldn’t have you scouring the north for her or starting battles with the terrorists in the east so we expedited her death. Not that burying a fake Captain Hawkeye has stopped you; I know exactly where Havoc and Catalina are. I know exactly where Breda is. Are their lives so insignificant compared to Riza Hawkeye’s?”

“You know they aren’t.” Roy struggles to keep his voice level. He only wants to spit fire in the Führer’s face but public spaces are not the place for heated discussions about a woman people believe to be dead. The thought occurs to him that the Führer could have seen the car as it pulled up and approached Roy outside on purpose, under the heat of the sun, in the center of a city humming with life. His ire grows.

Roy is glad he doesn’t have his gloves on him. He feels an overwhelming urge to light everything in the city on fire. It sickens him that his mind turns to flames when he’s so devastatingly riled but that is all he’s been allowed to be since Ishval: Roy Mustang, the Flame Alchemist, The Man Who Burns Things. Cadets see him and wiggle uncomfortably in their boots; his peers sneer at him; the country honors him. His heart does a dramatic drop into his stomach.

“Whether she’s dead or alive, Mustang, she doesn’t need your protection. She didn’t need it when you sent her to Briggs - and she wouldn’t need it now, my boy. She was safest by your side but the Promised Day has shaken you. You got a taste of what losing Riza Hawkeye would be like and your soul vehemently opposed - so much so that you disregarded your captain’s wishes and thought with your emotions and not rationale.” The Führer spoke slowly, his voice not unkind.

Roy knows Grumman is right. He should have heeded his captain’s wishes and let her stay with him - he shouldn’t have pushed so hard at General Armstrong and Führer Grumman for their approval to move her. She should have been in charge of her own safety; he should have respected her that much. This is his fault, truly. He knows this - he laments it - and he doesn’t need to hear the Führer repeat it to him like he’s a child. Or like he’s got his old and wrinkled finger in some deep, unseen wound and he’s twisting it, rubbing Roy’s nose is all the messes he’s made.

“You dug up her grave, didn’t you?” Führer Grumman says, his stern eyes drinking in Roy’s messy appearance. Roy nods. “Go see a medic and get yourself cleaned up. You are a general in the Amestrian military and I expect you to conduct yourself as such.” He descends the steps the rest of the way. Roy stops him through gritted teeth.

“If we don’t find her,” he says quietly, like he’s murmuring secrets to the air, “then we are no better than anyone else who has ever failed her. Her father, you, me - she will have gone her whole life being used as a notebook; a pawn; a weapon. She is more than all of those things and the longer you leave her to wherever she is and whatever she’s doing the longer she will go on believing she has some duty that outweighs who she is.”

And she is so much. She is so much.

“This was never just about keeping her safe. This was always about the things that I have done - that you and her father have done or haven’t done - that have led her here. I do know what she’s capable of but that does not mean she has to go at things alone. Her strength is not an excuse for you or anyone else to be complacent. We can’t wait around hoping she’ll show up and prove us all wrong. We owe her so much more than that.”

“Drop it, General Mustang,” the Führer all but growls. Roy can tell his words have ruffled the old man. His frame goes small, shrinks, shies away. “You may keep your men out east but their primary objective as of right now is to incriminate Jaeger. It’s too dangerous to pull them out now so I want your and their noses on that man’s trail and nothing else. Leave this business with Captain Hawkeye be. That’s an order.”

Then he keeps walking, leaving Roy to shake with quiet fury below Central Command, his eyes stinging in the cold.

Riza doesn’t remember falling asleep. She spoke to General Armstrong and then she went to sit between Havoc and Ryder and then...and then…

She sits up and winces when her thigh smarts in protest. Someone is curled up at her feet, limiting her leg space, crimping her legs in places. Ryder? She reaches out and nudges his shoulder, blinking hard against the soft yellow light filling the living room. He jolts forward in his seat, his head lifting with a snap from the back of the couch.

“Oh shit,” he groans, “I just popped the shit out of my neck.”

“I’m sorry,” Riza pats her comrade’s leg affectionately. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Ryder smiles gently, his eyes squinting and watery. “It’s all right, Captain. Judging by the sunlight I’d imagine it’s time to stop snoozing anyway.”

Riza nods, though she wishes quite the opposite. She could sleep for another few hours, or possibly a few days. Her whole body feels taken with sleep. Her limbs are sluggish and her eyelids droopy. Her left arm is tingling. She realizes she forgot to remove her automail cast before falling asleep so she does so now. Her small fingers work carefully at the tiny fastenings and metal plates as Ryder looks on over her shoulder, the palms of his hands working the leftover sleep out of his eyes.

The curtains are drawn together in the living room but sunlight still trickles through. By the intensity of it Riza guesses it’s past noon. Who in their right mind thought to let me sleep for so long? She peels the soft material that cushions her arm from the metal away and unties her blue ribbon from its place near her elbow. She gathers the smaller pieces of her cast into the ribbon and stretches her arm behind her back and over her head. The movement feels good. The rush of blood flow and air over her exposed skin helps to wake her further.

“How are you going to manage that thing when you’re around Jaeger?” Ryder asks, stifling a yawn with his fist. He’s angled himself against the arm of the couch so he’s facing Riza directly, his dark eyes skittering over the small pieces in the body of the ribbon. He has one arm slung over the couch’s arm and the other over the lip, behind Riza’s head.

“That isn’t for you to worry about.” Riza tells him. She’s already reassembling her cast, preparing for the day.

“It’s my job to worry about it, sir,” he responds, but he doesn’t press the matter. He leaves the couch and does stretches of his own in the misty light of the afternoon sun. The loss of his weight on the couch leaves Riza oddly unnerved.

“Could you help me up? I’m not sure I can support my own weight yet.” She asks as she’s fitting the last of the pieces over her fingers. She’s gotten quite fast at manipulating her cast. Possibly fast enough to impress even Winry. The thought makes her smile despite her tiredness.

“Sure thing,” Ryder grins. He ducks down and slides an arm around her waist. Then he takes her opposite hand in his and lifts the two of them from the cushiony couch easily. Riza tries to put her toes to the floor and her wound stretches. Flames lap at her leg from her hip to her foot. She inhales sharply through her teeth.

“Ow.”

“Maybe you need crutches,” Ryder teases.

“She needs rest.” Havoc rounds the corner from the hallway to the living room. Rivulets of water drip from the tips of his short hair and roll down his face. There’s a hand towel draped over the back of his neck. He has a toothbrush sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Riza frowns.

“Lieutenant Havoc.”

Havoc hums.

“Is that my toothbrush?”

Havoc pops the thing out of his mouth and eyes it. He touches a finger to his chin. His lips perk up menacingly into a broad grin.

Riza glares.

Havoc’s playful smile fades. “Yikes you’re scary,” he sighs. “Reynolds grabbed a few of these bad boys for us after Miles left with your shadows.”

“After Miles left with…” Riza sighs. “You mean Bostic and the others. I had forgotten. When did they leave?”

“After you fell asleep,” Ryder says. His voice rumbles through his frame and Riza feels it against her own. She gives more of her weight to him, silently glad he’s tall enough to bear it. “You went out like a light after your talk with General Armstrong. No one wanted to wake you because you were sleeping so heavily.” He pauses. “Actually, that’s not true. That woman you brought along wanted to wake you but Lieutenant Havoc wasn’t having it.”

Havoc shrugs. “We have to go back to Jaeger today and you need to be well rested for that. Gina left early this morning to give you even more time to sleep. She’s going to feed Jaeger some bullshit about how we needed to leave separately to curb suspicion from MPs or something.”

“That was kind of her,” Riza says. “So where’s Reynolds now?”

Havoc and Ryder share a look. Riza has seen it before in Havoc; it’s the look he gives when an uncomfortable subject is breached. “Lieutenant Havoc?” she urges.

“She’s out scouting,” Havoc says. “The chief was closer to us than we initially thought. Reynolds saw him, Lieutenant Ross, and Breda leaving one of the old train yards. She managed to follow them long enough to catch Breda after the general left him so Breda...knows now.” Havoc gestures vaguely to Riza. “Breda told Reynolds that General Mustang had a run-in with one of Jaeger’s guys.” Riza stiffens. “Whoever it was he met was feeding him all kinds of lies about you and how they’re holding you hostage and all this shit. It really got the chief messed up, but…” Havoc shifts his weight from one foot to another. His face goes dark. All traces of fun leave his features as suddenly as lightning cracks. “They know about some tattoo...and scarring. I didn’t even know about it. Neither did Breda but according to him the general reacted defensively when Jaeger’s guy brought it up.”

Riza’s back begins to buzz. She fists Ryder’s shirt in her hands and he pulls her up further, thinking she needs the extra support. She does. Black spots blot her vision and her knees go weak, her thigh pulsing achingly with her heart beat. Everything feels so far away and muffled. Ryder says something to her but it’s like he’s trying to talk to her while she’s underwater. Clarity doesn’t return to her until Havoc is on her, his hands cradling her by her shoulders.

“I didn’t think they could possibly know.” Riza says. “How could they know?”

“Breda says the chief said something about physicals. Military ones. If Jaeger has guys in the military then they could have gone over any of our files for identifiers or weaknesses.”

To Riza it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. She steadies herself on Havoc’s chest, one hand there and the other still tethered to Ryder. “It’s a tattoo that I asked General Mustang to deface years ago.” She offers an explanation no one explicitly asked for. Havoc’s eyes grow wide. Ryder grips her waist tighter like he’s preparing to be impacted by something heavy and destructive. “The tattoo is how the general learned flame alchemy, Havoc. After the war I asked him to ruin it so that no one else could learn it.” She says each word slowly, enunciating and pausing for her listeners to process what she’s saying. Havoc takes a step back, almost stumbling as his ankles cross.

“The chief burned you?” Miraculously, there is no revulsion hinted in Havoc’s reaction. There is only a long, wide expanse of sudden understanding stretching between him and Riza and probably General Mustang too, because Riza suspects this information has shed light on her relationship with Roy where there used to be none.

Riza simply nods in reply.

“That’s a huge identifier,” Ryder breathes. “If they know you’re scarred on your back like that, that’s...well as soon as they see it they’ll know exactly who you are.” Riza hears fear in Ryder’s voice. She feels it creeping through her veins.

“They won’t see it,” she says flatly. “Hiding the tattoo will be no different than hiding my automail cast.” She looks to Havoc and tugs on the front of his shirt. He stares at her dumbly before he speaks, his voice raw and as rough as stone.

“So you’re still going to do this?” he asks.

“Yes.”

Havoc swallows thickly. “Okay then,” he says. “They won’t see it.” There is a promise in his eyes, hot and fiery. Riza can’t be sure she likes it. A new fear soaks through her skin and muscles into her bones, one born from the look in her dear friend’s face. He looks at her like Roy did when he first read the letter from Jaeger; like he’s overcome by a hot, primal need to keep her safe.

Riza smooths Havoc’s shirt over his shoulders. “I’ll get dressed and we’ll go back to Jaeger.”

Chapter Text

Riza is glad to be traveling during the day. The sunlight settles her nerves. When it’s dark everything is ambiguous and Riza has never liked to live in that kind of uncertainty. The innate need to see her surroundings is one she’s sure is evolutionary but as a longtime bodyguard she’s also sure it’s something she has learned, refined.  The ability to pick out with her eyes the things that are out of place is something that comforts her. She is calmed by her own power, ever vigilant and all seeing.

She is fighting with her sleeve. It is aggravatingly difficult to roll it up past her automail cast with one hand. Her hair is still damp from her afternoon shower and Ishval’s sun melts it against her forehead where it is slowly slipping into her field of vision. She flicks it out of her face and works her fingers under the thick wool of her flannel. Her thumb smooths the material over her arm while the rest of her hand pulls at it until it flips, finally coming over the ridges of metal casings that go in a wave up her arm to her elbow. She sucks air in through her teeth as she goes for a second roll. Havoc snickers.

“What’s so funny?” Riza resists the urge to pull at her sleeve with her teeth. That would only give the man next to her more to laugh about. “Spit it out, Havoc.”

Havoc clears his throat. His eyes are on the dusty road ahead, catching sun rays that explode into stars over his irises. “Nothing, sir.” But he’s biting his lip. The corners of his mouth are scrunched together like an unhappy starfish and in a moment he’s giggling again, his hands swatting at the steering wheel.

Riza can see it in the daylight: Havoc, a weight lifted from him, being who he is in the stuffy warmth of a terrorist’s car. She only needs to squint to imagine his hair two inches shorter, his blue eyes peering out at her from underneath sandy bangs. In his mouth is an unlit cigarette, the white of it catching the light and becoming luminescent. Riza’s sharp eyes see it all. She takes a deep breath - attempts to steady herself - and then her carefully planned exhale gets away from her and she’s laughing, her sticky hair coming apart as she tosses her head back.

Her sleeve is forgotten until Havoc’s wiping loose tears from his eyes and slowing to a stop outside the Flour. Riza is blinking her own euphoria away as the cloud of dirt settles around the windshield and she sees the boxy rock of the Flour for the first time. It’s a shimmering metallic grey, almost white in the sunlight. She was right about the Briggs-inspired doors. They are bolted together with thick black rods and even from her place in the passenger seat she can tell they are dense. The Flour itself is immaculate. It is a rectangle that stretches back too far for her to see, but she speculates that it must end where a garden of boulders begins - Desert’s Ring, if she had to pick a landmark. The top of the Flour juts out a few feet over the doors and under it is a collection of those spikes Riza saw on the ceiling inside. She shivers, recalling what her mind had told her they were made for… Violence.

Havoc turns in his seat as the guards outside shift their eyes to him interestedly. He holds his hands out to Riza, palms facing the sky. “Gimme your arms,” he says.

Riza puts her automail-casted wrist in one of his hands and he finishes the job she couldn’t. He stops curling the sleeve over her cast when he’s met the edge of it and then he takes her other arm and rolls that sleeve until it’s even with its neighbor. He sits with his back on the door and his hands on his thighs when he’s finished, a Havoc-like smirk set into his sweet face. “I’ll never let you forget this,” he says.

Riza ignores him. The sight of the Flour and the guards has set off an uncomfortable bout of anticipation in her. It’s weaving up between her ribs like a snake, constricting and writhing against her lungs. Jaeger is inside, and he most likely has plans for her. The thought that she is now a terrorist floods her mind like a god’s storm, leaving destruction in its wake. What is it that he will request of her? What is it she will learn? There is no part of her that is ashamed of the fear she is feeling. If this month has taught her anything it’s to let her fear guide her, protect her. She has been programmed to prefer light over dark and she has been programmed to react to fear too, even when it makes her feel cowardly.

Havoc must sense her anxiety because he puts his hand on her forearm where the guards can’t see. “Captain,” he whispers, his mouth barely moving in case someone outside can read lips. Riza looks at him - really looks at him - and in his eyes is what she had seen earlier in the day. The raw, powerful hardness of a promise: I will protect you. There are a dozen different ways Riza can react to a look like this one, and she chooses to shake her head. She hopes her eyes are easily read.

That is not your job , she wants to say, but the Briggs-like doors are pushed apart as she finds her voice and she closes her hand on the passenger side door, wind carrying dust into her hair and eyes as she hobbles out of the car. She uses her forearm to block the onslaught of rough granules and looks hard at the form coming out from between the screaming metal doors. She can’t tell who it is, but it’s probable that Havoc can. She turns her attention on him and he’s eyeing her, his expression stern and questioning. He’s obviously lingering on their silent conversation in the car but he moves forward - away from her - anyway. He greets the person at the doors with a familiar smile and then he gestures for Riza to join him. She tries her best to walk toward him with dignity, but all she can manage is a half-stumble over pockets of sand and gravel. The wound in her thigh rubs over the fabric of her pants and she sucks in air through gritted teeth, regretting the decision to remove her dressings after she had showered. Surely Opal will not approve.

“So this is our new recruit, Emilia?”

“In the flesh,” Havoc says. He takes Riza’s elbow when she’s near and she anchors her body to his as best she can.

“Jaeger’s pretty excited about her,” the nameless man says. He’s tall with messy dark hair and hazel eyes. He is wearing an apron that misses his knees by more than a few inches and he wrings his hands around in it, the smell of grease coming off him from the movement. Riza recognizes it and her stomach stirs: roasted boar. She hasn’t had that in months, maybe a year. She is now painfully aware that she hasn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours, and the feel of Havoc’s gurgling belly under her hand tells her he could be in the same sinking ship.

“My name’s Barkley,” the man says, and shakes Riza’s hand. Her fingers feel short and stubby compared to his long and bony ones, and her hand disappears into his palm when he takes it. “I do most of the cooking here, but I’m also an alchemist. I was dumping the grease out the side door when I heard you guys pull up. Thought maybe you’d be transport.” He turns to Havoc. “They’re supposed to come back today. I think they’re bringing back something big.”

Riza doesn’t know what that means but there is no doubt in her mind that Havoc does. He tenses beside her, if only a little. “Great,” he says. “Is dinner ready yet?”

Barkley laughs. The sound is short and comes out high pitched. “I served lunch about a half hour ago. You’re welcome to the leftovers.”

Riza was inside the Flour hours ago but she was too tired then to notice the fine, squared lines indicative of alchemy. They are scattered over the floors and walls like confetti. She gives Havoc’s arm a gentle squeeze as they move slowly to a narrow hallway at the back of the white room. He digs his fingers shallowly into her side in acknowledgement of her uneasiness. They still have a lot to discuss, it seems.

Riza looks around Havoc at the room that is Jaeger’s office. It is eerily silent and still. She has a hard time believing that is the place where she had stood and seen Havoc the night before. It had been so menacing in Riza’s heightened state of anxiety and now it is as bland as any other door - though she knows it houses a man who believes he holds the east in his hands. That might be the most dangerous thing about Jaeger, Riza thinks. He is so sure things belong to him if he wants them to, and while the east isn’t really his it’s the belief that it is that emboldens Jaeger. It makes him feel untouchable, like he could kill the Flame Alchemist’s subordinate and hide away in his rock unscathed and unbothered. Men who feel untouchable are not apologetic, and they do not count the consequences of their actions because to them there are none. They don’t empathize or humanize. They are the ultimate burden on the world, on progress and society: a blight.

The King Bradleys of Amestris are never ending.

The hall leading into the lunchroom is so cramped that Havoc’s shoulders barely miss brushing its sides. The walls and ceiling of it look untouched by alchemy, like raw stone just like the floor, walls, and roof of Jaeger’s office. It is a dark hall but up ahead is light and the soft echo of voices. Riza had hoped the room would be empty so she could whisper questions to Havoc but it isn’t, and when she steps out into the whiteness of it her gaze finds Gina first, then the exits, then she scans the rows of long tables for signs of anyone recognizable. No one. Gina smirks as Riza and Havoc approach.

“Don’t look so jumpy, Em,” she says. Havoc helps Riza into her seat and follows Barkley into the kitchen. Gina drops her playful smile once he’s gone. “Jaeger wants you to fight Richard,” she deadpans.

“What?”

“I thought - I had hoped - that he would spare you if you fought me but I was wrong. I misjudged. What he had me do must have been something else. Now you’re wounded and, well, Richard is a big man.”

Riza’s first thought is that she’s too hungry to worry about this right now, and her second is that Richard could crush her jaw in his palm. Richard is one of the men Riza met the night before. He was at the bar sucking on the butt of a cigarette, his bulky body covering half his side of the booth. His fists are the size of dinner plates, bigger than Riza’s head. He’s a short man but looks like he could pummel through the sides of trains if he tried hard enough and Riza is regrettably much more breakable than a train.

“How do I win?” she asks.

Gina looks stunned, then sobers with a gentle shake of her head. “I don’t think you can. Your best bet is to ru-”

“How do I win , Gina?”

Gina leans back in her seat, the front legs of her chair lifting off the ground. She sighs. “Richard is big but fast. He’s not even remotely good at hand-to-hand technicalities like form and analysis of your opponent’s movement so he uses his strength. He can overpower just about anyone with that alone, and with your leg the way it is… You’re going to have to even the playing field if you want even a sliver of a chance.”

“What happens if I lose?”

“Jaeger sends you to transport. You’ll be away from me and Marsh,” she lets the legs of her chair smack distractingly against the packed earth beneath her, “and Jaeger. Can’t keep tabs or get information on the man if you’re away from him and informants.” She says this so quietly that Riza has to reach across the table to hear her. “Here,” her hand disappears under the table and reappears with a small knife, the black handle ridged with plastic spikes. She places it on the tabletop and it lies there gleaming in the bright light. “Get this into his thigh at the start. After that you use that crafty metal arm of yours to take his blows until he wears himself out.”

Riza looks at the knife as though she distrusts it. It is no worse than the guns she carries but the sight of the small thing makes her thigh throb. “And if he gets ahold of it? What then?”

Gina shrugs. “You either let that happen or you don’t. Hopefully you don’t, but if you do you should find any and all ways possible to avoid him.”

“Great advice, Gina, thank you.”

“I’ve been nothing but helpful to you since we first met, huh?” she teases, smug. It blows Riza’s mind how easily this woman can recognize her shortcomings and do nothing to improve on them. And then it hits Riza that Gina is unapologetically Gina, and Riza is not unapologetically Riza because she’s...something else. She is so used to the people closest to her having something to fix in themselves - even the Elric brothers - that when she meets someone who is confident in who they are she is rendered speechless, everything she knows about the world is knocked off its axis. Riza smiles.

“You really have no shame, you know.”

“Absolutely.”

Havoc comes out of the kitchen’s door and into the lunchroom then. He’s balancing two plates on his forearms full of what Riza hopes is boar. He walks carefully to where she’s sitting and he sets the plates on the table before settling in next to Gina. Riza is already picking at the wet and steaming meat on one of the plates before Havoc slides it her way.

“Jaeger’s making Emilia fight Richard,” Gina says blankly. She surveys her nails and picks dirt out from under them. Havoc coughs, the potatoes he had stuffed into his mouth threatening to fly across the table.

“She can’t fight Richard,” he says, swallowing. “She can’t even stand!”

“I can stand,” Riza replies, indignant. Her eyes find the knife on the table as Havoc’s do and he watches her pocket it, carefully sliding it into the waistband of her pants. Havoc sighs.

“It can’t be helped,” Gina pats his arm. “If Jaeger wants to watch her fight before he formally assigns her to a scouting unit then that is just what we have to let happen. It’s not like Richard will kill her.”

“I thought Jaeger had already added me to the scouts?”

“There are scouting levels,” Gina leans back in her chair again and lights a cigarette. “Marsh, Richard, and a few other guys work with me in the first tier. First tier scouts work close to the Flour and closely with Jaeger. Second and third tier scouts move farther out like, say, to Eastern Command or Central. The guys who blew up that train in the north were third tiers.” She drags on her cigarette and then hands it to Havoc so he can take a few puffs too. He does so in between forkfuls of boar, potatoes, and broccoli.

“There are more third tier scouts than any other tier. They aren’t Jaeger’s best fighters, but they are stealthy and a lot of them are tricky to catch. First tier scouts do all the dirty work close to home. We’re the guys who blow up food carts and torch pipelines. All of us are good at fighting too. Jaeger wants his best defenders kept close to home.”

“What about transport?”

Havoc hands the cigarette back to Gina, who takes one last drag on it and snuffs it out on the sole of her boot. Then he speaks.

“Transport does exactly what they sound like they do: they transport stuff. Usually it’s cars Jaeger has sold to someone in the east. But their only task isn’t to take stuff out into the cities. They also bring back people who may be a threat to Jaeger and whatever it is he’s doing here. They bring back new recruits or car parts or food.” Havoc scrapes his fork across his plate, gathering all that is left of his lunch. “Transport can be gone for days or a week or two weeks. It’s not where you want to be.”

“So I have no choice,” Riza says, finishing her own plate. “I have to beat Richard.”

“Sounds like you’re shit out of luck there,” someone says. Riza feels the seat next to her shift downward, pulling the table down with it. Gina rolls her eyes.

“Hi Richard,” she says.

Riza turns her head and there he is. His blue eyes and sandy blonde hair are the first things she notices about him. Then she recognizes the squareness of him - of his face and his shoulders. He’s shaped like a pear but without the rounded edges. Definitely the man she met at the Drooling Dog the night before.

“Hey there, Emilia.” He ignores Havoc and Gina and focuses his attention on Riza instead. She tries to look as bored and unaffected as possible. “I thought I’d come by and make peace with you before the big fight. I wanted you to know that it’s nothing personal, but I have to defend my honor and kick your ass.”

“You have to defend your honor by winning a fight with a wounded woman half your size?” Riza says plainly, twirling her fork around in the grease on her plate.

“No need to be bitter about it.” Richard tries to touch Riza’s arm and she twirls her fork around in her hand until its prongs are pointing upward at his face. He laughs and folds his hands on the table instead. “I’ll tell you what. I came by here to make this interesting...to make a bet with you. Wager’s make things more fun, yeah?”

Havoc folds his arms over his chest and raises one eyebrow. Gina continues to roll her eyes animatedly. Riza does not spare Richard a glance. She is becoming legitimately uninterested in the things that come out of his mouth.

“You let me take you out if I win. And I’ll let you take me out if I win.” His laughter roars through the lunchroom an he pounds his large fists on the table, making Riza’s plate click against it. The sound of it makes Riza’s ears sting with anger.

“No,” she deadpans. Richard laughs again.

“It’s only fair, Emilia. Going out with you would be a religious experience for me.”

“Find a new religion,” Riza says, and then: “I am not a prize. I do not date my colleagues either.”

Gina snorts a laugh. Riza shoots her a glare. Richard looks between the two of them, his brows furrowing.

“All right,” he says, and rises from the table. He sticks his hands in his pockets and shrugs, his big shoulders pinching his neck between them. “I’ll just have to kick your ass and get nothing out of it then.”

“In your dreams, Richard,” Gina says, still giggling.

“Fuck you, Gina. Anyway transport’s back. The first wave of ‘em pulled up five minutes ago. I came here to tell Barkley to get some food ready, but saw you a-holes stuffing your faces,” he gestures to Gina and Havoc, “and couldn’t help myself.” He turns to Emilia, she feels his eyes on her back. “You dressed up so pretty in those bars, Emilia,” he says, “but that’s not what gets Jaeger’s attention. You’re doomed here if all you can do is flutter around in a dress.” He leaves then, his heavy steps fading the farther he gets down the dark and narrow hallway.

Riza almost scoffs. Looking pretty is not nearly all she can do - give her a gun and she can show Richard just how far the divide is between them. Bullets stop wild fists cold. But there is too much at stake here for her to turn to guns to win a fight. She is the best marksman in the Amestrian military and that is a widely known fact. To avoid suspicion she will have to go at Richard with her own fists, not in a disorderly way but in the controlled way she was taught: hang back, learn to predict your opponent's movements, sweep your leg… And plant the knife into his thigh down to the thumb rise.

“‘I do not date my colleagues,’” Gina giggles under her breath when Richard is out of sight. “That’s a good one, Em.”

“Gina,” Riza swats her arm. “Shut up.”

“You should have told him you only sleep with your boss,” Gina says, then laughs again.

Havoc picks up his plate and Riza’s and heads for the kitchen door again, probably to dump the dirtied dishes in a sink or basin of soapy water. He is quiet, turning contemplative as quickly as a light goes out.

“Richard said transport is back,” Riza says, watching Havoc disappear into the kitchen. “Does that mean that-”

“Unless someone died out there - which never happens - then yes, it means you can officially meet the transport team .”

That stirs up anticipation in Riza and, somehow, uneasiness too. She is going to see Rebecca, and she hasn’t seen Rebecca since before she was sent north over a month ago. What would her friend have to say...?

Havoc returns to the table and rounds its side so he’s standing next to Riza. She takes the hint and lets him help her out of her seat, her leg sore and pulsating. He leads her wordlessly back to the hall and Gina follows. They reach the room with the cars and people are criss crossing one another in it, looking like ants. The chaos looks controlled, though - people are clearing a path from the Briggs doors to another hall on Riza’s right. Someone whistles, there is a flash of blue light, and the mouth of the Flour lifts off the ground. The thunderous grinding of stone on stone is uncomfortable and Riza winces, pushing her ear into Havoc’s shoulder. There is a woman on her knees on one side of the rising wall and she is looking hard at the array below her, her brow furrowed and muscles taught. After minutes of the torturous sound the wall finally stops, and people begin sweeping the cloud of dust off the white floors until a car creeps in. It is guided forward and stopped just before the door to Jaeger’s office and then another one files in directly behind it, and another and another. Eventually four cars are packed into the white room in a row.

“What is this?” Riza says, mostly to herself.

“Transport,” Gina replies.

Riza looks for Rebecca as transport steps out of the cars. Some of the men and women are bruised and all of them are dusted with sand. They walk in a row into the hall to Riza’s right, and as they go she expects to see a familiar head of curly dark hair. Panic rises to her throat when she doesn’t and she turns to look at Havoc.

“She must be escorting whoever they caught to Jaeger,” he says. “The ‘something big.’ She’ll go to Opal next. Gina, take Emilia. I’m going to make sure I get to Catherine before she…” He trails off, looks at Riza.

“I get it, big guy,” Gina says. She opens her arms for Riza and curls her fingers in a “give her to me” kind of way. Riza is transferred from Havoc to Gina and then Havoc leaves. He goes into the hall that transport went into and then all Riza can do is wait, and she waits for minutes that drag until they feel like hours. She takes the time to survey the men and women who work with brushes and oils and soapy buckets of water to clean the transport cars. They wipe down the interior with rags. People are pulling hunks of metal and weapons and cans and boxes of books and syringes out of the cars’ trunks. Riza sees and hears them go to the floor in piles as they’re extracted from the trunks like eggs from a bird’s nest.

“What are they doing?” Riza asks.

“Everything transport brings back is inspected by scientists, which in our case is the few alchemists we’ve got. This crew here cleans the transport cars before they return to the lots outside.”

“Why?”

“Jaeger likes shit to be tidy. He also likes to be sure no one has snuck a bomb or something into one of the cars so the lady alchemist over there will rifle through all that junk and then when she says it’s safe the cars will be rolled outside and the Flour will be shut back up again. It’s a precaution.”

The thought of Jaeger being cautious of anything is strange to Riza but she supposes he has to maintain his crew and this hunk of alchemically-glued rocks and concrete somehow. Caution is his best defense out here. Caution, and the fact that most everyone out east has no idea he exists and are only afraid of a nameless group wrecking the progress the military has made.

The alchemist who rose the wall began working her way through the things that were pulled from the trunks. She looks tired to Riza; old, with wrinkles around her eyes and along the seam of her mouth. Her bony fingers pick apart the items in the pile. To Riza she seems reluctant to be doing what she is. She behaves as though it is exhausting for her...she moves slowly and not at all deliberately, like she is not here at the Flour because she wants to be. Riza wonders how many other people are working for Jaeger against their will. She wonders this, and she wonders what he could be holding against this woman to force her hand.

As the alchemist is finishing her work the transport team returns from the tunnel adjacent to Riza. Four of them get into the cars and the rest pass Riza - a few giving her curious glances - to get to the lunchroom down the dark and narrow hall. Riza does not see Rebecca again but she does not see Havoc either. They are probably with Opal , she tells herself.

“Are you Emilia?” One of the last of transport stops in front of Riza and Gina. He points at Riza with one hand and runs his finger through his frizzy brown hair with the other.

“Yes,” Riza says.

“Jaeger wants to see you.” Then he turns his attention to Gina. “In the receiving room.”

“Fuck,” Gina sighs. Then she drapes Riza’s arm over her shoulders like a rag, hoists her up so the pressure is off her thigh, and they make a move for the other hallway.

The receiving room, Riza assumes, is where transport takes the people they find. If the cars get brought directly into the Flour and their contents are spilled out onto the floors right then and there then the only thing left to receive from transport are the captives. Captives and, Riza’s sure, volunteers. But it’s the thought that she might see potential captives that makes her stomach start aching, and halfway down this second hall that is identical to the first Riza turns her mouth to Gina’s ear and whispers, “What is going on here?”

Gina does not answer. Riza’s question envelopes the whole of everything she has seen and experienced in the last few days. The way this place - the Flour - runs is so intricate. Everyone has a place and everything has a purpose and it is structured like a region all its own. Riza and Roy have been tinkering with the rebuilding of Ishval for close to two years yet nothing went awry until a few months ago. The Flour functions as though it has been an established home for these terrorists for decades. It is either that or Jaeger is better at managing his group of grunts than he has let on so far...or perhaps whatever he is planning is older than the birth of the Flour.

The receiving room is steel-walled. The floor is the Flour’s signature rocky stone but along the walls and ceiling is shining metal that reflects the light from the bulbs hanging a foot from the metaled roof. The lights cast irregular shadows over the stony floor, and Riza follows the dark, inky blots with her eyes as they morph from small dots into large pools, converging together into a central part of the room. Riza recognizes the woman there even before Jaeger opens his mouth. She feels him on the edge of her consciousness like she feels Gina’s arms go tight around her abdomen, pulling her up as her knees buckle beneath her. He goes to her side, his fingers putting pressure at the base of her skull. The touch is not angry or affectionate - it is possessive.

“I think this woman’s been following you, Emilia.” Jaeger waves his free hand in the direction of his newest captive. “We saw her at those bars where we saw you. And now she shows up on my turf.” He pauses; he thumbs the safety on a gun at his hip. Riza hears it snap, snap, snap. “Either she’s eager to be recruited or she’s a spy. I’m betting on military.”

Riza hopes she isn’t shaking as bad as she thinks she is. She can feel her teeth want to chatter. She looks at the woman in the shadowy puddles - Reynolds - who is watching Jaeger intently. Her gaze focuses purposefully on anything but Riza and Riza drinks in the sight of her split temple, a bruise rising to the surface under her right eye, a lip cut deep enough that blood draws a line down her chin and onto her tan shirt. She is on her knees with her hands tied behind her back, the top half of her body tipping forward.

“Richard wandered into Mr. Flame Alchemist last night. He saw this fine woman talking to Heymans Breda after he’d left Flame and Ross in some filthy train yard. I’m not concerned about what it is they could have been talking about, but military or not it pisses me off.” Jaeger’s hand tightens over the back of Riza’s neck. “If this woman has a connection to one of Mustang’s men then it’s safe to say she’s not on our side. But I am curious, Emilia.” Riza hears the familiar click of a holster being opened, and in the corner of her eye she sees the gun. “Do you know this person?”

And now Reynolds’ eyes go to Riza as Jaeger’s do. There are others in the receiving room - guards - and their eyes land on Riza too. Reynolds shakes her head slowly, a single, smooth motion from left to right.

“No,” Riza says. “I’ve seen her around but I saw a lot of people in those bars who frequented them as I did.”

“I can’t prove that you’re not telling the truth,” Jaeger says. Then the gun enters Riza’s sights, the end of its barrel trained on Reynolds.

“You don’t want to try?” Riza says, fighting not to seem frantic. “You would get nothing out of killing her here. If she really does have a connection to Mustang then we should try to-”

“No,” Jaeger says, forcing Riza's head to turn and her to look at him. His blue eyes are far away, emotionless. “This one will be made an example of and the next will be screaming their secrets to all of Ishval.” He holds Riza’s gaze as he pulls the trigger, making Riza jump and leaving her stunned, the echo of the shot in the metal room sounding off in her head until it becomes a faint ringing sound, airy and empty. Reynolds thuds to the floor.

It is one second - maybe even a fraction of a second - full of disbelief that leads Riza to hunt for the knife in her waistband. Jaeger leaves her, his fingers trailing down her jaw like tears. He says, “You’re in charge of cleaning this mess.” His men - the other people in the room - follow him and Riza has a grip on the knife. She turns as best she can, wants to plant it in Jaeger’s back, but a force stops her. Gina’s hands clamp over Riza’s wrists and pin them to her waist.

“Are you an idiot?” she hisses against the shell of Riza’s ear. “Don’t be so fucking stupid.” She holds Riza back until Jaeger is gone. When he is Gina steals the knife from Riza in one swift movement. Then she spins Riza in place and takes her face in her hands.

“ I will clean this up,” she says. “Go to Opal. You need a recheck on your thigh. You need a good cry. Go there, do what you need to do, and then get over it. There is no room for what you’re feeling here .”

Gina says there is no room for a lot of things. Riza has become okay with leaving her past outside of the Flour and she has even learned to release her old name too - but this is something else entirely. This makes Jaeger’s ferocity tangible, something that isn’t a rumor but as real as any other monster Riza has ever seen. He pulled the trigger with little more than a shake in his shoulder from the recoil. He took Reynolds’ life without even the uncertain quiver of his brow.

And again he reminds Riza of her father, stoic and apathetic even while participating in something gruesome.

Riza takes her automail casted arm in her hand, the feel of it not at all doing what she needs it to this time. Gina lets her go and she blinks long and hard as she turns her head to leave, fully intending to avoid the sight of Reynolds’ blood and punctured skull. She hugs the wall as she shuffles down the hallway, takes the sharpest of lefts at its end, and keeps her hand gliding over the doors she passes until she sees Jaeger’s office, which is a few doors down from Opal’s, which is directly in front of the wall that rises.

Riza’s throat feels constricted, like someone has it in their fist.

The door to Opal’s office is locked. Riza leans into the handle. “Opal - it’s me.” She feels the knob jiggle; hears the lock click out of place. Then Opal is there, wearing a white coat over dark brown slacks and a green shirt. She helps Riza inside, her eyes scouting her from head to toe.

“Riza?”

At the back of the room, leaning against the cabinets, are Havoc and Rebecca. Havoc’s arms are folded against his chest, his worried eyes lingering in the space between Riza and Rebecca. Rebecca has a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and watery with feeling. Her skin is cluttered with cuts and bruises, her dark green pants hard and flaky where mud had dried on them; her shirt is half untucked from her belt and dusty with sand and old specks of blood. Her hair is a mess of short wisps curling over her forehead and at the nape of her neck. She takes a step forward, and Riza braces a hand on the nearest table to do the same.

The women meet somewhere in the middle of the room, with Rebecca reaching to close the gap and bring Riza into her arms. Riza feels the weight of the Flour; of Jaeger and Reynolds crush her shoulders and compress her spine and cause her to lose her breath for a beat until Rebecca starts running her fingers through Riza’s hair, her steady breaths beckoning for Riza to emulate them. She tries, she does. Riza tries to match her inhales and exhales with Rebecca’s but she cannot sustain the rhythm, not with the echo of Reynolds’ death plaguing her mind and the thought that Gina was in the receiving room, cleaning bits of brain and bones and ponds of blood off the floor.

Havoc goes to Riza when she has cried all she can. He takes her by the shoulders and urges her to sit on one of the beds chained to the floor. She does, and wipes the butts of her hands hard over her reddened eyes.

“I heard they found someone they thought was military,” Havoc says. Rebecca sits next to Riza and rubs her backs in soothing circles. “Who?”

Riza is afraid to say. She feels like once she has said it out loud then it is a forever - a thing that happened in minutes and will last a million lifetimes. But she is a soldier...and Reynolds was one too.

“Reynolds,” she says, her voice catching in her achy throat.

“How did they…?” Havoc runs a hand through his hair. He sighs and sinks back on his heels, deflating.

“We found her maybe a mile from the Flour,” Rebecca says. “It seems she was following you guys or something.”

“She left this morning,” Havoc says. “But I didn’t think…”

“Havoc,” Riza looks up at her friend. She is sure that she looks as shaken as she feels but Havoc gives her his full attention as if she had ordered him to. “Marsh,” she corrects herself, “I need you to understand that it is not your job to protect me. It was Reynolds’ job and it is Ryder’s but it is not and never will be yours.” She remembers the look her gave her in her apartment, in the car. He gives it to her now.

“Do you think the chief wouldn’t order me to protect you if he knew you were here with me?” he says. “And I would do it in a heartbeat. For either of you.” His eyes flit to Rebecca.

“You don’t know the chief very well if you think he would ask something of you that is so selfish.” Riza says, and the explosion of emotion threatens to come back when she thinks of Havoc in Reynolds’ position. “ That ,” she says, pointing in the direction of the receiving room, “is not a thing I can survive twice, Marsh. He would never ask you to put my life above yours. He would trust in my and your abilities equally and order us to watch each other’s back.” She takes a deep, shivering breath. “Which is what we are going to do. That’s an order.”

Havoc’s mouth opens and then closes again, and he nods.

“But for any of this to work,” Riza says, “I have to beat Richard.” She stops, thinks back to something Jaeger had said to her in the receiving room. “Jaeger told me something about Richard running into General Mustang in a train yard.”

“That’s where all of us would meet at the start of all this,” Havoc says.

“I wonder how that interaction went...and I wonder if I can get any information on it from Richard. It might tell us where the general is at in terms of his movements or what he knows.” Riza wants those answers desperately. Especially now that someone has died - that this mission has become more than dangerous, but decidedly deadly.

“He’s making you fight Richard in that condition?” Rebecca says, her tone laced with anger.

“Hopefully not this condition,” Opal says, making room for herself between Havoc and Riza. “If you two are done bothering my patient I would like to get her undressed and do some doctoring. You can talk about these things later, and preferably out of my office.”

Rebecca kisses Riza’s cheek and hops off the bed. “See you on the other side,” she says, and follows Havoc out the door.

Riza’s head swirls with thoughts of Reynolds and Jaeger and dark meetings with General Mustang in train yards as Opal readies her instruments of torture. She clears her cheeks of tears as they come and by the time Opal has helped Riza remove her pants she is numb to the pain, focusing only on Reynolds and the days to come.

Chapter Text

Riza lounges against the wall of Rebecca’s quarters, her legs stretched out over her friend’s small bed. She uses her fingers to make circles around the sore wound on her thigh. Opal had used all kinds of antiseptics and tongs and needles to clean and suture the slit in Riza’s leg. It left the tissues there feeling taught and heated as though she had been stabbed minutes earlier.

Her thoughts had been on Reynolds the whole time the doctor pricked and poured - Reynolds, and the oddity that was her capture and murder. She can still hear the ringing in the air, the leftovers of the pop of a gunshot. Jaeger had drawn his weapon with deadly intent, firing the bullet into Reynolds like she were a cardboard cutout - a practice dummy, one with targets painted on it and a red X over the sternum and forehead. But Reynolds was a person of interest, not a throwaway. Jaeger murdered her without attempting to coax information out of her even after Riza urged him to.

Jaeger was in stark contrast to the way in which the military worked. Had the situation been flipped, and the military had captured one of Jaeger’s men, that person would have endured torture until they begged for death, or until they spilled their secrets. It was a practice that the best of Amestrians frowned upon but one that was efficient, and efficiency wins in military states, overtaking the slower but kinder methods of information gathering from a prisoner. When a country like Amestris is wrought with the threat of war it loses itself in the promise of it, sacrificing humanity to win a battle that might not ever come. Jaeger is already fighting his battle, and General Mustang is offering himself to the east, giving Jaeger easy access to him. What he needed from Reynolds was silence to secure his advantage. A dead woman cannot relay the whereabouts of a hideout.

Still, the ordeal felt strange to Riza.

“What was she doing out here during the day?” Rebecca says to no one, but voicing the thoughts of others all the same. She is thinking out loud, as she often does. Havoc chimes in.

“Whatever she was out here for must have been important. Breda was ordered to stay out of sight in the daytime for reasons like this. I’m sure Reynolds was ordered the same.”

Riza winces because “reasons like this” means a swift death. It has been some time - and hour, perhaps two - since she listened to Reynolds die, and still Riza cannot find it in her to wrap her mind around it. It feels so meaningless that it makes her angry, but Reynolds had been good at her job. She did nothing without a purpose and would not have put herself or Riza or any other soldier in the Flour in danger if it had not been for something important. For some kind of monumental piece of information.

“She met with Breda,” Riza says. “Which means she knew what General Mustang discussed with Richard at the train yard. Whatever it was must have been important enough that she felt the need to tell us as soon as possible.”

“She came back to the apartment last night after she met with Breda. She had an opportunity to tell us anything and everything right then and there. We already knew she and Breda swapped information and we knew the chief had a run-in with Jaeger’s guys last night too. She told us about the tattoo, about the taunting. So far all we’ve gotten that we didn’t have before is that Richard was the goon who clashed with the general.” Havoc says.

“Yes, but what if what she needed to tell us couldn’t be said in front of Gina? What if she picked and chose what to share and what to not? Or maybe she met with Breda again and found something else, something much more pressing.” Riza’s thoughts are gathering as they spiral downward, becoming as large and hard-packed as a ball of snow careening down a mountainside. Havoc considers her words. He presses his back hard into the wall behind him, his fingers curling around his chin as he thinks.

“I guess the only way to know is to get in contact with Breda. But I haven’t been able to do that in a few weeks. My assignments have been out of the way of the train yard, and there is only one person who could cover for me if I left the scouting group while in the field.”

“Gina?” Riza presses.

Havoc shrugs. “We all know how helpful she can be.” He uses his index and middle fingers on both hands to make air quotes around the word “helpful.”

“By the time the first tiers are sent out next, I’ll be one of them and we can cover each other,” Riza says.

That doesn’t seem to comfort Havoc. His brows pull together.

“Wait…” Rebecca says, her gaze unfocused and eyes thoughtful. “What if Reynolds wasn’t following you all? What if she was following transport?” Rebecca looks up at Havoc from her spot next to Riza. “Jaeger told you who it was that the general ran into and Reynolds told you what it was about. I think it’s safe to say she said all she thought was important but found something else. I don’t think she was here because of Mr. Sparky’s late night date with Richard at all.”

Riza knows how easily that could be true, but a large part of her is longing to know what Roy is up to. Without Reynolds around to track his movements all Riza has is Richard, and she cannot shake the thought that Reynolds kept some piece of information to herself - or that Breda did the same - the night they swapped. But Rebecca could be right and Reynolds was following transport. The possibilities were endless and endlessly headache-inducing, and all Riza knew was that she was now blind to where Roy was, unsure of the true nature of Richard’s conversation with him, and short one trustworthy soldier.

Rebecca opens her mouth to go on but is cut off by knocks at the door. “Let me in,” a voice commands through the thick metal.

Havoc strides forward and unlocks the deadbolt and Gina flies inside, the smell of bleach hanging off her, taking over the small room. She stomps up to Rebecca’s wooden coffee table and plants the knife in it. The hilt vibrates quickly back and forth from the impact., so fast that it is barely noticeable.  

“You pull shit like that again and I’ll let him kill you.” Gina’s eyes are narrowed in anger. There is something else in them too but Riza cannot place it.

“What’s this about?” Rebecca starts to get up, puts a hand on Gina’s shoulder, tries to coax her toward the door.

“She was going to stab Jaeger.” Gina points points at Riza, looks at Rebecca, and then whirls on Riza again. “And what would that have gotten you? Did you think putting a knife in his back in a room full of his guards would win this for you? Bring that spy back to life? You’ve got to play the game better than that.”

Fear . There is fear in her eyes, mingling with the anger.

“Teach me to use that knife,” Riza nods to the weapon jutting out of Rebecca’s table. “You need me for something, right? That means I have to succeed here. If I’m not kept in one piece then you can’t get what you want. Am I right?”

“You’re half right, Cap .” Gina sits on the couch across from Riza. “I can’t teach you to use knives in a few short hours. You’re going to have to employ whatever techniques those blonde brats taught you and hope you don’t cut yourself up in the process.”

“I’ll be going at Richard blind.”

“If you were willing to go at Jaeger that way then Richard will be a breeze.”

The comment was searing. Clearly Gina took the attempted attack on Jaeger as more than a threat to whatever her and Opal’s plans might be. She took it personally, like Riza trying to kill Jaeger somehow harmed Gina too.

“What is Jaeger to you, Gina?” Riza understands that the question is bold. Havoc and Rebecca look between her and Gina nervously, but also curiously. “If there are things I certainly must not do then I need to know why. Even if I had died for it back there killing Jaeger would have solved a dozen problems, so why stop me?”

Gina sinks into the couch. She crosses her arms over chest and heaves a sigh, runs a hand across her face. The room is still and quiet for minutes until she sits forward, her elbows resting on her knees, and says, “Jaeger’s real name is Jian Miller. Mine is Guo Miller.”

“He’s your brother.” Riza says it like a statement of fact. Gina nods.

“I want him apprehended, not dead.”

“He’s killed a soldier, Gina. He’ll face the firing squad.”

“Your soldiers killed thousands of us. Where are their firing squads, Emilia?”

Riza could not say it out loud: That Amestris valued the lives of its soldiers above all else. That the military still won out as the governing body of the country. By killing a soldier you were directly disrespecting the unofficial monarch of Amestris. And by killing a citizen - or a foreigner - you were defending your country. A “necessary sacrifice” is what Bradley used to call those lost lives.

Riza did not agree, but she and Roy’s efforts are with restoring Ishval. She has left the morality of the country up to its leader - Grumman. When it is Roy’s turn is when the nation will get its well-deserved wake up call.

“You said ‘us’,” Riza starts. “Are you Ishvalan?”

“My mother is from Xing and my father is an Amestrian scholar. He met my mother while studying religion in her home country and they settled here in Ishval. It’s the only spot that marks a comfortable halfway point between the two countries. Jaeger and I were born and raised here.” Gina strikes a cigarette to life and puffs on the end of it. Rebecca’s quarters start to sour with the smell of smoke but she does not complain. She lowers herself slowly back to the edge of the bed, her eyes wide and watching Gina.

“We practiced Ishvalan religion, Jaeger and I, and our mother and father remained non-religious, though my father was curious enough about reliance on religion that he wrote textbooks on it for universities in his spare time. My mother practiced Alkahestry and Alkahestry only, to the disappointment of my laolao and yeye . During the war she taught Ishvalans to use her knives, and she taught soldiers too, for a steep fee.

“You ever wonder how the late Maes Hughes learned to manipulate daggers and knives?” She drags on her cigarette, pulling her cheeks in until they are arched inward. Then she releases the smoke and hands the cigarette to Havoc. “That’s a Xingese art, and last I checked, Hughes had no living Xingese relatives, and no ties to Xing. The man paid my mother to teach him to throw weapons at Ishvalans.”

“You mother supplied that service,” Riza says.

“My mother needed money to keep her children alive in a country that was being ripped apart and annexed against its will. She wanted my brother and I to be able to protect ourselves as the State Alchemists moved inward from East City. I don’t know if you remember this little detail but your precious general was assigned to decimate the border towns first. Imagine being a parent whose family is teetering on the line of a murderous country and a terrified one. As General Mustang started to set fire to our temples, homes, friends, and family my father tipped us over into Amestris, where his citizenship supplied us with all we needed to escape the hell your people turned Ishval into.

“We weren’t necessarily welcomed in the east. Our hair was not light enough, our eyes were not light enough, our skin was sunkissed and made us look dark, Ishvalan. My brother and I were spit on in school, my mother could not find work. We migrated to Central eventually, where the racial tensions weren’t so high, and by the time I was in secondary school I was finally able to learn without my hair being cut from behind me or my pencils stolen from my desk. I stayed angry but healed over time, whereas Jian... Jaeger , he did not.

“His anger stayed inside of him and festered, and as we grew apart from Ishvalan culture he fell deeper and deeper into hatred. He went and studied at a university, but didn’t finish and joined the military instead. He was dishonorably discharged after six months of service for attempting to steal weapons from the armory. I remember some story came out about Roy Mustang executing a young woman - that Maria Ross - and it pissed Jaeger off more than all of those Hero of Ishval headlines.

“Jaeger went back to Ishval after that. He took his fury and a few good friends with him. He built the Flour, he amassed support, and he still dons that stupid Amestrian flag on his collar so people think it’s an Amestrian nationalist stirring the pot in the east. He wants control of this region back - that’s his endgame. All he has wanted since the war began was to restore Ishvalan lives and culture, his culture, but he could never stop conflating the war and Mustang, as though that soldier had pulled the trigger on State Alchemist involvement himself. But when you wake every morning to a man who looks like you strutting around in a blue coat, making the air smell like rotten bodies, you develop animosity for him. And somewhere along the way Jaeger forgot what he came here to do - who the Flour was initially for - and his mission shifted from save my home to destroy Roy Mustang .”

“And the occupation of soldiers in Ishval post-Promised Day can’t have shaken his resolve to ruin the general,” Rebecca injects.

“Quite the opposite, Cat,” Gina says, and beckons to Havoc for the remainder of their shared cigarette. “He believes the restoration should be lead by no one else but him, and who he chooses. Personally I like that Amestris is ponying up soldiers and money and time and supplies. That shithole country is very literally paying for its mistakes. I’m not sure Ishval could stand on its own without help being funneled in from somewhere but Jaeger seems convinced that any Amestrian occupation - even if it’s for Ishval - is a disease.”

Riza can understand that. There have been a few disagreements between Ishvalan people who accept the Amestrian’s help, and Ishvalan people who do not. Both sides, as far as Riza can tell, harbor valid points. But in the end Ishval needs aid, and the only country that can supply that is the very country that created a need for it in the first place.

“His anger is justified,” Riza says, her voice leveled and cool, “but his actions are not.”

Her eyes meet Gina’s. The fear is still there, she muses, but the anger has dissolved into something else. Something powerful.

“You fight Richard this evening,” Gina tells her. She plucks the knife from the table. “So let’s get to work.”

Despite Opal’s concern Riza and Gina managed to squeeze two hours of knife practice in before Jaeger called for the floors of the white room to the cleared. The training consisted of silent blade work, in which Gina would correct Riza’s form and offer advice, tips on how to keep from injuring yourself: Always keep the sharp end pointed away from your own body. When possible, handle with two hands for more force and better accuracy.

“She’s going to reopen her wound.” Opal had pinched the bridge of her nose, her mouth straightening into a disapproving line.

“She’ll end up in worse shape if she can’t fight Richard off,” had been Gina’s smooth reply.

Riza stands at the mouth of the hall that leads to the lunch room. She uses the wall for support, despite her best efforts to pretend her leg isn’t throbbing, and secures the knife between her waistband and her belt. She hopes she does not make the wrong move and end up sending it straight through either of her iliac arteries. That, she thinks, would be a bloodbath, and would leave the crisp whiteness of the room looking like a mangled animal.

Richard waits by the wall that rises. His stance is threatening, his eyes are predatory. His gaze lingers over Riza longer than she feels is necessary but she ignores it, choosing to remove her shoes and discard her flannel, giving her adversary nothing but her collectedness.

Her time with Ed and Al had been short, but what they taught her remained stapled to her mind. It is easiest to fight when her body feels free, so she takes care to pull her hair into a tail behind her head. She borrowed a pair of Gina’s shorts (which had once been combat slacks), and she snipped the sleeves off of one of Rebecca’s shirts. She feels odd revealing so much skin, but more comfortable and confident in her meager collection of physical abilities when she can move without restraint.

“It’s going to be hard for me to dirty up something so pretty,” Richard calls to her. The cars that had wheels had been rolled through the rising wall to the lots outside, and the tables and chairs were pushes against the walls to act as homes for onlookers; spectators; mechanics and transport and scouts placing bets and nursing their alcohol. Riza hears their every whisper in the emptied space.

She’s going to get her ass handed to her.

What the fuck is Jaeger thinking?

I hope she wins. Richard is so fucking arrogant.

She’s hot, yeah, but he’s still going to break her nose.

“I’m all amped up after getting my digs in at that general,” Richard stretches his legs, pulling his ankle up behind his back. Riza freezes, the air going cold.

Somewhere to Riza’s right she hears Jaeger. “Richard,” he warns.

“His eyes, they were so -”

Riza tenses. Jaeger goes on. “Richard shut your mouth and do what you do best in three -”

“ sad , like I had just broken him into a million -”

“two -”

“tiny, fractured pieces. It’s like -”

“one -”

“he was going to fall apart right in front of me! The little bitch just disintegrates at the mention of -”

“go.”

“ Riza Hawkeye !”

Riza is not rattled. She is not angry or coming undone. She is motivated.

She finds the strength somewhere in her to go forward, to meet Richard close to halfway. He lunges for her, his fist already prepared to strike her temple, but she spins on her heel neatly, causing him to catch a fistful of air. He whirls on her, a wild smirk playing on his lips, and the adrenaline begins to mask her pain, and she brings her casted arm up and connects her fist with his jaw. The hit rings on the surface of her skin, muted by the spongy material coating the inner layer of her automail. Richard does not stagger back, but grabs her forearm, pulls her close, captures her other arm, and drives his knee into her gut.

Riza tries to double over but Richard holds her upward, his hands traveling to her wrists. His face inches from her face, he breathes, “You could owe me a lot more than a date if I win so easily.”

Riza, ever the one to play fair, lifts her leg hard, and fast, and catches Richard in the groin. He goes down to his knees, releasing Riza from his grasp. He lets out a garbled wail, chanting you bitch you bitch you bitch. His hands cup his most sensitive parts and while he’s occupied Riza steals the knife from her waist, takes it in two hands as Gina had showed her - one around the handle, the other over the top of it - and thrusts it into his thigh. He screams, she removes the bloodied weapon, walks back a few steps, lets Richard writhe on the ground at a safe distance.

She spies Jaeger standing at the door to his office, his hands folded behind his back, a smile plastered on his handsome face. It is unnerving, but her attention recedes from him and settles on Richard again, who looks at her, and snarls. His blood is pumping out between his fingers, spilling onto the floor. He tries to get up, fumbles, falls onto his hands, leaving a bloody handprint over the white. Riza raises her arms, her hands in her face as Al had taught her, the knife pointing away as Gina had taught her.

“What was it you were saying about winning easily, Richard?” she pants.

He shoots upward, his bad leg soaked in blood, little droplets of it decorating the ground. His hands are coming for her, straight for her throat, and her scar there stings, aches, tells her to step back and she does. She takes her knife and swings it in a horizontal sweep, catching the ridged edge of the blade on Richard’s palms. Now he staggers, stares at his hands, his eyes slipping frantically from them to Riza and back again. He is coated in blood.

Riza hears Gina whoop.

Richard, in all his fury, does something Riza could not see coming: He drops low and sweeps his bad leg, and catches the back of Riza’s bad knee. She buckles, falls, hits her head on the hard ground. She feels him before she opens her eyes again. His knees dig into her thighs, even the bad one, which screams at her until she screams too. She’s faintly aware she is still holding the knife even as Richard leans into her, his hands slick with blood, his fingers coiling around her throat.

Riza has to resist the urge to drop the knife and claw at his face. In his anger he forgot about her weapon, and she has to take advantage of that.

She listens to Havoc explode in fear, yelling at Jaeger to stop the fight, berating Gina for not intervening. “Wait!” Jaeger says, his voice icy, stern.

And Riza plants the knife to the hilt between Richard’s ribs, and twists, and pushes. He goes up, following the path of the knife to keep it from mincing him further. Riza feels the blood already getting sticky over her neck, and the feeling is familiar, sickly so. She swallows the urge to vomit.

“Get off my legs,” she says through gritted teeth. Richard obliges. He sits on his haunches, Riza’s knife his guiding point, his new religion.

“Is it over?” Riza calls to Jaeger. Richard’s blood is pressing into her hands, trailing down her palms and forearms to the cricks of her elbows. She does not like the feeling of life leaving a body. It is jerky and wet, anticlimactic and certain, so striking in its finality that it reminds her of Jaeger, and Reynolds. “JAEGER!”

“Let him go,” Jaeger concedes. Riza leaves the knife in Richard and scoots away from him. Opal descends on him, already urging the other medics to lift him to her office, where those chains on the beds will likely be of great use.

Riza checks the stitching on her leg, releases a breath upon seeing that it is intact. Jaeger calls to her. “My office,” he says, “right now, Emilia.”

Riza does her best to get off the floor, but only progresses when Gina goes to help her. She hooks her arms under Riza’s and hoists her up, then Riza is off on her own, limping toward Jaeger’s open door, the excitement falling away from her in heaps and leaving the pain in her leg and throat and gut behind.

When Riza cross the threshold into Jaeger’s office she shuts the door behind her. Jaeger stands beside his desk, the tips of his fingers resting on a list of names. He taps it.

“You exceeded my expectations,” he says. “You were ruthless.”

“I was only trying to survive.”

“I would not have let him kill you,” Jaeger says, then adds, “and I will have a talk with him about the way he speaks to you. We’re all equals here at the Flour, and you, sweetheart, are to be respected. I can feel you becoming one of my finest scouts already.”

“So I’m a scout?” Riza pries, wanting a definite answer.

“You couldn’t be anything else.”

Jaeger picks up his list, thumbs through a few pages. “You’ll be a first tier. That means you work for and answer directly to me, and it means Richard and Gina are your team leads. Has Gina told you about the tier system here?”

“Yes, sir,” Riza replies, feeling relief overtake the pulsating ache in her leg. She did it.

“I’ll give you until your leg heals before assigning you to a region, although by the looks of the way you moved out there I’d say you have a five day grace period and then you’re armed and ready. I trust that you understand what that means.”

“Absolutely.”

And then Jaeger approaches her. He touches her, his hand resting on her shoulder. “Go take a shower, scout,” he says. “After you’ve scrubbed the blood off my floors, that is.”

And after I have a chat with Richard, Riza thinks.

Chapter Text

Riza is ready to speak with Richard. She feels it like a charge in her bones, like lighting the end of a firework. She can smell the tang of iron on her neck and arms and hands and even that nauseatingly familiar stench cannot deter her from the things she wants to pry from Richard’s mouth. Reynolds’ death is the pivot point from which she makes all of her moves now, the single consequence of this mission that presents to Riza the very real possibility of more people she cares about - people she loves - succumbing to Jaeger’s viciousness. And that is why she has to hear it from Richard, why she has to know his conversation with Roy more intimately than how Reynolds had told it. Because Richard will not hold back, he will not spare a word, or a twitch in Roy’s chin.

She has to know what state Richard left Roy in. It is a selfish want, and she is acutely aware that the longer she is away from him the more she will want him. And the more she wants him the more she will crave doing things like hounding Richard about him, like defying Jaeger. She closes her eyes and she can smell the earthiness of Roy’s cologne, and she can taste the coffee on his breath, stale from the cups of water that followed it. Each hour is harder. Questions about his well being swell up inside of her like a storm and it is the not knowing that throws her into a whirlwind of unsteadiness, like she is teetering on the edge of insanity, of a precipice, the balls of her feet rocking toward and then away from her demise.

As Riza attempts to turn from Jaeger’s grip his long fingers dig uncomfortably into the flesh of her shoulder, holding her in front of him. For one agonizing second she can see the things in Jaeger’s face that she is lucky to have missed as his scout, as Emilia Enfield: a humanity sullied by palpable fury, the willingness to rip every strand of hair from Riza Hawkeye’s head, to pull her fingers back until they meet the bony top of her hand. Phantom pain explodes in her mind, trickling like water from a faucet down her spine, where he would have undoubtedly focused his efforts, cracking a hammer over her vertebrae. She feels the heat of fear sweat through her capillaries and pass along to her legs, of which he would have crushed under the rising wall, grinning as her screams filled every crevice of silence in the Flour, even the miniscule cracks in the alchemically-glued walls and stone.

And somewhere underneath all of the anxiety and a potential fate she sidestepped, is Roy. Brave, selfless Roy and the weight of loss that would have stomped him into a powder at her feet, eliminating the traits that made the Flame Alchemist human, that brought him to trial in his own mind, keeping his morality in check, weighing the rights and the wrongs.

It is in this moment that Riza understands how fortunate she is that Jaeger had not managed to capture her on the northbound train. She would be a pile of rotting flesh if he had, her face unrecognizable, her body contorted into unnatural angles like she were a doll. And Roy would be desolate, unable to grapple with a death so fierce it would tear out his insides and spill them onto the blackened pavement of Central City for all to see.

Jaeger’s eyes regard her with an insatiable hunger. The light reflecting off his irises give depth to his gaze where there usually is none, and it leaves Riza feeling small, unimportant, the way the night skies make her feel in the east. Everything sodden with sprinkles of starlight and moonlight, casting shadows over an already breathtakingly dark landscape, obscuring the hills and ridged lines of the roads so that everything looks the same, like you are staring off into a void. He does not look at her like Richard does, his eyes tacky in the way sap is, sticking to your fingers and clothes, but like she is a weapon, her blueprints littering his desk, sealing his victory. He sees in her a prize, a great invention. Riza resists the urge to shrink against the wall.

“Jaeger?” she prompts. She feels like he has been pressing her under his gaze for hours. A dry, flattened flower keeping place in a book, being molded into a tool.

“You’re looking at me like you’ve got me all figured out.” Jaeger’s teeth seem sharp, like a cat’s. His stare roams over her lazily. “Guo told you things, didn’t she?” He uses Gina’s real name. Riza stiffens. His mouth, as it curls into a smile, is as unfathomably distant as his eyes. It is a deep, leering thing, and Riza half expects blood to dribble out from the space beneath his upper lip and paint his chin, the collar of his shirt, like a carnivore after tearing into its meal. “She is the only person I trust implicitly, you know. Her years of hiding from violent racists in Amestris have taught her how to disappear. She can slink in and out of anything, anywhere, like a ghost. She is invaluable to me.”

As a pawn or as your sister? Riza thinks venomously, but keeps her mouth screwed shut, her molars grinding together.

“If she has decided to disclose our shared past with you then I will not think too much on it, although it is a bit curious. She is notoriously tight-lipped. For example,” he sucks on his teeth, “she neglected to tell me you have a tattoo, sweetheart. Even though it’s her job to know everything about everyone in the Flour and detail it all for me. She has never kept this kind of thing from me. I’m inclined to find out why…”

Riza’s stomach plummets. Nausea goes off like a volcano inside of her, the sickly sweet taste of her last meal crawling up the back of her throat, mixing with bile on its way. She worries she will vomit all over the collar of Jaeger’s coat as he bears down on her, his breath hot in her face, his hands expanding, spreading heat between her shoulder blades and down her back, igniting the tattoo there. He presses his lips to her ear, grazes them across her jaw and over her temple, and his hands move to the hem of her shirt, begin to peel it off of her.

She cannot move. Like a deer in headlights she is stuck in her terror, waiting for a deadly impact. And then his bare hands are under her shirt, feeling for something, his nails like claws, scratching their way across her skin. She is thrust back to the days following the Promised Day, to the tumultuous nightmares about slit throats and aching backs and a father with eyes that were very far away. It was always Roy’s hands on her, pulling her into him, rubbing circles over her back, his warmth forming like a halo around her periphery. His touch is yellow and gold and Jaeger’s is a blackish green, dropping sick into her mind, forcing her to relive the needle pricks, taste the salt of tears on her tongue, feel the restraints over her wrists, watch the algae grow over the damp walls. All at once she is suffocating in the dim, dank basement of her father’s estate, praying for someone interrupt, to tear him away from her.

My scars, Riza thinks wildly, remembering how she broke the link to her father. A tattoo is one thing, but if he feels my scars… Her mind is assaulted by images of her, blood pouring from any part of her body Jaeger can make blood pour from, her tibia cracked and broken, coming out of her skin like a bloodied glacier, her lips bruised and split. And Roy, silhouetted by fire, his head in his hands and his eyes as grey and unseeing as they were on the Promised Day. He would die if he lost her now, like this, after finding out she was alive all along. He would not survive the death of his captain, not twice.

Riza pushes out of Jaeger’s grasp and nearly falls into the door behind her. Goosebumps have risen over her skin, her arms and her belly, and she is panting. Sweat clings to her forehead like condensation over a cold glass on a hot day. Jaeger does not seem particularly bothered by her flying backwards out of his touch. He watches her patiently, his demeanor twisting her insides into knots.

You’re looking at me like you’ve got me all figured out.

“I can see the lines peeking out from the back of your shirt.” He says plainly. Riza’s fingers tease the doorknob. She does not take her eyes off Jaeger, who slips a hand into his pocket and shifts his weight to one foot. He is nonchalant, sure of himself, uncaring and casual.

Riza had thought of the stretch of her tattoo, and knew where it met the notch at the back of her neck. Rebecca had helped her swathe it in makeup before the fight. But if Jaeger could see it from his place by the door, then it was rubbed off somehow. Maybe by her sweat, maybe by Richard’s bearish hands around her throat. It does not matter now, not as Jaeger continues to force himself upon her, walking until his chin is inches from her forehead. He is deftly reminding her, with each stroke of his hands over her body, that he is in charge. That, no matter who she is, there is no escaping Jaeger, or the Flour. He tells her to jump, and she is expected to ask, “How high?”

“Take off your shirt, Miss Emilia,” he says, his voice treacherous.

“I would rather not do that, sir.”

Sir coming off her tongue stings. It boils in her mouth like she had just eaten a pothos. When she says sir to Jaeger, she is bowing to him, practically brushing her nose to the floor and kissing his black Balmorals. The palm of his hand meets the door behind her. He slams into the metal hard, hard enough for the sound to pummel the tunnels of her ears painfully.

“I didn’t bring you here for you to disobey me,” he growls. “I’ve known you for less than twenty-four hours Emilia, and if you weren’t so exceptional at combat and if you weren’t so perceptive then I’d have let Richard have you by now.” He shows his teeth, the shadows over his face making him look like a wolf, peeking out at its prey from under the brush. “I still can.”

Here he is, Riza thinks. This is Jian Miller, not Jaeger.

This is the fury he keeps sequestered away.

“Richard is losing life on Opal’s table right now.” Riza reminds him. She finds her resolve in Jaeger’s stony glare, in the hinges he’s let come undone. His threat was meant to persuade her, to scare her into leaving her conviction behind, but Richard is no more than a pest to her now, a fly in her face, a mosquito in her ear. Riza brings her hand up into Jaeger’s view. It is sticky, crusting with blood. His nose crinkles, his snarl deepens.

“All of this is his. If you’re going to dissuade me from disobedience then you’d do well to find a better motivator. I only remove my clothes for doctors and dates, and last I checked you were neither of those things to me.”

Something calculating flashes in Jaeger’s eyes. It is like he has a tapetum lucidum in his retinas, shining bright like a flashlight in the dark, illuminating his movements and, consequently, his intentions as a predator. He takes Riza’s forearm and squeezes, and she is reminded all too suddenly of Selim Bradley - of Pride - and his tendrils, black and thin and tapering into sharp points, like the tips of a dozen swords. She tries to recoil but hits the door instead, the impact startling her heart into a hard rhythm. Jaeger moves in close, his nose hovering hers.

“How convenient that I happen to have a doctor of my very own.”

Riza feels his nimble fingers against her back, working the knob to his office door. She did not realize how stuffy his space had become until air from the white room comes streaming in. It is a splash of cool over her heated and nervous body, it is caressing her legs, congealing the blood on her hands, petting her throat. It makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention.

Behind her she can hear water sloshing. She hears the wet slap of a mop over a floor, and Havoc’s voice, mingling with Rebecca’s and Gina’s. Jaeger’s door opens slowly at her back and then he turns her by her upper body, puts a hand on her lower back and guides her forward, pushes her gently until her feet start to move. Havoc’s forehead is shiny with sweat and he is mopping the bloody floor in small circles while Rebecca pours water in a steady stream over his mop. Gina watches them until, like magic, she looks up to find Riza’s eyes.

Then Rebecca and Havoc catch sight of Riza too as she is being urged toward Opal’s office by Jaeger’s thin, bony hands. “Looks like you’ve made some friends already,” Jaeger says against her temple. Havoc does his best to mask his horror, but Rebecca’s bottom lip is trembling, her grip loosens over the bucket and it dives to the floor, flooding the area around her feet. Gina sends a sharp glare her way and that is the last thing Riza sees before Jaeger is opening Opal’s office door and shoving Riza inside, where her senses are overtaken by the smell of alcohol and plastic and soap.

Opal’s back is a stiff arch. She is hunched over Richard’s body, the tips of her fingers wet with his blood and threading, coaching needle and a soft wire through his flesh. He is awake, but barely. The empty syringe still clinging to the skin of his arm bobs up and down as he fists and unfists the sheets of his bed. His eyes are on Jaeger first before they roll far enough to focus on Riza. His lips curl back over his teeth like a wild animal’s, and she sees his canines are stained with his blood, his pink gums burning red under the fluorescent spotlight above his head, and ribcage.

During the war Riza had seen wounded soldiers daily, and some days hourly, and some even less so. Over time she became accustomed to the sight of pale, sallow young men and women with syringes hanging from their arms, their doctor too busy to waste the half a second it takes to pluck it out. Usually these soldiers were numbed enough to lower their inhibitions, dampen the pain, and sometimes, rarely, they were forced into sleep. Doctors and nurses took their time with these sleepers. They padded about around their dusty, blood crusted cots, not bothering with antiseptics or alcohol because their patient had already lost so much blood that the bruises under their eyes looked more black than blue. In a war where supplies for medical servicemen were used so frequently that they began to run short, the lives of higher ups, and the lives of those who could be easily saved took precedence. Everyone else was awarded the look and feel of medical attention without any actual attending.

Riza wishes to see Opal halfass Richard’s care in such a way. The creepy bastard is fumbling with his tongue, trying and failing like a drunken man to say something to Riza, something undoubtedly nasty to send her scurrying out of the room. Her stare hardens under his and he seems to lose nerve until Jaeger speaks, his voice a deep rasp, like rocks grinding together underwater.

“Opal,” he says, “my dearest, sweetest Opal.” There is something in his tone that betrays his words, something that straightens Opal’s spine and stills her hands. Richard grins, the inner rim of his lips sticky with blood, oozing from his smile like guts from a carcass. “Miss Enfield here needs a physical.”

“Respectfully, sir, I’m a bit preoccupied.” Opal’s reply is soft, gentle, but her body is edged with caution. Jaeger’s hand slides up her back, starting low and going high until he is gripping the back of her neck, taking care not to startle her into tearing at Richard’s flesh with her needle. Riza cannot tell if anyone in the room has taken the time to breathe since Jaeger opened his mouth, and so she inhales loudly, and Opal follows with an exhale. She continues her work.

“I’m looking for a tattoo, Opal. Be a dear and report to me when you’ve found what I know you will.”

Opal takes time to glance at Riza from over her shoulder. “Okay,” she says. Jaeger releases her, and for a reason not discernible to Riza she had assumed that, because of his relationship to Gina and Gina’s to Opal, Jaeger would not hurt her. But when his fingers come away from Opal’s neck she can see the lines he left in her skin, white and red rimmed, sunken and beaming, like he had caused her purposeful discomfort until she obeyed. Anger surges behind Riza’s eyes.

“Good girl,” Jaeger tells her. His shoulder brushes Riza’s as he passes her. “Get well soon, Richard. We have work to do.” And then he is gone, Opal’s heavy office door slamming shut behind him.

“Fuck, Emilia,” Opal hisses, blowing her bangs out of her face. She retrieves another syringe from a shallow rectangular plate by Richard’s bedside and slides the needle under the skin of his forearm, where his humerus meets his ulna and the articulation there. His head dips to the side soon after, his eyes fluttering shut. He looks like a child when he sleeps. A large, pudgy faced boy with wires sticking out of the palms of his hands and a bloodied tooth stuck on his bottom lip. “What tattoo?”

Opal stitches the tail end of Richard’s slit of a stab wound, cutting the leftover string away from his ribs. She wets a white round pad with a clear, foul-smelling antiseptic and begins wiping Richard down. His hands, each finger, the red stains around his mouth. When she is done she pulls both syringes from his body, covers him up to his chin with a thin sheet, and sheds her gloves. She is scrubbing her hands clean with a wiry brush when Riza gathers the courage to tell another soul her most personal secret.

“I have a rather large tattoo on my back,” she says so quietly that she cannot be sure Opal even heard her at all. She goes on assuming she has, taking Opal’s silence as an invitation to continue. “It’s a gathering of lines marred by scars.” Riza avoids saying what it actually is: alchemy, flame alchemy. She can’t imagine Opal would be thrilled to know that the woman she has patched together was not a random soldier in the war against her people but the person responsible for the Flame Alchemist and, consequently, his actions. And all of the country knew that it was Flame who took the most life out in the desert.

“It’s an identifier is what it is,” Opal says, drying her hands and depositing the towel into a covered basket by the sink’s side. “So someone could see this tattoo and know who you really are.”

“Very few people, although records of where the tattoo is on my body, as well as the scars that plague it, have been documented by a number of military medics and doctors over the years.”

Realization dawns on Opal’s face. Dark, unrivaled fear explodes in her red eyes. The emotion is so fleeting that Riza struggles to name it at first, but it is there, and it seeps back behind her eyes, where it becomes a peripheral fear, like getting into a car and worrying over the possibility of an accident. In the wake of Opal’s quiet, Riza goes on: “The general has tried time and time again to have any written record of it expunged but physical deformities such as this one are required to be reported if one wishes to serve Amestris in the way I do.”

Opal’s eyes turn down to the floor marked by Richard’s blood. There are droplets there followed by lines, like plots on a graph. They trail from the door to the cot chained to the floor. “In the way you do, huh?” she says.

Riza bites her reply back, keeps it hidden away behind her teeth. Her words have no place here in Opal’s presence. Riza is sure that not even she has a place here. She is alive only because Opal needs her, and she is, in a lot of ways, being kept right under Opal’s black heels, the soles of them threatening to touch down on Riza’s head and stomp her like a cockroach.

Opal twirls her finger in the air. “Let’s see this tattoo.” Riza turns and - slowly, because the place where Richard had caged her neck is bruising - slips her shirt over her head. She hears nothing from Opal, not a gasp or an inhale. She drops her bra to the floor, feels cold fingertips move along the edge of one of her scars, parting to fan out over the leathery skin there. “These are burn scars,” Opal’s voice is breathy, like she has been holding it. “And this salamander...this flame it’s…”

“Gina didn’t tell you?” Riza asks.

“Gina and I don’t talk about our work. Not unless we can’t help it. You, Enfield, are the definition of Gina bringing her work home with her.”

Opal’s touch leaves Riza’s body. She feels the loss in her spine down to her toes. For all of Opal’s posturing, she has never been anything but gentle with Riza, and Riza has come to find comfort in a doctor who is, however loosely, on her side in a place like the Flour.

Opal rummages through cabinets, moving from one to the other in smooth succession. She returns to Riza unannounced, her fingers swirling a chilled gel over Riza’s back, the focal point being her scars and the small chasms between them. Riza jolts from the odd sensation and is taken back in time to the dusty quiet of a ravaged Ishval, her superior’s hands messaging ointment over her charred skin gingerly, like she were as fragile as a flower, liable to wilt away.

“This is the array on General Mustang’s gloves,” Opal muses. There is no question in her tone, no uncertainty. She knows this like she knows her medical texts, like she can see the truth of it as clear as she is seeing the tattoo in front of her. “I see. So you don’t serve anyone but yourself.”

Riza finds it hard to breathe now, like the room has been denied oxygen. It feels like it does when she stands too close to one of Roy’s snaps, the air zapped right from her lungs.

“You don’t serve your awful country. And you can never serve Ishval, not after what you’ve done. You serve that general of yours. Your devotion to him is rooted to a genocide.” Opal does not stop her ministrations as she speaks, her quiet voice fluttering through the room. “Tell me, do you love him because of who he is or because you can’t bear to let yourself love anyone innocent? Because what you have with that man is ugly. It comes from guilt and ignorance and, it appears, a shared sin.”

Riza never spoke of the war in Ishval with Ishvalans. The closest she had ever come was when Lieutenant Colonel Miles and the man formerly known as Scar met with her and Roy in a shabby hut in the Ishvalan slums, near the border to the desert. The interaction had been nothing short of strained, with Scar refusing to speak in anything but his native tongue, and only to Miles. It had struck Riza as being very odd, this shift from where she left her understanding of Scar on the Promised Day to what it is now, but certain words stood out to her: child, killer, murderer, woman. She had heard those from many Ishvalans during the war, and it did not take a linguist or translator to let her know what they meant. She had almost opened her mouth to ask the holy man for neutral ground while they deliberated, but Roy’s touch on her lower back had quelled her.

She is nothing, no one in Ishvalan company. And so she stays quiet, content to let Opal have her voice, and to let it remain unsullied by the interjections of an Amestrian soldier.

“What I have with Gina,” Opal goes on, “is something you will never have with that man. My relationship with her is pure, it comes purely from reciprocated love and devotion and, sometimes, a shared trauma. I suppose you think you have shared a trauma with your general, Emilia, but I can promise you that you have not. You chose to fight your war while Gina and I were given no such luxury. We watched legs be blown off our neighbors, and we walked in the shadows of buildings only to be sprayed by the blood of our comrades when they were nabbed by a sniper. Your country fought, and we fought back, and there is a difference in our motivations. You wanted to subdue us, and we only wanted to survive.”

Opal finishes with the gel. It dries over Riza’s skin the way the blood had, crusting and shrinking against her. The two women sit and listen to nothing but the muffled sounds coming from the white room.

When Opal moves again, she says: “I’m going to take pictures of your tattoo. The gel I applied will hold hardened silicon over it long enough for me to pretend that seventy-five percent of your tattoo doesn’t exist. For all Jaeger knows you have some odd words scribbled onto the notch of your neck and that’s all.”

Riza swallows. “Thank you, Opal.”

“Do not thank me,” Opal says. She takes light colored silicon pieces from a white wire basket and smooths them over Riza’s back. “You aren’t the first person to come to me looking for a way to hide something. I made these with the help of one of our alchemists for another person living here. You’re lucky I had some leftovers.

“But don’t think that this will lead Jaeger completely off your trail. You are now a person of interest, Emilia. He will keep circling and sniffing around you, because he only trusts me when he feels so inclined to, and he trusts you probably not at all quite yet. No matter how much I abhor you you have to stay alive, stay safe. Gina and I will never escape the Flour without you, so do not forget that I help you to help myself, and to honor my profession, and nothing more.”

Opal takes a photo of Riza’s back when she is through with the silicon. Riza redresses, and shifts on her chair until she is facing Richard.

“What are you doing?” Opal asks, ridding her hands of the last of the gel.

“I would like to hear about Richard’s run-in with the general.”

“Don’t be stupid. Go back to Catherine’s room, wash that silicon and gel off in a shower, and take your five days of rest. You go poking around for information about General Mustang and you’ll get yourself killed.

“And a dead hostage is a useless hostage. Do not make yourself useless to us.”

Chapter Text

When Riza was a little girl her father would take her to the pond behind the house. No matter what time of year they went, the water would sport a thin iridescent film, which her father assured her was some sort of iron. The ground was soggy, always attempting to steal the shoes off her feet and the dragonflies flit from one stalk to another, their wings buzzing in her ears. Berthold Hawkeye went to fish, so he would set the line and let Riza reel the small catch in herself. Then they would return to the house with their spoils still hanging from the small hooks on the fishing wire. Riza would help her father gut the animals, and they would cook them together, usually with wedges of lemon and sprigs of basil. The fish tasted like the water from a river, their skin gritty under Riza’s teeth.

It is that same grittiness she feels in her mouth now, aboard a utility vehicle with no top, the Ishval sands being flung into her face. She wishes she were eating fish instead. The evening is hot and she’s sweating under her combat boots and slacks and long sleeves. The wind offers no reprieve, it is as warm as the silted air, and the metal over her left arm feels particularly suffocating as it captures the heat from her own skin and the sun overhead.

Havoc sits to her left. He is cleaning a gun, an old dusty Browning, sticking a cloth down it's barrel and examining the oily stain that lingers on it when he pulls it free. He does this a number of times before he is satisfied enough to put the small weapon back together. His shortened hair clumps together over his ears and the nape of his neck, wet with sweat. He wipes the back of his forearm over his forehead, thumbs the moisture off his temples.

Gina has her hair pulled into a long tail behind her head. It touches the small of her back when it isn’t being flown about by the rough course of the car. Her dress is the same as everyone else’s, dark pants and shirt and boots and gloves. The gun at her hip is joined by her knives, all stuck into their own individual pockets on her utility belt. She sucks on a cigarette, the smoke blowing back against her face as it catches in the wind. This doesn’t bother her, but Opal swats the at the offending stick in Gina’s hand, mumbles about it being bad for her health. Her head has fallen to Gina’s shoulder and she turns her lips to the curve of Gina’s neck to place a kiss there. They sit murmuring to one another and flirting, wholly engrossed in each other, passing the cigarette between Gina’s hands and Opal’s and back again as they fight for control of it.

There are a few soldiers in her company who Riza doesn’t know. Maximus, a young blonde boy with bony elbows and a waist as thin as Riza’s femur sits to her right, his thigh nudging hers over every bump. Gordon’s dark eyes jump forward repeatedly as he follows the passing rubble and rocks, scanning the scenery. His pale skin and black hair are in stark contrast to the tan Ishvalan land. The driver is a man named Willard. His long blonde hair is tucked into a bun at the back of his head, with strands coming loose around his face when the wind wrestles them free. The muscles of his forearms pop and recede as he turns the bulky utility vehicle this way and that, avoiding potholes and other obstructive things in the road. The three men, as Riza understands it, are tasked with guarding Jaeger under normal circumstances. They don’t leave the Flour, or at least they rarely do. But today they are scouts. Today their boss is going to be milling about around Ishval, parading himself in enemy territory like he did the night he approached Riza by the water tanks.

Jaeger has been fitted with two semi-automatic service pistols. They wink at Riza when he shifts on his box near the cab of the car. It would have been Richard joining the scouts today but he was in no condition to move under the scorching sun, and so Jaeger had taken the man’s place, claiming it had been too long since he’d gone out with his favorite scouting group anyway. Riza can’t say she is pleased with the change of command during her first outing. She has no way of predicting how Jaeger might behave out in the desert, away from the Flour where there will be no one to quell him if he decides to go off with Riza alone. She shudders to think she might be trapped with him like she had been before, in his office.

Five days had blurred together pleasantly fast. Riza managed to find the rhythm in the Flour’s movements easily enough. Breakfast at a quarter past 0600, lunch at noon until one o’clock, and dinner served before six in the evening. She was assigned a room but maintained her place in Rebecca’s bed, with her. The two of them whispered quietly back and forth about the things they had experienced in their months apart. Mostly Rebecca complained about the dreadful men and women she went out into Ishval with on her transport missions, how mundane it became to come across overturned carts of canned goods and feel excited by it. Riza did no such complaining, she merely listened and smiled as one of her dearest friends went on animatedly, like old times, like nothing in the world had changed when everything certainly had. They usually fell asleep in a pile of tangled arms and threaded legs, the cot being too small to accommodate them both but neither of them willing to give up the other’s treasured touch.

Riza’s leg was healed enough that she could run drills with Havoc and Gina by the third day. No one is permitted to work outside the Flour unless on leave for scouting or transport, so the white room is the best place for sparring and weapons identification and briefings. She and Gina did the most mock fighting, and every time Gina came out on top, quite literally straddling Riza with her knee nestled painfully into Riza’s still sore stab wound. Havoc joined only when he felt particularly spurred to because, frankly, his hand-to-hand was lacking in finesse. So lacking that Riza wondered how he had gained Jaeger’s favor enough to go scouting, to cart newcomers like herself to and from Ishval unattended.

“The man has a good eye on a scope,” Gina had said, shrugging.

Handling weapons at the Flour was bothersome at best. Under General Armstrong’s orders Riza was to refrain from practicing her craft, so during lessons in weapons Riza would feign ignorance, most fervently when asked to fire a rifle, or wield a pistol. Gina and Havoc and Rebecca understood her avoidance well enough, and she was able to make it days without looking down a scope or barrel, until the briefing.

“Emilia doesn’t have a gun,” Jaeger had said, his hands resting over the handles of his own. He looked her up and down, his gaze pinning her in place, and snapped his fingers. “Fetch her a pistol, Marsh. I trust she can figure it out.”

And so Riza has a pistol stuffed into the waistband of her pants. It feels like she is carrying around a grenade, the pin threatening to slip out, blow her into pieces. Jaeger keeps studying her face, then drinking in the sight of the gun. He had watched her check the clip back at the Flour, the movements so easy, so engrained into Riza’s being that she couldn’t help but perform the maintenance with practiced fluidity. He leans forward, his elbows digging into his knees. “What’s the game plan, my beautiful Emilia?” he says.

He is asking her to do the final briefing as they near the city. She obliges, her back straightening: “Separate drop points. Opal on the outskirts, Gina on the first ring, Marsh on the second, myself on the third, then you and your cohort at the heart, sir.” He nods, inviting her to go on. She raises her voice enough for it to carry over the cacophony of wind and crushed gravel. “We converge at the bar behind the old temple, Shoup’s, after we circle the perimeter in opposite directions, looking out for military police. Once we have deemed the streets to be safely navigated we begin the second phase, which involves stopping the shipment from Central as it drops off liquor at the bar. We set off smoke bombs and open fire on the truck’s cargo, effectively destroying the loads of Amestrian goods being funneled to the slums. We split and leave as the chaos ensues, returning to our original posts and awaiting your arrival.”

Riza shares a brief, knowing glance with Havoc. They plan to use the smoke, the chaos to their own kind of advantage. Havoc needs to get a message to Breda about Riza, and Riza to Ryder about Reynolds, and they presume the commotion will call attention of the two men, hopefully prompting them to go to their designated rendezvous points.

Slinking out of Jaeger’s sight will prove difficult, however. Riza will need to run right from Shoup’s to her apartment, which is six blocks west of the bar, and be back in the third section of the city in fifteen minutes. Havoc would have a better go of it if the train yard weren’t so far northwest. He will have to sprint from the explosion of smoke to the old yard and be back in the second sector in only thirty minutes - a feat indeed. Though neither soldier lacks greatly in cardiovascular fitness, Riza’s leg still bothers her, the calf and her thigh, and Havoc smokes too much to run fifteen minutes one way and back without pause.

Though the greatest threat to Riza and Havoc’s plan is Jaeger, who has taken to keeping tabs on where Riza is. He was not completely sold on Opal’s photo, even though it was grainy enough to blur the shadowy lines where the silicon did not sit flush against Riza’s skin. There is only so much to be done where Jaeger's trust is concerned, Riza has realized, and obsessing over where his mind might be would only add nails to her own coffin. If he were to sniff out her fear now she would likely find herself under his insistent hands again, and she would sooner shoot them off at the wrists than endure their bony touch. So whether Jaeger will be watching her closely or not she will not be foolish enough to throw away her duty, to leave Ryder in the dark any longer than he’d already been in it. She has to continue with her mission, suspicions from Jaeger lingering on her or not.

The flat tops of Ishval’s northernmost city come sprouting into view, cutting long shadows over the road and rocky ground around it. Sunlight filters through the space between houses, temples, bars, and schools, turning the dirt into a reddish orange color, like fire. Willard slows the utility vehicle enough that Opal can hop out as it’s moving. She disappears into a cloud of chalky dust where she’ll wait to be called upon if anyone is unfortunate enough to be injured by an MP, or a mostly benign smoke bomb that goes awry. Gina is next to dive out of the car. She uses the wooden box she was sitting on to kick off and backflip gracefully over its edge, then roll out of the road and into the cover of a nearby pile of rubble. “Showoff,” Havoc murmurs. He flicks the safety off his gun and slips away, Riza can see the spirals in the exhaust from where he’d run through it, disrupting its flow.

Riza drops out of the utility vehicle after casting a sideways glance at Jaeger, who watches her follow her comrades gracefully. His eyes are dark slits, the light glancing off of them like they were bullets whistling through the air, honing in on their target. She tries to forget about them as she stumbles on the loose gravel under her feet. She finds purchase after a few teetering steps on the corner of an old bake shop, the chipped paint flaking off from her touch. A rectangular sign hangs sadly against the old brick, a cow on the front licking its lips, it’s eyes faded gold stars.

Riza raises her pistol to her shoulder. It takes her a bit of maneuvering until the thing feels secure in her hands, the metal from her automail cast somewhat lacking in grip. She has to clench her left hand tighter over the handle than she does her right hand to prevent the gun from slipping. It works for the most part, though she worries for the integrity of whatever shot she may have to take when the pistol will inevitably kick against her. Still, she can’t help but recognize how fine it is to feel the dense, heavy metal on her skin again. It’s like a part of her has been restored, and she thinks how funny it is that it was Jaeger who pieced that part of her back together.

Ishval is still and quiet in the evening. The hour for prayer is reaching its peak, and following will be dinners and the shuffle of sandals over the dusty ground as wealthier Ishvalans and military police migrate to the merchant line.

The place where Riza had first met Jaeger six days ago.

Riza takes tentative steps around the old bake shop. She is careful to follow the shadows, which are cast long and dark in the dying light. The outfits fitted for her and the other scouts had seemed impractical upon her first inspection of them - black, covering every inch of her body minus her neck and head and hands. It seemed to her that it would be all too easy to become overheated in the things, but as the sun set lower and lower she felt the breeze come in cooler, like opening a fridge and standing in its arc of reach.

She makes it to the sidewalk, looks left and right as the street lights flicker on. There are houses to her left, rows and rows of them built with red stucco, rimmed with wood salvaged from old wagons and wells from before the war. They all look the same, cookie cutter is what Rebecca would call them. But Riza thinks there is something charming about people who equate their worth with their faith choosing to live only as their neighbors do. Ishvalan temples are large, domed buildings where people pray in rotundas decorated with paintings from stories straight out of the book of Ishvala’s teachings, whereas Ishvalan homes are places that offer little distraction from faith or family, minimalist and quaint. Perhaps, Riza thinks, this devotion to Ishvala and to one another is what makes the Ishvalan people so steadfastly strong.

Riza resolves to go right first, and in doing so she notices something she hadn’t while contemplating the Ishvalan homes up the street: Cohen, that’s where she is. The third ring starts up on Cohen Street, and she’s currently on the intersection between Cohen and Maple, which means…

She will have to sneak past Amestris’ Ishvalan headquarters if she intends to complete her circuit around the ring she was assigned.

And she will have to complete it, because for all she knows Jaeger placed her here on purpose and could be watching, or could have Willard, Maximus, or Gordon watching. Between Reynolds and her tattoo, Riza is in a precarious position, on a swing that Jaeger is threatening to cut from it’s branch. She falters, she acts disloyal, she gets brave, and he’ll send her sailing toward the ground. So she hugs the far end of the sidewalk again, away from the road, and presses on. Better to appear as though she hasn’t a clue where she is, or what is in store for her in the event she’s right and someone is keeping an eye on her movements.

The sun continues to set all around the city. The sky is a pot of blues, purples, oranges, reds, and yellows, like it were a melted rainbow. Like someone mixed cotton candy flavors and swirled them together. Riza’s heartbeat hammers against her ribs the closer she gets to the little square white building at the end of Cohen, where it turns into the empty desert. Black military issued utility vehicles line both sides of the street, the tops of them lit a dull yellow from the street lights humming above them. Some reflect the colors of the sky, presenting them as less vibrant, more muted than they really are.

The headquarters on Cohen Street are where Riza and Roy would work when visiting the slums, when not meandering through East City headquarters with other generals and other captains discussing Ishval’s tattered infrastructure. Riza always preferred the Ishval headquarters to any other. The building made room for five, maybe six high ranking officers instead of the usual ten or twenty. You had to have a personal stake in Ishval’s reconstruction if you wished to step foot in the two-story, white stucco, red roofed headquarters, and that meant conversation was much more amicable between officers here than any other place. Shared space, shared ideals. It makes for somewhat enjoyable work.

Riza, now ten or fifteen feet from the front of headquarters, pulls back into the threshold of an old book store. The splintered wood of the front door lets loose the smell of old paper, of ink and dust and mold. A car rolls forward right past her, she had heard it move over the graveled road, and jolts to a stop at the curb. It’s another military vehicle, deep black and well tinted. She flips the safety off her gun, not intending to fire it at anyone but prepared to let off warning pops if she happens to be noticed. She holds her breath as the driver’s door opens, blue uniform looking navy, almost black in the evening light. Then a man emerges from the back seat, his black hair, his broad shoulders, narrow waist, the coat pillowing out around his frame send shock waves through Riza’s body, starting in her toes and reverberating around in the crown of her head. She lowers her pistol, thumbs the safety on.

Maria Ross does a preliminary sweep of her surroundings, her palm resting dutifully on the hilt of her gun. Roy is unconcerned, he shrugs his coat tighter over his frame, trusting his companion to keep eyes out for him. Riza’s foot slips from the lip of the doorway. She follows him with her eyes, a cry forming in her throat like a tight ball of yarn. She cranes her neck, her shoulder blades lift off from the battered door. Roy begins to move up the steps, Ross positions herself so that her back covers his.

It takes only a moment of blind yearning, a half a second of want, to compel Riza to step out of the protective shadow of the book store. She isn’t watching her step, and her right hand anchors her to the doorway, but as her second foot falls off the edge of the threshold her pistol in her left hand goes clattering to the concrete below it. The sound echoes in the quiet, off buildings and up and down the tunneled street of Cohen. Riza looks down disbelievingly, then back at her empty metal hand, and she hears Ross say, “Who’s there?”

When Riza looks up she has been shrouded in light. A flashlight, being held parallel to the barrel of a gun. Ross advances on her, her face obscured by the white light of the flashlight. Over Ross’ left shoulder Riza can see Roy, suspended in mid-step up the stairway to headquarters, his eyes wide, black, knowing. They stab through the dark, through the white of Ross’ light, and into Riza’s eyes, her being, like they’re reading all of her secrets.

She takes a breath, shaky and shallow, before stepping into the full of the light. Her hands lift above her shoulders, her palms face forward.

“Riza Hawkeye,” she says, her voice airy, quiet. “Don’t shoot, Lieutenant.”

Ross’ flashlight and pistol dip downward, like she’s about to send them on a nosedive to the sidewalk.

And then Riza turns, and runs, and prays Ross does not fire her weapon.

*

Panic rises like a tide in Roy’s chest, a wave in his throat. He stumbles down the steps to take hold of the gun in Ross’ hand. “Don’t shoot,” he pants. “That was my Riza.”

Ross looks at him, her brows furrow over confused eyes. “Your Riza, sir? Captain Hawkeye?”

“My captain,” Roy corrects himself, nodding. He slips his coat off and drapes it over Ross’ shoulders, and then takes off in the direction Riza had gone. He strains his eyes in the receding light as he tries to follow her path, watching for boot prints in the dust and dirt below him. He can hear Ross calling after him. The sound of her heavy step follows him like a shadow, and he picks up his pace.

*

Riza’s blood is roiling in her veins. It’s uncomfortable, like her head is going to burst from the pressure of her own turbid blood. The night air stings her lungs, making the area under her sternum feel tight like she has swallowed cubes of ice. She wills her legs to go forward, to put one step after another, to move, move, keep moving, dammit.

She hasn’t heard anyone call after her but she knows he’s on her heels. His presence at her back is hot, persistent. She can hear him huff through his nostrils, gulp at the air through his mouth. His strides are longer than hers, they carry him quick and far. Riza can’t outrun him, and if by some miracle she managed to he would keep pursuing her well into the Flour, into Jaeger or Shoup’s. He’s seen her - He’s recognized me! - and there is no going back.

The best thing Riza can do for the both of them is find some place to hide; some place where they will be obscured from Jaeger, or Willard, or Gordon, or Maximus’ view.

And so Riza takes hold of the corner of the building adjacent to the old bake shop as it springs into view. She swings herself into the gap between the two buildings, keeps running until she’s at the alley that separates properties from one another. Electric blue light zigzags up either side of her, over the brick and stucco. She stays in place as the two walls join together in front of her, the faint lines indicative of alchemy clustering together. It reminds her of the walls and floors in the Flour, how Havoc had told her that Jaeger’s alchemists used rock and old concrete to create it, thinning their surroundings until all that remained was a large rectangular block.

Roy’s hand is still on the bake shop wall when she turns to look at him, the desert sun hanging red and low on the horizon. The blue sizzles away under his palm as he stops the transmutation.

She can’t see his expression, he’s silhouetted by the dying sunlight, but his shoulders and chest rise and fall animatedly, like his body is fighting for oxygen. Every bone in her body is screaming for her to run to him, every nerve is on fire, the tiny hairs over her arms and neck are standing on end. There is a part of her that has conceded to him, a part of her that wants him, but still there is a voice in the back of her mind, insisting: deny, don’t tell him, don’t speak except to deny, deny denydenyde-

“Riza?” he ventures, taking a step in her direction. Maria Ross goes barreling past him only to pivot around on her heel and catch his forearm in her hand.

“General Mustang!” she huffs. Roy does not look at her. He is staring at Riza like he’s studying a familiar subject, but catching up on its intricacies. Everything about the way he’s looking at her is calculated, nearly mechanical. Ross follows his line of sight with hers and tentatively raises her weapon.

“Stand back, sir,” she says. Uncertainty clouds her tone.

“Lower your weapon, Lieutenant Ross.” Lights from the houses down the road start to cast puddles of yellow on the sidewalk. Roy is illuminated by the hue, half his body traced by the soft light. Riza can see his mouth moving, the thin line of it, the pull of his lips over his teeth when he tells Ross to stand down.

“Sir?”

“This is Captain Hawkeye,” he says it like it’s fact, and it is, and Riza curses herself for letting it be so, “and I’ve given you an order.”

Ross obeys but keeps her finger resting lightly over the trigger, the safety off.

In a few more steps Roy has overtaken Riza’s senses. Her clarity and the conviction that slips further and further from her the closer he gets go spiraling away, like feathers in the wind. She looks over his shoulders and Ross’, and forces herself to listen for noise coming from above her, from behind Roy’s barrier. Nothing, she hears nothing but the wind rustling through the sparse brush and her own pulse pounding around inside of her.

Still: “It’s not safe, General,” she blurts. He stops then, but only for a beat. Lines crease over his forehead as he processes the sound of her voice, the lilt of her subtle eastern accent, soft as sheepskin and warm as summer. “Stay away.”

“No,” he replies, a bit indignantly. There is pain fissured into his features, stringy like a web. Riza wants to reach out and touch him, feel the cracks she put in his face, lift the bags she left under his eyes. He looks bruised but without the purple and blue and black blotches of color. He’s wounded, thin, his uniform bunches up at his hips where he stuffed it haphazardly into his waistband. It pulls down and reveals too much of his neck, the hollow at the crest of his sternum. The more he advances on her the more her heart breaks, chips of it falling away like the ice on the outer walls of Briggs.

“You’re favoring a leg,” he says, “and you’ve got an automail hand.” He’s near enough to her now to take her hand in his and inspect the metal, Winry’s fine artisanship tricking his eyes into believing Riza’s truly lost a limb, a piece of her. He feels up to her wrist, his hand sliding under the sleeve of her uniform. “No… You have an automail arm.”

Roy is so close Riza can hardly believe she isn’t dreaming. She breathes through her nose, smells the smoke and the coffee and the worn leather of his military vehicle. She wants to draw away from the disbelief, the disgust in his voice, but she wants to reassure him too, take the pieces off her arm and show him how intact she is.

She settles for whispering, “I’m fine.”

“Your hair is a different color,” he continues. Riza detects the hurt, the catch of his voice in his throat. He turns her face, the pads of his fingers pressing gently over the yellowed patch on her throat. “And your neck is bruised, Captain, so please tell me how you’re fine.” The return of his usual tone - steely and smooth and cold - compels Riza to take her arm from him. She attempts to jerk her face away, but his fingers curl into her, settling her chin into his palm, caging her.

The feeling of his bare hands on her is a momentary distraction, like plunging into water and noticing only the striking coldness of it before the weeds brushing over your legs. She gives herself to the sensation, to the touch of someone who isn’t a predator, a practitioner, a stranger. She is so acutely aware of what it is she’s doing wrong here. He’s her superior, he’s calling her Captain, and she’s his subordinate, a dead woman. But when she’s at the Flour all she knows is that she’s been buried alive, like somewhere her lungs are burning as she continues to scratch at the lid to her coffin, her fingernails run down to the cuticles. And with the general she’s reminded that it’s all a fallacy, that her breaths come freely.

“Mission report, Captain,” he says. She can feel the rumble of his voice pass from his chest to hers. 

“I’m not a captain right now,” Riza tells him, and she is speaking so low that she can hardly tell she’s spoken at all, “and I cannot disclose my intent to you at this time. Feel free to take your questions to the Northern Wall, sir.” He gathers her into him slowly as she’s talking and slings his left arm across the small of her back. The hand cradling her chin migrates to her jaw. The corners of his lips turn up like he plans to smirk at her customary professionalism, as though it meant anything to him while he’s anchoring her in his arms.

Underneath Central, when Riza’s throat had been cut, Roy was desperate. He fought for her like she would disappear if he let her out of his sight. He clutched her to him like she were a life vest, coasting over the water and offering him protection. This time he is more methodical in his touch. His hand slips from her face so he can run his knuckles lightly over the scar on her neck to her collar bone, across her shoulder, down her arm.

It’s like he’s proving to himself that she’s there, like he’s re-memorizing the shape of her, like he’s daring her to tell him he could ever possibly be wrong about who she is.

“You’re real,” he says more to himself than to her. “You-”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Gina’s voice pierces through the growing dark like a blade, showing up as unannounced as she had. She clutches at the corner of the bake shop as she struggles to catch her breath. “This is why you’re late, Emilia?” she hisses.“I got to the bar and you weren’t there, and five minutes later you still weren’t there, and Jaeger and his guys went one way and I went this way, and they’re going to circle back here and see you, you dumbass!”

“Wha-? Who are you?” Ross barks. She points her gun at Gina, no longer unsure of her target.  Roy frowns.

“Emilia?” he looks to Riza.

“Codename, you idiot general,” Gina says, exasperated. She is the most flustered Riza has ever seen her, a sheen of sweat glistens over her skin, her hair is coming out of her tail and sticking to her face. She must have been afraid that Riza slipped away, which would have buried her and Opal’s plans, or that Jaeger would find her doing something treacherous, something like letting General Mustang caress her under the setting sun. “Nice to meet you, by the way. I’m Emilia’s new lover, Gina. I’ve heard you’re kind of a prick.”

Roy raises an eyebrow.

“Who are you really?” he inquires. His hold on Riza tightens.

“It doesn’t matter right now,” she answers.

And then, under her breath: “Jaeger is coming.”

Riza takes Gina’s cue and rips the standard issue pistol from the holster at Roy’s hip, the one he keeps on him whenever he travels out east. She tears herself from his hands and thrusts her back against his wall. She flicks the safety off; trains the sights on his face. Confusion, ache explodes in his eyes, and then it’s soaked up by unspoken understanding and he raises his arms, his hands lifting above his head.

“Gina,” Jaeger’s voice drifts in on the breeze, his slow drawl igniting a nervous fire in Riza’s gut.

He’s going to see the general.

His goal is to hurt the general.

He’s going to be in the same place as Roy.

“Oh my, is that Lieutenant Ross I see?”

Ross keeps her gun trained on Gina as she turns her head to look over her shoulder. Jaeger grips her there before appearing like a ghost at the mouth to Roy’s transmuted alley. His gaze travels over Ross’ arms to the gun in her hands, then to Gina’s disheveled frame and then, finally, to Roy and Riza. Maximus wrenches Ross’ arms behind her back as Jaeger’s touch leaves her. She cries out once, sucking through her teeth when her hands are pressed into the chasm between her shoulder blades. Willard steals her pistol.

“General Mustang,” Jaeger points at his sister and then at Riza, “what are you doing to my men?”

“So you’re Jaeger,” Roy snarls. Riza prays he keeps his fury in check. She blinks hard, tries to clear the moisture from her eyes. He hasn’t used flame alchemy in Ishval since the war, and suddenly she can feel the scorching heat of it. When she closes her eyes she sees Jaeger, his flesh falling off his bones to land in clumps at General Mustang’s feet. She sees embers misting off Envy in the tunnels under Central and the endlessly bleak blackness of her superior’s eyes.

“Something like that.”

“‘Something like that’?” Roy drops his arms. He takes a step in Jaeger’s direction and Riza cocks the service pistol; a reminder. Roy stiffens.

“I feel as though we have quite a bit to talk about, General.” Jaeger says through a toothy grin. “Why don’t you come to the bar with us ? I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Fuck you,” Roy starts to tremble, his thumb meets his ungloved middle finger out of habit. “Why would I go anywhere with you after what you’ve done? Why shouldn’t I cut you down right here?”

“Because, and pay close attention here Mustang,” Jaeger says flatly, his grin fading away. Willard and Gordon find their places at his sides as Maximus forces another whimper out of Ross. “You don’t have a fucking choice.”

Chapter Text

Shoup’s is sandwiched between another bar and a small, boarded up building that used to be a shop. Riza surveys the faded old lettering on the late shop’s sign, translating the Ishvalan scrawl in her head:

PASTRIES TEA JERKY WATER

The sun had sank slowly behind the sandy hills. Riza no longer sees its influence glinting off street signs or illuminating the horizon. Everything is dark now, dark enough to hide her shadow. Even Shoup’s is murky, filled with smoke and lit by flickering bulbs that sit in stubby iron light fixtures along the white trim of the ceiling.

The night presses against Shoup’s dirt-crusted windows. Riza closes her eyes and sees herself at the bar, short hair coming undone from her clip and Roy, a tired smile on his face, his fingers returning her stray strands to their places. They never spoke here — not of work, not of anything. The din of customers was always too much, like the nag of a headache. It was easier to use the noise to speak silently to one another. To tap their glasses over the bar top and listen for invisible messages.

Shoup’s is mostly empty now. It’s eerie. Riza can feel the quiet crawl up her back and worm its way around her neck, into her ears. The darkness that pools in the corners of the bar is inky black liquid that seeps ever further toward the center of the room. It coils around old bar stools and hides in the cracked wood there, waiting. Everything smells faintly of moist wood and decay, like wet leaves left rotting in a jar. And suddenly Riza’s vision of herself and Roy is gone, and it’s replaced by the image of Jaeger’s lean shoulders obscuring the light, becoming outlined by the darkness that moves throughout the bar.

Riza’s stomach knots when Jaeger hooks his hand around the back of Roy’s neck and guides him down onto a stool at the bar. He orders drinks for the both of them — two whiskies, neat. Roy’s shoulders are hunched, taught. His hands are balled over the countertop, parallel to one another and itching, probably, for his gloves.

She hadn’t seen his face since he turned to face Jaeger in the alley. All she’d seen while she walked in the growing darkness was the metallic black of Roy’s weapon, pointed dangerously at the back of its owner’s head. She kept to the back of the company as Jaeger, flanked by his cronies, lead the way to Shoup’s. His head a little too high and his shoulders a bit more square than Riza would have liked. But his ego kept him preoccupied, enough so that he didn’t notice Riza’s finger drift from the trigger to settle safely along the gun’s barrel instead. And when she was feeling brave, she would venture the sights a little to Roy’s left, just enough that if she were to shoot she’d shoot straight through Jaeger’s throat.

What a sight that would be.

Jaeger takes a seat to Roy’s right, and gestures for Riza to settle in on his left. She does, and flicks the gun’s safety off before stabbing Roy in the side with it, under the table where the bartender can’t see, but where Maximus and Gordon and Willard can.

She can feel her pulse in her fingertips, pounding against the metal of her weapon. She can hear blood whooshing through her ears when she purposefully stills her chest, holding in a breath and releasing it through her nose, ruffling the hairs that fall over the crest of Roy’s left ear. She chances a glance at Ross, now free from Maximus’ hold, lowering herself stiffly into a chair, and then one at Havoc. He’s sitting in a corner of the bar, stone still and nursing a glass of something clear and fizzy. Probably Vodka and whatever soda they had that wasn’t flat.

“General Mustang,” the bartender — a slender man with a sunken face and wiry veins pushing up against the skin of his forearms — places a shot of whiskey between Roy’s fists. “I haven’t seen you here in a long while. How are things?”

Jaeger nudges Roy’s arm. “Things are fine, Sal, thank you.” Roy’s voice is a bowstring, wrought with use and liable to snap. Riza takes her free hand and runs her knuckles along his lateral thigh, coaxing him into submission. She hides the gesture by shifting in her seat, by transferring the gun from her right hand to her left. The corner of Roy’s left eye twitches, indicating that he’s understood her.

“Things have been tense since my captain’s passing,” he goes on, “and my workload has increased exponentially as a result. I’m tired, that’s all.”

Sal takes the comment at face value, offering Roy condolences while hurriedly turning away from him. Riza wonders if that reaction is what Roy has had to grow accustomed to. A mention of his dead adjutant met with an uncomfortable muttering of I’m sorry for your loss, eyes straining away from the general’s poorly concealed sadness.

Jaeger lifts his drink and sips at it, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His hair looks darker in the dimness of Shoup’s. Not quite like Gina’s, but a deep mahogany brown, almost black. The shadows from the minimal lighting accentuate both siblings’ high, sharp cheekbones and their finely pointed noses. Gina finds her place opposite Ross, and requests from a mousy waiter that they both receive a glass of water. Ross does not touch hers. She’s too busy setting a stubborn gaze on Gina’s face and Jaeger’s back, both subjects taking turns under the lieutenant's scrutiny. Riza sees Gina capture Ross’ forearm and shake her head.

“You hate me, don’t you?” Jaeger’s breath echoes with the sweet stench of liquor. “That’s all right. I loathe you.”

Fear is a coil in Riza’s insides, wrapping around her veins. She feels the tension pile and pile and pile. Then Roy says, “You went after my subordinate.”

“Oh, Mustang,” Jaeger coos, “but that’s not all she was, eh? A sweet thing like her had to be filled to the brim with perks. Some of which came packaged in a bedroom, I’d bet.”

Jaeger pays more attention to his whiskey before continuing, employing a smug smile: “What was her favorite color of lingerie? Burgundy would’ve looked nice on her, I think. Although I’m not really one to judge. I’ve never seen her in all her glory. Ah, but you have! So tell me, Roy, what color —”

Roy lurches from his seat but Riza fists the shoulder of his jacket before he can whirl on Jaeger. She urges him back down, the gun’s muzzle nestled into a gap between his ribs. Jaeger laughs.

“Touchy,” he says. His unruly hair sinks over his forehead and he pushes it aside, clean and uncaring. Sal turns away from array of liquor on the wall opposite them. He looks at Roy with concern, confusion in his eyes. Voice low, Jaeger warns, “Let him know that he should mind his own business. This game is only for us.”

Roy waves a hand in the air. “It’s nothing to worry over, Sal,” he says. Sal is unconvinced, but turns his back to them anyway. Riza knows he keeps a gun underneath his counter, right below the tap. He keeps running his fingers over it.

“Good boy,” Jaeger says, and takes another drink. Then another, another, another until his whiskey is mostly gone. Roy stays obediently still.  

No one can afford to be explosive here, and yet Riza is braced for impact. She’s readied her body for the full force of the sky bearing down on her, crushing her, mixing her with the black that shrouds her periphery. Every movement Sal makes is one that could invite retaliation from Jaeger; and every turn of Riza’s face into the meager light is a chance that Sal might recognize her; and Havoc’s chest keeps rising and falling into and out of view, his blue eyes open to the size of cenz, his mouth pinched with worry.

Once, when Riza was taken by King Bradley, she’d been asked to sit in on negotiations with representatives from Aerugo. She remembers readily the stuffiness of the encounter, like shoulders were pressed in on one another even though no one was touching. The air had been sickly and lukewarm and a haze of particles drifted around in it, dancing into and out of the sunlight that streamed in through the windows. Her place was in a corner by the door behind Bradley. She took to studying the muscles of his neck as he spoke and as he listened. When he was talking, the muscles bulged out on either side of his jaw, thick snakes underneath his skin. And when he listened she saw the movement shift to the back of his neck, like he were gritting his teeth so hard that the motion bypassed his face and buried itself deep inside of him. She wondered then if that was how Bradley always managed to appear as he did — flippant, kind, so unlike all of the roiling anger that burned inside of him. Watching Bradley fester then was like being in Shoup’s now, except she didn’t know Jaeger in the way she knew Bradley. She could count the seconds until Bradley would explode, usually by chucking a vase her way and grinning at the way it shattered and split against the wall. At the way she jumped and recoiled.

But Jaeger had no tells. Riza has seen him unravel once, and it was a calculating anger — she can still feel the soft itch of his nails along the line of her spine.

“What do you want, Jaeger?” Roy says. The words are ground out, forced into existence.

“Another drink,” Jaeger replies, calling on Sal for a refill. Once he’s got a fresh glass, he takes a final sip and drapes an arm over Roy’s shoulders. Riza bristles despite herself.

“I want you to know something, Mr. Hero,” Jaeger says. “And I want you to know it well, so listen closely: Riza Hawkeye’s life is mine. It will always be mine, and if you aren’t careful, Vato Falman’s will be mine as well. Jean Havoc. Heymans Breda, who keeps snooping around in Ishval like the flea bitten dog he is. Even little Kain Fuery will belong to me. Maria Ross,” at this, Jaeger tips his face up to wink at Ross from across the room, “is in more danger than you are right now, right here in this bar. I could kill her or I coulda take her, and you and everyone would be powerless — useless — in stopping me.”

Anxiety churns in Riza’s blood. Yes, there is a fine difference between the wrath of Wrath and the wrath of Jaeger. Wrath was angry because anger was what he was; Jaeger is angry because anger is what he has become.

Roy tries to crane his head in Ross’ direction, and Jaeger snickers.

“You are, without a doubt, the most predictably disgusting man I have ever known.” He throws his hands in the air, like he was trying to make his distaste known to the universe. “Do you know why we went after her, Roy?” Jaeger places his hands on his thighs now, and leans in to peer into Roy’s darkening face. “Answer me!” The palm of his hand slams hard into the wood of the bar top.

“No,” Roy bites back. Jaeger seems pleased with this response.

“Because she was unequivocally yours. Because, while all your subordinates are your little pets, Riza Hawkeye was the dog you let in your bed. She was the horse you rode into the sunset, the bird you let sit on your shoulder and preen your hair.

“You might think you were smart to guard her, Mustang, but you weren’t. You were stupid, so fucking stupid, and I cannot thank you enough — there are not enough words in any of my languages to convey just how grateful I am to you that you made it so fucking easy to ruin your life. You held Riza Hawkeye in your big, strong arms and you put a target on her forehead. Good job, Roy-Boy, you’ve killed your adjutant! Are you already gunning for another round?” His hand did a dramatic sweep in Ross’ direction.

Somehow, as Jaeger’s fury grew, Roy’s began to slack. The tenuous stretch of his arms and his back left him. The more Jaeger speaks, the further Roy’s head sinks down, down into his hands. Until all Riza can see of him is a curtain of black hair, fingers diving into it, rubbing hard at his face. And then, impossibly, Roy laughs. It’s only once, twice, harsh — and then it ends.

“You’re a child,” Roy says. Jaeger makes a fist and then releases it, like a sigh.

“I’m pissed off,” Jaeger grits. You destroyed my home, sits neatly on his tongue, poised, waiting. But he won’t dare say it. It would give too much away.

Riza swoops in to fill the gaps as silence rushes in around them.

“I don’t know all that much about you, General Mustang,” she lies smoothly, “but I’ve heard quite a bit,” two almost imperceptible taps of her knuckles on his knee, “from a friend of mine, Jeanine.” J, Riza hopes Roy catalogues. J.

“We were friends where I lived on the Ishval border. I knew her before your war cost me my arm,” she brandishes her left arm, and in the process knocks two more times against the wooded bar top for added emphasis. Roy gives his attention to her, making a show of reluctance. “We knew these girls who were sisters, Irene,” I, “and Annabelle.” A. “Their mother was a sweet woman named Nicole,” N, “not that you care or ever cared what their names are.”

By now all ears were fashioned to everything that was coming from Riza, especially Jaeger’s, who seemed to be straining forward over Roy’s lap, hungry for the words spilling from Riza’s mouth.

“Jeanine told me what you did. I had left the border by then, but you went to Irene and to Annabelle and you burned them alive in their beds. Nicole killed herself at your feet.”

Jian.

“You’re sick, General Mustang.”

I’m so sorry, sir, please, please, his name is Jian.

“And you deserve whatever heartbreak Jaeger has bestowed upon you.”

The words are ice coming up Riza’s throat. Ice that burns like fire, licking against the wetted skin of her tongue, lighting her saliva like it was gasoline. Her ears rang in the quiet left behind in Shoup’s — even Sal had stopped dinging dishes together in the sink to listen — and Roy’s face fell, his brows knit ever-so-slightly together over his dark, glassy eyes. Riza would die for those eyes.

“Well there it is,” Jaeger says, “the sharpest among us has spoken.”

Riza doesn’t like the way Jaeger says sharpest.

“I can’t sit here with you any longer,” Jaeger suddenly rises from his seat, face stoney and marked by stress lines, fractures. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting done what we came here to do tonight, and so we’ll leave you for now. This is not the place I wanted to take you out, nor the time. I have bigger things waiting on the sidelines for you, Roy Mustang. They’re packed into your machines and couriers and are liable to blow. Boom.” He takes two fists and his fingers explode from them, demonstrating an explosion the same way a child might explain how fireworks go off in the sky.

Riza stands to leave with Jaeger and his men, every bit of her soul pulling her back down to Roy, drawn like a magnet. He stays still at the bar, deep in his understanding of what Jaeger is and why Riza cannot flee with Roy now. Riza is joining Gina at the bar’s entrance when she hears a glass tap twice over the bar’s surface, and she stills, and turns in time to see Roy lifting his drink.

Roy and Riza decided years and years ago that they would cultivate their own secret code. At first they’d used it to communicate under Berthold Hawkeye’s nose, for protection and for comfort — mostly Riza’s. It was as simple as two taps of a hand, of a foot, of an object like a broom or the butt of a gun. They started with names of people they knew, so that Berthold would raise no eyebrows, but as they matured so did their secrecy, and they learned that any proper noun could become an effective communicator. Shoup’s, for example, would have worked fine to indicate the letter S; Central is a C; Xing would be an X. But still names were the easiest, most effective device. No one steered their nose into a conversation about people they couldn’t know.

Jeanine. Annabelle. Irene. Nicole.

Two taps are the starting line, the point of origin, and Roy is tuned into them. He can be out in any place and hear a succession of ticks and he’ll wait like a dog for the ball to drop, although it never does unless Riza is with him. She is the only other person who speaks this language.

Maria Ross walks carefully into Roy’s view and takes the seat Riza has just vacated. The air where she was is still warm and smelling of gun powder and leather, and Roy is reluctant to let the smell waft away but it does. It’s replaced by Ross’ perfume, muted but there. She crosses her arms over the bar top and orders a lemon sour. Extra sour.

“I’m sorry,” Roy says. He sips more at his drink. The urge to nurse liquor keeps coming back to him the further Riza slips away with Jaeger, to some place he knows as the Flour. He wonders idly about what it must be like there. He imagines chambers slick with muck, chains drilled to the floor. Cuffs rest at the end of them, cuffs with old blood on their rims from where prisoners would chafe their wrists. The image of Riza’s yellowed bruise assaults Roy’s vision and he blinks hard, trying to dispel it from his mind. How did she get it? It wrapped around the side of her throat, right beneath her pretty jawline, like a collar.

“Sir?” Ross inquires, and it’s only then that Roy notices she’s responded to him more than once.

“I’ve put you in danger.” Roy says plainly. Ross sucks on her lemon sour through a straw.

“It’s nothing I haven’t encountered before, sir.” She tells him. “A career in the military comes with risks, and I’m well prepared to deal with them.”

Still Roy feels guilt boil in his gut. Jaeger had threatened her — in front of Sal, Roy, and Ross herself — and he was right. Roy can do nothing if Jaeger decides to go for Ross, because Roy cannot send Ross away. She wouldn’t have it, not now. She was married to duty almost as steadfastly as Riza was. And where would that get her? Shackled to an undercover mission, or worse — dead in the Briggs mountains.

“That Jaeger,” Ross begins, an edge to her tone, “it’s like his anger’s a spring. It keeps wrapping and wrapping downward, but instead of letting it loose he just locks it there. Keeps its energy saved up for later.” Ross turns her eyes onto the ice cubes in her drink, bumping into one another as she twirls it in her hand. “I’m afraid of what he’ll do when that spring breaks free.”

So is Roy, but he doesn’t admit it. Besides, he’s afraid for reasons much different than Ross’. He says, “Jian.”

“Sir?”

“Jian,” Roy throws the last of his drink down the back of his throat, wincing as it stings him. “Jaeger’s name is Jian. And I need Breda.”

Rocks strike the sides of the car in a noisy symphony as it barrels away from Ishval and toward the Flour.

A headache is growing behind Riza’s eyes, starting in her temples and joining together in the center of her forehead. She feels pain pulse and pulse.

It had been hard to leave Roy. It was very rare that Riza resented her own loyalty to him, but sometimes it bubbled up in her stomach like a sickness and she wanted to void it from her body. She always thought of the two of them as a unit — a man and his shield; a woman and her conviction. They were two gears running together in the same motor. A part of her knew this meant they could not truly function separately, but another, smaller part of her reasoned that there were rules in place to solve such problems. Mechanics, for one. Fake automail arms. Maria Ross.

Roy had seemed so far away. Riza tries to think back on the first time she saw his face in that alley, but all she can conjure up is a fuzzy outline of his jaw against the diffuse light of the sunset. Then her cheeks start to warm and she turns her face into the cool nighttime air as it passes along the car’s scuffed surface. Riza has never let Roy touch her like that before. She unwillingly recalls the tight hold he had on her face, and the ghosting of his fingers along her skin, lighting her nerve endings up like one of Havoc’s cigarettes. The closest he had ever come to handling her like that before was the Promised Day, and the eyes of Amestris had been there to tamper him then. This time it was only Ross, who seemed too stunned to comment, and Gina.

And that had, evidently, made all the difference to Roy.

Jaeger had made them leave Shoup’s in different directions. Riza had used her time alone to ponder over all the times in the last few months that she has escaped doom. There was Briggs, and there was the first time she met Jaeger, his guards waiting in the shadows, teeth bared. Then there was Reynolds and Richard. She hoped her survival meant she was doing things right — but Roy had successfully intervened, and so she knew that she wasn’t. She was scraping by. Borrowing luck. And it would eventually run out. Which meant she couldn’t afford to indulge in her superior again, no matter how much light she found dancing in his dark eyes.

They had reconvened one by one as Willard found them along their respective routes. Opal had been gathered first, and she was at once openly confused and then sedated by a brief status report from Gina, who now rests her cheek on the top of Opal’s head. She speaks all of a sudden, her words igniting the night.

“What were you talking about, Jaeger?” she says. The wind carries her voice away, and so Jaeger only stares at her.

“What?” he asks.

“What did you mean when you told Mustang you had bigger things planned for him? Liable to blow,” her voice rises above the whoosh of the wind. She’s slumped against a box, her arm dangling across Opal’s shoulders, but her face is stern, severe.

“What did I say?” Jaeger asks. Riza can’t blame him for the blip in memory — even she is struggling to remember that part in the conversation. There had been too much going on at once and it had all run together in Riza’s mind, creating a river of anxiety and information. Her priorities had shifted to Roy there in Shoup’s, and left no room for anything else.

“You said you had bigger things packaged in machines,” Gina says. A snarl flashes across Jaeger’s face, just once, just long enough for Riza to notice. “and in couriers. Were you planning to share this plot of yours with me?”

Jaeger’s face shifts from a snarl to something much more dangerous. His teeth flash in the dark and he grinds out, “This is a conversation better had in the privacy of my office, Gina.”

Gina’s nostrils flare and she leans forward, her own kind of danger settling into her features. “You said it, Jaeger. You said it in front of all of us,” here Jaeger’s gaze skitters over to Riza, “and I think we’re entitled to an explanation.”

Ah, Gina is doing this for Riza’s benefit. This was something Riza’s mind had skipped over, and Gina is bringing it back into the fray, adding it to Riza’s growing list of concerns because this, to Gina, is a concern. Probably quite high on her list.

Riza braves the conversation, wanting very much so to glean what information she can from it/ “I remember that too,” she starts, careful. “Jaeger, what are you —”

Jaeger rushes Riza then. The back of the car tips with his weight as he moves from sitting straight-backed against the cab to pressing his fingers and his palms over the yellowing bruise on Riza’s throat. She sucks air in but the effort is wasted because Jaeger’s grip is there, and it is strong, and it isn’t relenting. He’s breaking more blood vessels, squeezing a fresh bruise over the old. The air goes liquid hot in her lungs. Jaeger pulls her forward close to his face, and then he slams her into the raised wall of the car’s bed. Her spine collides with metal.

“You don’t speak,” he growls, and something is moving over his shoulder. Gina or Opal or Havoc or all three. Riza’s vision is falling away, but Jaeger releases her just as it shifts to black and she goes limp. Blood rushes to her injured neck as oxygen explodes into her lungs. Her entire body is burning.

Someone’s hands are on her then, coaxing her up.

Jaeger returns to his place by the cab to watch her scramble to sitting, his glare venomous.

Riza can see his regret even as tears spring to her eyes, but it’s not for what he’s done to her. She specifically was not meant to hear a thing about machines and couriers and he’s furious that she has. What does that mean? she thinks through the searing pain. What does he know?

Chapter Text

Havoc had been banned from the infirmary. This was partly because Riza needed to shed her shirt for Opal to inspect the bruising over Riza’s spine, but it was also because Havoc wouldn’t stop foaming at the mouth.

“I wanted to kick his ass!” Havoc had raged. He’d been pacing Opal’s infirmary-slash-office for the better part of fifteen minutes, the heels of his boots clicking against the solid ground. It did nothing to temper Riza’s growing headache. “Hell, I still want to!” Havoc went on and on about how badly he would beat Jaeger if given the chance. He spared no gory details, and finally Opal lost her patience.

“Marsh — out.” Opal had pointed a stern finger in the direction of the door. She did this over her shoulder as she pat a cool cloth over the tender and burning skin of Riza’s throat. “Your superior is about to become very underdressed, and I am this close, “ she brought her thumb and forefinger together, a centimeter of space between them, “from shoving my tiny foot up your big ass.”

Havoc had relented, grumbling like a dog that had been chastised for barking at the mail man, and now Riza is alone with Opal in the infirmary. Again, as they always seem to be.

Getting Riza’s tight black long sleeve over her head is hard work. Hard because the muscles over her fresh bruise stretch every time she flexes her shoulders, and the pain is biting. She makes three hearty attempts before Opal elects to help her and together they work the back of the offending material up and over the back of Riza’s head without her needing to move her arms at all. The sleeves pull away from her arms easily.

“Thank you,” Riza breathes, sighing as cool air washes over her back. As usual Opal says nothing. She moves about the room like a ghost, silent and invisible. It isn’t until Riza feels fingers press into the notches of her spine that she realizes Opal is directly behind her.

“This is nasty,” Opal says, clucking her tongue once.

“I can feel that it is.” Riza says. There is no ignoring it. The weight of blood rushing to the site of the injury is heavy like a stone, and it presses hard against the ruined tissues in her back. She can still hear the groan of the metal underneath her weight. She can still see the rocks that had leapt up from the car’s tires to strike uncomfortably close to her face as Jaeger had bent her back over the edge of the bed, his fingers tight as a noose.

Opal’s touch disappears and then reappears seconds later, accompanied by an icy gel. The shock of the cold jolts the nerve endings in Riza’s back and she starts, hissing through clenched teeth.

“Sorry,” Opal says. “This is something I learned to cook up way back when.” Opal doesn’t say it — doesn’t need to say it — but Riza knows she’s talking about the war. This is how their conversations go; it is inescapable. Sometimes Riza hopes that she and Opal can be friendly one day, and other times she recognizes that it would be selfish of her to expect such a thing.

“What does it do?” Riza asks. Opal takes two fingers and slides them over the irritated, puffy flesh of Riza’s neck. Riza is not excited to see it in the mirror later, whenever that may be.

“It’s a cooling agent,” Opal replies. “When you’ve got a soft tissue injury like these ones it’s usually fine to let them inflame and be angry for a little while. However we don’t seem to have the luxury of time, and so this will constrict your blood vessels. If anything it’ll numb the pain while you’re awake so things can mend while you sleep.”

Riza is touched that Opal would consider her comfort, although she reins the emotion in. She opens her mouth to reply, but the door to the infirmary bursts inward in time to cut her off.

It’s Rebecca. Her mouth is pinched, light glances off her teary, red-rimmed eyes, and there is dirt dusting her nose, her hair. She looks very unlike herself when her face is shrouded in worry. Usually, if you were to catch her on the street, Rebecca would be wearing heels, a modest skirt, probably some lipstick. Her dark, warm eyes would be topped with eyeshadow, something flowery — pink. People would gawk and fawn and throw out offerings to her, and she’d shoo them all away with a classy smirk and a wave of her pretty manicured hands. Riza loves both versions of Rebecca dearly — the one on the street and the one standing in the infirmary now. But this Rebecca breaks something inside of her.

“I’m all right,” Riza says to Rebecca’s stress-laden face, though her back whines in protest.

“You don’t look all right,” Rebecca says, her bottom lip quivering.

Riza heaves a sigh, and it takes great effort because any widening of her ribcage means a movement of her thoracic vertebrae.

“I don’t know what happened, ‘Becca, I only know that it did and I’m alive and for now that’s all that matters.”

Opal clears her throat. “Names,” she reminds plainly.

“Catherine,” Riza corrects. She won’t ever be used to Rebecca’s code name. It doesn’t fit.

Rebecca kneels on the floor beneath her friend, settling herself between Riza’s legs. She rests her temple against Riza’s left knee. “Marsh told me you’d been strangled,” she says, “and I thought, Not again! and that made me so sad. Not again.” She scoffs as though someone had just told her a very inappropriate joke.

Riza’s chest swells with affection. Back in the academy Rebecca was all she had; her father had died, her childhood home was in decay, Roy had left her, and Rebecca had swooped in to fill the aching loneliness in Riza’s heart on the nights she missed it all the most. It was moments like these that reminded her Rebecca had carved out her own place in Riza’s soul. She brushes the backs of her fingers along her dear friend’s cheek.

“I saw him,” she says. Rebecca had been looking at the floor, but now she turns her face upward. White fluorescent light engulfs her.

“You saw him?” Rebecca says. “You saw him?”

Riza nods, smiling despite herself. “He saw me too.”

“How did —” Rebecca starts, but doesn’t finish. She leans away from Riza and rests the backs of her thighs on her calves and feet. “Do you think that could be why Jaeger…?”

“I don’t know,” Riza says. Truthfully, she’s terrified of why Jaeger did what he did. The explosive fury had surely come from a place of hate, but whether that hate was for Riza or not was unclear. You don’t speak. Riza sees in her mind’s eye the sharp points of his canines as he’d bared them at her.

“Shit,” Rebecca runs a hand through her hair, starting at her forehead. “Fuck.”

The threat of Jaeger is a cloying thing. It permeates the atmosphere and waits up in the clouds like a cat in a tree, flicking its tail and its whiskers, readying to pounce. Riza is powerless to stop those around her from feeling the fear it breeds. Havoc and Rebecca were seasoned soldiers, yet even they knelt to the maddening possibility that everything could go, as Havoc would so eloquently put it, tits up. And maybe things had already gone that way. Rebecca sat crumbled at Riza’s feet as though some massive secret were just uncovered — The jig is up! — and her sense of safety was strong enough to rival even Riza’s.

Troubling thing too, because Riza’s concern for her own life had been spent at Shoup’s. She’d traded it for the life of Roy Mustang. Where did that leave her, she wonders. If Jaeger knows just who she is, and he held a gun between Roy’s head and hers and said, “You or him, Hawkeye, who’s it gonna be?” Riza would choose herself, and she’d do so without hesitation.

There it is again, that pesky, self-destructive loyalty.

“We were together in an alley, away from Jaeger. If he suspects anything it isn’t because of the general.” Riza isn’t sure, but she says so anyway. To pacify her friend, who throws a disbelieving look. Opal is returning vials to cabinets over Rebecca’s shoulder, and Riza catches her gaze as she turns. It isn’t the deadened gaze that Riza has come to expect from the Ishvalan. It’s the bright red warning of tail lights, set below a worry-lined brow.

The door to the infirmary swings open once again, and this time it’s Gina who enters through it. Opal sighs and locks the door behind her.

Gina is a mess of jittery energy. Riza hesitates to call it excitement, but Gina’s shoulders are visibly shaking. She has a thin stack of papers in her hand one moment, and in the next they’ve been tossed over the cot next to Riza, fanning out over its naked surface. That was the cot Richard had been kept on, Riza realizes. Now he stalks the halls of the Flour, the hole in his abdomen healed enough for him to be an ass in his own quarters. Lucky for them.

Gina presses her fingers hard to her temples. “It’s that,” she grinds out, and even her voice is shuddering. Rebecca rises to steal a paper off the cot. She looks hard at it, but her eyes are untrained. She doesn’t see.

“What is it?” she asks. “Doodles?” The paper is just translucent enough for Riza to make out a scribbled circle through the back, at its edge. She asks for it, and Rebecca delivers.

It’s a crude drawing for sure. It looks like someone had drawn a log and four circles, but here is an engine and here is a trunk. It takes Riza’s hawk eyes less than a few seconds to recognize the sketch of a car, and it’s mostly ordinary except for the arrows crossing from the paper’s corners to land in nondescript areas of the log-car. One such arrow seems to be pointing to the car’s underside, and another to the left headlight, and one to the car’s trunk. Or perhaps the back seat, Riza can’t be sure. But it isn’t the arrows or the car that truly catches Riza’s attention. It’s the squiggly lines of an array at the origin of each arrow, their latin just barely big enough for Riza to read. Her mind matches symbols to memory and she takes a sharp breath.

“Alchemy,” Riza says at the same time Gina says, “Bombs.”

“He’s going to detonate bombs inside cars using alchemy.” Gina supplies further.

“Transport,” Rebecca says, and then groans. “We’ve been delivering cars in the east for so long. I thought it was a front to keep people from snooping.” Her voice dips a few octaves, mimicking Jaeger’s, “Nothing to see here, military guys! This ugly hunk of rock and metal is just a manufacturer.”

Riza’s father had kept alchemy textbooks in his study. There were stacks near the front door to the house and below the dining table. He had rows in the upstairs hall, and at least half a dozen in each of the two bathrooms. Even Riza’s own room had been used to store large, cracking volumes of alchemic texts. And it only intensified when Roy joined their party, bringing his own suitcases full. There wasn’t much to do in the Hawkeye house back then when the only two other tenants were busy reading or setting the furniture on fire. So, Riza dipped her head into alchemy on the days when the weather was too bad for her to brave the outdoors. She’d read a number of things, some alarming and some quite boring. Something that stood out to her, even now, was an array for combustion. Her father had thought, This! This is what my alchemy is missing! but he’d been wrong, and that had made him angry, and so the book on combustion became Riza’s. She stored it under her bed and read a chapter or two when there had been nothing else to do, no one to talk to. And so Riza can definitively say, “This is combustion alchemy.”

Gina throws her hands in the air. “Bombs!” she says again.

“It’s…a bit different than what I’ve seen, but, there’s no question about it.”

“So Jaeger is going to explode some cars.” Rebecca says, plopping onto the cot beside Riza. She drops her head to Riza’s shoulder.

“He’s going to explode some cars in residential areas.” Gina emphasizes. Her fury is palpable. It’s liquid like molten iron seeping from her veins. “We’ve dropped a dozen cars in Ishval alone, and I haven’t even kept track of all of what we’ve sent to Eastern headquarters.”

“What would he gain by blowing Ishval up?” Rebecca asks.

“Power,” Opal replies. The look on her face is impassive. “It’s simple — if Jaeger wounds Eastern HQ then he’s wounded the military. And if he wounds Ishval then he’s sowing distrust, further wounding the military. He’s wanted them out of the home country since he first heard they’d be back.”

“But how will he even detonate these? There are, like, two alchemists here.” Rebecca says. Riza studies the arrays again, her mind wandering over possibilities, too many possibilities.

“We need to get into Jaeger’s office,” Riza says, “and find out more. All that we can.” Gina nods.

“He just finished ripping me a new one in his office for the thing in the car. Then he went storming out like the fiery bastard he is, and I swiped this little pile off his desk.”

“Can you get us back in?” Riza asks. “Do you have a key?”

Gina shakes her head. “No. But I got myself into your apartment, didn’t I?"

It is powerfully dark when Riza, Rebecca, and Gina tiptoe their way into Jaeger’s office. They have to use the few lights spreading out over the stone from underneath peoples’ doors to navigate their way. Riza doesn’t like to feel pride in her abilities, but it is clear that her eyes are a major advantage in this low light, and so she’s placed at the head of the gaggle — a duck and her ducklings. And her eyes do prove to be effective in the quiet, nearly black halls. She is able to see with frightening precision each movement behind each backlit door; shadows that appear in shadow; the minuscule glinting of light off a lost and forgotten cenz. Everything is a danger in this darkness, everything is a potential threat. Riza’s sharp sight snuffs it all out.

Riza is the lookout while Gina and Rebecca fuss over Jaeger’s locked door. The two of them make very little noise, and as Riza stares off into the blackness of the room of cars she’s reminded of entering her apartment less than a month ago and finding Gina there. She never would have imagined then that she would now be breaking into Jaeger’s office with Gina, a woman who’d thrust a knife deep into Riza’s thigh. The ghost of the wound still tugs at Riza every time she takes a step. But Gina has proven over and over, every day, that she could be trusted. Relied upon.

Eventually the door comes open and Riza is urged inside.

They elect to leave the lights off in case anyone happens by. Sometimes people will cross from one wing of the Flour to the other to retrieve forgotten tools or jackets or hats. Riza isn’t particularly interested in inviting any of these night owls’ suspicion, so she had brought a flashlight. She aims it at the wall and flicks it on. White light explodes over the Amestrian flag that hangs behind Jaeger’s desk — an ode to faked patriotism.

“The blueprints should go back first.” Rebecca whispers. Gina places them in a stack on Jaeger’s desk. “That’s where you found them?” Rebecca asks. “For real? Right there in the open? I thought they’d be hidden in a secrete compartment or something.”

Gina is busy rifling through the papers in a drawer. “Yeah,” she says. “He’s always got this door locked, and he’s arrogant. I guess he sees no reason to hide them in here.”

Riza props the flashlight light-up between two large paperweights — horses, one curling to the left and the other to the right — so that the ceiling is lit. Soft, diffuse light cascades down the walls. It’s just enough to see.

Rebecca takes to carefully rifling through the drawers of a bookshelf. She takes a document from a file, squints at it, and then replaces it, over and over. Riza moves about the room, hugging its edges, searching for something. She isn’t sure what yet, but she stands in front of the Amestrian flag and hopes that it’ll come to her. It’s dancing on the entryway to her mind, this little something. Playing with her.

And then, as though Riza has gleaned the answer from thin air, the corner of the flag curls to reveal something beneath. Riza takes the cloth between her fingers and pulls it up and back, gently, like she were lifting a blanket off a sleeping child.

“Son of a bitch,” Gina says.

Because there beneath the flag, is a map. Riza goes up on her toes to remove the flag fully from its place on the wall. It pools at her feet on the cold stone floor, revealing a detailed map of the east. Here is Eastern HQ, plotted right into the center of East City. And roughly six inches from there is Ishval, it’s outer edge rimmed with a jagged line dividing it from the desert. Amidst it all are red dots, thirteen in Ishval and seven in or near Eastern HQ: twenty.

“He’s got twenty of those explosive cars out there.” Gina breathes. She appears at Riza’s side, and her hand shoots out to take Riza’s shoulder. She squeezes as though she were holding onto it for support.

“This is a nightmare,” Rebecca says. “We have to figure out how he plans to detonate these things.”

Riza contemplates. On the one hand, they’re mostly powerless. Jaeger could have any of the three of them killed — and if he figures out who Riza is, or who Rebecca is, he could kill Havoc too. Riza’s stomach plummets at the thought. On the other hand, Riza has Ryder. Havoc has Breda. And information can be passed along if done discreetly. Riza turns to Rebecca.

“When are you heading out for transport next?”

“Two days,” Rebecca says. “Why?”

Riza finds a clean sheet of paper and a pen. She draws from her own memory a map of the east, just as it’s drawn on the one on the wall. She presses the paper against the wall parallel to the map and copies each of the twenty dots as precisely as she can. She commits the thing to memory when she’s finished, and then folds it into fours and hands it to Rebecca.

“Get this to Ryder or to Breda, I don’t care which. Ryder will be at the apartment complex on eighty-fifth and Grayson, room six-four-six.” Rebecca pockets the map and gives Riza a small, half-hearted salute.

“Yes, sir,” she says.

As the three of them prepare to leave, and Riza takes her flashlight from its place between the paperweights, her eye is caught. There’s something sticking out from a drawer stuffed full. She goes to retrieve it, smoothing it out over the desk top. Her gasp is soft but feels loud in the still night of the Flour.

CAPTAIN RIZA HAWKEYE MURDERED BY TERRORISTS

GENERAL ROY MUSTANG CITES LAPSE IN BRIGGS LEADERSHIP

It is a newspaper clipping, probably the one Jaeger had told Riza about the first time she’d met him. There is a picture of Roy among the rows of text. He is descending the outdoor steps at Central HQ, his greatcoat billowing out behind him. His face is sunken, he is alone, and he is so small against the backdrop of such a thing. 

Chapter Text

The Flour has a way about it that wrestles with Riza’s psyche. She feels like she’s staying in a haunted house and at any moment a ghost is going to flutter into view. Not that Riza believes in ghosts, but it’s the prospect of them that chills her. The Flour’s floors are made of cold, unforgiving rock and most of the walls bear the etchings of alchemy. To an untrained eye it all might seem like lackluster architecture, but to Riza it’s a statement. It’s a something bigger , built by someone who thinks they’re great but can’t seem to make the filling fit the mold.

Built by Jaeger.

No one else in the Flour seems as unsettled by it all as Riza. Not even Havoc or Rebecca. Maybe it’s because Riza is keenly aware of a rock-walled room in a hall not far from the infirmary. It’s blackened rock falls in on her every night as she sleeps, pressing and pressing until she startles awake, splatters of Reynolds’ blood decorating her vision like stars. Although sometimes Riza isn’t the only one being crushed by rock. She’s joined occasionally by Rebecca, Havoc, or Ryder, and — on particularly grotesque nights — Roy. It’s just an anxiety swirling around in her unconscious mind, perhaps. Probably. She hopes.

Two days of freedom is all Riza is given. She spends most of her time recovering her throat and that tender line of muscle across her back. They are healing okay, according to Opal, but the bruises over Riza’s neck are already beginning to yellow out like an old banana. She catches herself flinching in the mirror at the sight of them. She is so very tired of being blotched by wounds.

Rebecca has things to do where keeping the map hidden is concerned. She never leaves it in her and Riza’s room unattended, and so if ever she needs to attend a transport briefing or prep a car for an outing she stuffs the map inside her boot. Under the sole of her foot, she’d told Riza proudly, as though Riza could ever think of Rebecca as anything less than resourceful.

It’s on day one of Riza’s two-day recovery stint when Jaeger informs her that scouts will be dispatched on the same day as transport. Her chest skitters with excited energy, like electric currents inside a wire.

“I can take the map, Catherine,” Riza urges later that night. She is reluctant to let her friend risk her life now that there is a possibility of Riza taking the torch. Rebecca shakes her head, adamant.

“This is my job, Em, and it’ll be easier for me to slip away than it would be for you.”

Riza sets her glare but leaves it be. Rebecca is right, after all. Richard is coming with them on this excursion, even though he still breaks a sweat when he walks around the eerie halls of the Flour. Physical exertion is obviously hard for him at this juncture, and Riza delights in that fact. Yet Jaeger insists his scout leader chaperone. A loud, nagging voice in Riza’s mind tells her Jaeger is paranoid. He’s sending Richard as insurance, and Riza is why.

It always comes back to Riza.

She stands now at the Flour’s yawning mouth, its jaws pried apart by alchemists to let searing eastern sunlight in. Despite the warmth, the sun does nothing to lift the Flour’s sour atmosphere, and Riza is glad to be rid of it for an evening. She thinks the fresh air might do her some good, that the natural vitamins the sun provides could help her heal faster.

She is saddled with a weapon again, same as last time. She is efficient at checking its clip, and then quick to flick it into safety and put it in the holster at her hip. The holster wasn’t her idea, but Richard’s. He’d told the entire unit that he expected them to carry and carry close because the military was encroaching on Ishval, closer than ever since the war.

“The place is teeming with ‘em,” Richard had said. His voice was brusque, and he kept shifting the hem of his pants down and out of the way of his still-healing knife wound. “They’re like fucking rats come to feast on a carcass.”

Gina idles next to Riza, her hand hovering over a table of pistols. The bright sunlight glances off Gina’s impossibly black hair, creating hues of blue over its silky surface. One of her dark brown eyes catches the light and turns into chocolate, and then it sweeps over to Riza.

“Admiring me, are you?” Gina says, playful. It’s impossible that two of them could become friends but they did, somehow. Riza throws a penetrating smirk.

“You have such pretty eyes,” she coos, and then relishes in Gina’s chuckle.

There are still so many things Riza doesn’t know about Gina. The most pressing being how Gina ended up at the Flour in the first place. Riza can reconcile the Flour with the Gina she saw in her apartment, the apparition that threw knives and sat heavily on Riza’s chest, but she can’t with the Gina who flirts. She assumes it has something to do with Jaeger, and something to do with Opal who has something to do with Jaeger, but the matter doesn’t weigh on Riza’s shoulders much. Mostly it’s an errant thought here and there about what Opal and Gina need Riza for, but even then it doesn’t get much screen time in the workings of Riza’s mind.

“Help me pick a gun, will ya?” Gina says. Riza chooses an automatic pistol for her. “This thing looks terrifying, Em.” Gina holds it between two fingers and sticks out her tongue, clearly unimpressed.

“It’s relatively easy to use,” Riza says. “I’m sure you’ll have no real need for it anyway. Take it to pacify Richard.”

“Speaking of Richard,” Gina says as she places the pistol in her holster, “he’s had his eyes on you all afternoon.”

Riza knows it. She’s felt his gazed dripping down the back of her neck for hours. Whether it’s calculative or hateful or something else, she doesn’t know. “Yes, well,” she says, “it’s likely that he’s still upset over being stabbed.”

“Ah,” Gina says, and turns to face Riza. The full of her face becomes engulfed in sunlight. “Are you also still upset about being stabbed? The two of you might be able to bond over a support group, you know.”

“I’m warming up to my stabber, so I can’t say Richard and I are on the same level in this matter.”

“Ha!” Gina barks a laugh. And though her voice is as calm as a spring day, her eyes are cautious. “Be careful, okay? I’ll cover you as well as I can but if he decides to enact some kind of revenge on you out there… Keep your guard up.”

“My guard is always up, Gina.”

“Okay then keep it more up than usual.”

Riza edges toward being offended, and then lets it ebb away.

Rebecca joins them at the table of guns then. She looks between the two of them, both a bit tense, the smooth scape of her forehead wrinkling a little. Riza answers her silent, Everything all right? by letting all the air leave her body. The sigh drags her shoulders down.

“Transport getting ready to leave?” Riza asks. She pretends to busy herself with the guns even though she has one of her own already.

“We’re finishing up with the loads now,” Rebecca says. She traces the lines in the pistol grip of an old Browning. Her back is arched like a bowed bridge as she bends low over the table. “I’m going to Breda,” she says, whispering down to the table. “I think he can get the information to your boy quicker than Ryder can.”

Your boy . Riza’s suppresses a snort.

Rebecca reaches over and squeezes Riza’s hand. “Be safe,” she says. Though Riza is Rebecca’s superior officer, the words sound like an order.

“No more getting strangled, Catherine, I promise.” Rebecca only stares hard for a moment, and then releases her friend.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Gina says, “what the deal is between the two of you. You guys share a bed — yeah, I’ve noticed — and never stop giving each other, y’know, the eyes.” She wiggles her eyebrows suggestively.

Riza is not quick enough to respond, and so Rebecca chimes, “Let’s just say I know Emilia more intimately than most. We were both young… sexually active adults who shared a dorm once.”

The palm of Riza’s non-automail hand connects with her face. Heat crawls up her neck all the way to the tops of her ears. After a moment of quiet embarrassment, she looks up to find Gina’s mouth has widened into an open-mouthed smile.

“Catherine!” Riza chastises. She swats at her friend with the back of her hand, but Rebecca sidesteps the blow and leaves for transport, blowing kisses at Riza the whole way.

“Holy shit,” Gina breathes, the infuriating smile still plastered to her face, “you were admiring me!”

Riza groans.

“I can’t wait to tell Opal. This might just convince her to like you, you know.”

Leaving the Flour as a scout means partaking in a scout’s ritual. Those who never left the disarming embrace of the Flour — the cooks and the janitors and the engineers — took turns sharing sacks of food, tools, water canteens with their scouts. Therefore, Riza finds herself enduring attention for longer than she deems reasonably appropriate within a span of one to five minutes. A young man brings her an extra clip of bullets; a woman hands off her comb; a scrawny cook hands her two loaves of bread. Riza is unprepared for all the petting, for the lavishness, and so she becomes overwhelmed. She climbs into the bed of a rusted black truck and watches with uncertainty, and a smidge of disgust, as a wave of people shout their agreement at her. She and her party are leaving in the shadow of sunset to steal food from people, and the Flour is unapologetically enraptured by it. Riza crinkles her nose as though she’s smelled something foul.

And then, over the bobbing heads of young and old, she sees Jaeger. He is not cheering, and he is not glad. He leans against a wall and watches. Observes. His arms are folded tight to his chest. Riza is relieved when the truck roars to life and she loses sight of him, his lean body disappearing as the Flour does. She sits herself against the side of the truck bed. It is only her and Opal and Gina who aren’t in the truck’s cab, where Havoc, Richard, and Maximus are. Willard and Gordon went ahead of them, sometime before noon, to glean what they can from the area they were all meant to meet at.

“I don’t remember leaving being such a chore last time,” Riza says as the truck pulls away from farther from the looming presence of the Flour.

“That’s because you were so wound up from the Richard thing that you gave everyone the cold shoulder. No one wanted near you.” Gina says. She’s leaning out over the bed, her ponytail flying wildly in the wind. Her eyes are closed and she seems, for a minute, to be drenched in calm.

Riza will be the first to admit that her fight with Richard had been unnerving, to say the least. She will never forget the feeling of his blood pumping into her hands in time with his heart, and the way his body had jerked when she plunged the knife into his abdomen. She had told Roy once that she liked guns because she didn’t have to feel her victims die, and she meant it. Whether she loathed Richard or not made no difference — Riza’s hands were not meant for that kind of killing. She was meant to take life from a distance, with precision. Like a sniper. Like a hawk.

Though Roy would argue she wasn’t meant for any of it at all.

This time the scouts are on their way to a warehouse district in the desert. It’s on Ishval’s outer ring, not necessarily in the city but close by. Riza visited there once when she and Roy were overseeing its construction just over a year ago. The place was dry and full of rocks and sand, but Riza remembers the officers setting a tent for her at sunset. She’d looked to Roy standing over the crest of a small, sandy hill. The sun was sinking in front of him, so his body was a black silhouette, but everything else around him was fire. Sun. Heat. It’s like he was commanding the element without ever having to life a hand — without the death and the destruction — and Riza had thought that that was all he was ever truly meant to do. But her father had sank his claws into the both of them, and that night when Riza was alone in her tent, the wind assaulting it from the outside, she saw Roy’s image a different way. She saw the living flame lapping at the sky.

Even still, the warehouse district is a far cry from the Flour. Where one was clunky metal and rock, the other was neatly arranged buildings and quiet, still air. Riza had woken the next morning to a breathtaking sunrise, unobscured by anything but the rocks nature placed in its path.

Willard and Gordon are there when they arrive. They’d ditched their car somewhere in the city and snuck into the warehouses on foot. Even in the darkness Riza can see that everything is vastly different from when she’d last seen it. There is pavement instead of coarse earth, and the buildings were lined like tightly-packed houses in a suffocating neighborhood.

“Cozy,” Gina comments. It’s been abandoned for the evening, all the warehouse doors are sporting heavy duty locks and chains. Each building is white and square with a blue roof, which looks navy in the moonlight. Riza half expects to open one of the doors and find prisoners inside instead of carts of water and canned food.

“Come back soon, Max,” Richard says, tapping the truck’s driver side door with his knuckles. “This won’t take more than thirty minutes, so count your seconds carefully.”

Richard has elected to keep Opal near him, though usually she was stationed somewhere far off and out of potential harm’s way. Riza thinks he might be anxious about his own lame condition and want his medic close at hand in case he starts to feel iffy, but Gina is less convinced. She stashes Opal behind a stack of empty crates like she’s a child and they’re playing a game, but the worry in her voice is so potent that neither Opal nor Riza try to sway her.

Maximus leaves with the truck. He will take it three miles away, park it out of sight — which won’t be hard, because it’s black — and count to thirty minutes. At thirty minutes, or eighteen hundred seconds, Maximus will head back for extraction. The goal is to have intercepted and stolen a crate or two of goods, ransacking the others but leaving their contents behind in the dust and sand. It’s a simple crime, but perhaps Richard isn’t up for much else yet. He still walks with a slight limp.

“When’s the stuff getting here?” Havoc asks Richard as he watches the truck vanish into the dark. He seems uneasy, it’s plain to see even in the diluted light of the moon. Riza wants to pat his shoulder, but refrains.

Richard’s face is impassive, his mouth drawn thin, long across his face. His eyes are deep set into purplish sockets, tired and far away. At his hip is a pistol. He fiddles with the holster’s clasp, unlatching and latching again, tick tick tick. “Be patient, Marsh.” He says, but his tone belies any patience of his own. “Hang tight.”

“How can they know to give Maximus thirty minutes? I know these shipments can be timed, but I don’t see anyone here to even receive one.” Havoc says. He falls back to join Gina and Riza as they walk through the row of buildings, following a good dozen feet behind Richard, Willard, and Gordon. Riza’s stomach lurches and falls, lurches and falls — like she’s dangling from an elastic cable. This mission is full of stink, and her instincts are highly attuned to it. Gina gets more antsy the farther they pull away from Opal.

“I don’t like this,” she says. “I don’t know what Richard’s game is, but I doubt it has anything to do with intercepting goods from Amestris.”

“This whole place is full of our stuff though, isn’t it?” Havoc says, his voice dipping low. The only sounds of the night are their light footfalls and the rustling of the wind as it forces its way between buildings. “Even if we take from one of these warehouses, we’re still just intercepting. Right?”

Wrong. Very, very wrong. Riza stills her steps. Ahead of her, Willard and Gordon are rolling barrels out into the open. Riza, having spent her whole life surrounded by things that can catch on fire, including her own back, tastes bile. “Wrong,” she says out loud this time, and takes one, two, three steps back. “That’s gasoline.”

Gina hisses through clenched teeth. “That it is,” she says.

What are they doing with gasoline? This isn’t an interception, this isn’t even an extraction or vandalism or pipes bursting or crates being smashed. This is destruction, as pure and severe as the bombs etched into Jaeger’s cars. Riza has a sudden, wild thought about Rebecca, her safety, the map, her mission, transport, and she has to forcibly still her breathing. After a beat, she says, “They’re going to burn the warehouse district down. They’re going to burn the blankets, the seeds, the food, the water — everything.”

“Their first act of war on the military,” Gina breathes. Her country, her home, war-torn again. She closes her eyes.

“What do we do?” Havoc says, and he looks to Riza for guidance. She is, after all, his superior — his commander. Undercover, bruised, beaten, but still Captain Riza Hawkeye. And she has no answer for him.

“Officers patrol near here,” Riza says carefully, “even if not always inside the district. Willard and Gordon have two, no — three barrels of gasoline. Even if I were to shoot a hole in one, or all three, they could still be used to light the concrete and the fire would travel. But,” she goes on, her fingers slipping into the holster at her hip, “there are alarms on the outside of some of the buildings. They’re designed to keep guards safe when working out here alone, and to call attention to the entire district if someone were to be wounded during work. They’re loud. I could hit one.”

“No,” Havoc says, but reels it in. His teeth snap together cleanly as he cuts the rest of his insubordinate sentence off. Then he recovers, and says, “You wouldn’t just alert the nearby patrols, Emilia, but Richard too. It’s not safe.”

None of this is safe , Riza wants to wail, none of this is safe!

“I will not let this happen. Fire cannot ruin this country anymore than it already has.”

Gina touches Riza’s forearm. Her fingers are cold, even through Riza’s long sleeve. Several yards in front of them, Willard pops the cap off a barrel of rancid gasoline. “I don’t like it,” Gina says, “and I think Ishval can take this hit, Em. I really do.”

But Willard and Gordon whoop and holler as loud as they can without the sound reverberating against the walls of the buildings, and Riza’s fear falls away to become something else. Resolution. Or stubbornness, and if she asked Roy, he’d bet on the latter. The two men are far ahead of them now, having rolled the barrels up to the door of the main office where paperwork is done and people mill about during the day, overseeing their warehouses of stuff. Dead center above the door is a round, red alarm. If Riza can hit it, break it, it’ll shatter the late time quiet of the night. Possibly it’ll even reach the outer ring of the city, rousing the soldiers that lived there. Riza removes her weapon.

“Hide,” she says. Havoc acts as though he’s going to protest, and then Riza tells him, “That’s an order.” He relents, deflating, and moves to wait behind the wall of a building to Riza’s left. Gina stays put.

“You’re not my master, Emilia.” She says. “I think this is stupid.”

For one terrifying moment, Riza wonders if her loyalty to Ishval is just as self-destructive as her loyalty to Roy. She finds that she doesn’t care.

“If you get caught up in this, Gina, it’ll mean bad things for Opal.” Riza says, trying to play to Gina’s weakness. It’s dirty, she knows, but it’s also effective.

Gina’s face darkens. “Are you at least going to hide?” she asks, and that’s when Riza knows she’s won.

“After I shoot,” she says. “I need to be able to see the security lights over the alarm to set it off, but once it’s hit, I’ll duck away.” She needs to do it fast, too, because Willard just tipped a barrel.

“What’s your story once the gun goes off? How will you explain this away, Emilia?” There is genuine concern in Gina’s tone — and frustration.

“I thought I heard something and when I drew my weapon, it went off in my hand.”

Gina is made of anger, but she backs away. She retreats behind the wall to the building on Riza’s right.

Finally Riza is left alone to do this one, tiny thing; this one easy task. True, she’s undercover, and her job is not to interfere with the Flour’s or Jaeger’s or even Richard’s movements. But she is also fighting tooth and nail, every day, at Central, in Congress, at the Flour, for Ishval’s reconstruction. She cannot let Jaeger plant the seeds that will sprout into further distrust, and she knows his choice of fire is a deliberate one. It’s meant to bring pain to the surface of Ishvalan minds.

Riza will be vulnerable right after she fires her weapon, because there’s a chance that Gordon or Willard will look her way toward the sound of the gunshot, so she hugs the wall to her left, near the corner. She can feel the heat of Havoc there, right on her heels. She’ll spin away once she fires, and run off in a different direction. Even if someone suspects a thing, they won’t be able to prove it.

Riza has the alarm in her sights, and the weight of the gun in her hand is familiar, it steadies her nerves. She closes her eyes hard and then opens them again, and watches the alarm and then Willard, and then Gordon. Her breath staggers into her throat and then stops, painfully, beneath the ugly yellow bruise.

Where is Richard?

She thinks it, and then she sees him. He’s poised at the mouth to his own gap between alleys, one hand on the wall to keep himself upright, and the other wrapped usefully around his pistol. He’s the ghost Riza keeps waiting for, the thing that haunts her in the Flour’s halls. Riza thinks hopes prays wishes that when she hears the gun go off, it’s hers. But no matter how hard she tries to remember the feel of the gun kicking in her hand, she can’t recall it. She never even took the safety off.

She touches the place on her shirt that feels the wettest, that burns the worst. Her automail hand comes away glistening, and she tastes the coppery tang of blood the instant her eyes see it on her metal fingers. Her gun clatters to the ground, and then she begins to slide, and sway, her breaths already shallow, so shallow. Havoc pulls her into his chest just before she loses herself and completely falls to the concrete. He settles with her on the pavement, patting her face and touching her ribs and screaming , my God, why is he screaming so loud?

“Opal!” He yells into the darkness, to the stars, the moon. “Gina!”

Riza is looking at Havoc from under water. His face blurs and shifts, like something were rippling over it. Is she drowning? There is water in her lungs. It makes her need to cough, and so she does, and sprays Havoc’s face with blood. “Fuck!” He says, and doesn’t wipe the specks from his face. The blood dusts his nose like freckles.

Riza is being turned on her side now, and she hears Opal’s voice. It is not at all like the trained lilt of a doctor, and Riza finds that funny. How odd that a doctor would sound so unlike a doctor. Her words are fraying as she speaks, stuttering out from between her teeth. Riza can see the letters bounce around in her vision before she hears the words, which come through a thick layer of fog.

“He’s pierced her lung,” Opal says in that not-doctor voice of hers. “Marsh, hold her down. I need her still.”

Someone places fabric in Riza’s mouth and she groans, though she doesn’t do it for long because blood is leaking steadily from the hill of her tongue to drip to the white concrete below. It’s such a strange sensation, like dragging slugs over her tongue.

“He won’t survive losing her twice,” Havoc pants above her. He’s speaking into her hair, his mouth moving against her hairline. His arms are tight around her. “We won’t survive this twice.”

“Marsh, I need you to keep it together right now.” Opal is a doctor again, if only briefly.

Riza opens watery eyes to see Gina crouching beside her. She gently pushes Riza’s fringe away from her face and then her hand disappears. Riza wants to tell them how hard it is to breathe, how each breath bubbles in her lungs and burns, please, it burns .

Something is shunted between Riza’s ribs and the cloth is removed from her mouth so she can gasp, only the gasp is accompanied by gurgled blood and a sharp, searing pain. Riza sees black dots. They eat up her vision the longer her heart pumps the pain into and out of its chambers. In, out, in, out. Pain pain pain pain pa—

“Emilia!”

He won’t survive losing her twice.

A different voice. “Hang on, Emilia.”

He won’t survive—

Begging, pleading. “EMILIA!”

—twice.

“Riza.”

The pain is far too much.

It is not only Breda in the old train yard.

Someone Rebecca doesn’t recognize waves a small hello at her as she approaches. The light cuts lines over his face as it falls through the chain-linked fence, making him look fractured. “Lieutenant Catalina,” the stranger says in greeting, “it’s nice to meet you. I’m Lieutenant Ryder.” He holds a lean hand out to her and she takes it, shaking it once. Breda shrugs his shoulders at her from the shadows.

“Riza — er, Captain Hawkeye said you’d be at some apartment.” Rebecca says.

“Things have changed.” His brows come together as he says this, and Rebecca gets the feeling that Ryder isn’t partial to the change, whatever it may be. “I’ve been reassigned to work for General Mustang.”

Rebecca might snort, she’s having that hard a time keeping her laughter contained.

“Listen, ‘Becca,” Breda says, his patience wearing. She can hear his exhaustion in his voice, like the groaning of old pipes, “I’m sure you came here for something, and I’ve been awake for two days, so spit it out.”

Rebecca hands him the map after fishing it out of the bottom of her boot. He wrinkles his nose as he unfolds it. “What’s this?” he asks, squinting. He holds it up so it catches a bit of light and Ryder — a head taller than good ‘ole Breda — peers at it from over Lieutenant Breda’s shoulder.

“Are those dots?” he asks.

“Duh,” Rebecca quips.

“This is Captain Hawkeye’s handwriting.” Breda muses, and for a moment his eyes go glassy with something — memory, probably. He’s been working with Riza for so long, Rebecca isn’t surprised that he’d know her words even on paper. “Where is she? Why did you bring this to us and not her?”

“Things have been tense at the Flour. I think it’s got Ri a little spooked.” Rebecca admits.

“Spooked?” Breda tilts his head, questioning. “I’ve never known the captain to be spooked by people.” But Ryder’s head dips and he stares down at the dirt over his boots. Rebecca thinks the young lieutenant might know something, but there were bigger, more pressing matters to dive into.

“Breda, Ryder,” Rebecca starts, “there’s something you need to know about that map.”

Chapter Text

Ed is starting to miss his children.

The days begin to bleed into one another like water on paper. Ed goes to bed early most nights, having nothing to do in the evenings to fill his time, no baths to give or plates of food to dole out. He spends the mornings chopping firewood or helping Winry set her automail appointments for the week. The afternoons are eaten up by odd jobs in town. Sometimes Ed teaches math or science to the elementary kids when their teacher wants a break, and while the curriculum is by far and large nothing to gawk at, he finds that he enjoys stringing equations along on a chalkboard far more than nailing shingles to his roof.

Ed writes letters to Xing daily. Most of them don’t make it to the post, but his favorites do. He once sent a picture of Winry in a letter where all he’d written was, Your mom is mean to me. He’d hoped his son would laugh at that.

He knows that Mei is family. He knows that his children are with Pinako in a beautifully rich country, surrounded by Xingese palace guards and the lush green of Xingese land. They sleep in a bed made to fit five, their tiny golden heads sinking into feather pillows encased by silk. Pinako sends letters so they arrive every couple days with updates, and occasionally pictures too. Ed has one of his daughter that he keeps in his back pocket. She’s wearing traditional Xingese dress and holding a sparkler in her hand, her eyes dancing with colors, her face lit brighter than the sun. He stares at that picture sometimes, his heart aching a little.

Ed thinks he would feel better if Al could return to Xing, but he refuses. And Ed doesn’t really blame him or bother him about it. He feels the swell of tension rising in the east like a tide, and each day it gets worse. The military is troubled by what’s happening beyond East City, in Ishval. They’re on high alert after the supposed death of the famed Riza Hawkeye. Ed spies their cars in Resembool, pockmarked on roadsides or stationed outside random shops and near the train station. Nothing like what’s happened in Ishval lately has happened out in Resembool, but military police are clearly out here to protect something. Ed wonders idly what that may be, what kind of threat has been made.

As much as he dreams of having his children home, he doesn’t feel comfortable asking them to cross the desert now.

Winry fares better, he thinks. She runs Rockbell Automail on her own right now. Initial interviews and evaluations are held in Ed’s parlor, in two hefty teal chairs he reupholstered for his wife on his own. Surgeries are scheduled tentatively for some time in the near future, usually months away to allow for Pinako’s return. Winry is always working, always hunched over her desk in the nook in the living room. Her lamplight beams are harsh on Ed’s eyes every night as he sprawls across the couch to read, strangely wishing there were toys he needed to pick up or crumbs to be dusted off the cushions. But everything is pristine now, clean. Organized. He heaves a loud, pitiful sigh.

“You could blow a tree down with all that air, Ed.” Winry says. He hears the unmistakable clinking of her screwdriver against steel, and he knows she’s put her tools down. He doesn’t need to look away from his book to sense her near him, her fingers moving his bangs out of his face. “What’s going on with you? You’ve been moping around for weeks.”

“I don’t have a fancy job to keep me entertained, Win.” He says, trying to sound less like a pouting toddler and more like a grown man. Winry laughs. The sound is airy and warm, and everything Ed needs right now. He lets his book rest on his stomach and reaches back behind him for Winry’s hands. He pulls her down when he has them, and kisses her forehead.

“For a guy who hates to sit still you sure have taken to the stay-at-home-dad role pretty well.”

“You’re nuts if you think being a dad for a living is sitting still. ”

Winry chuckles again, her hot breath ghosting over Ed’s face. He brackets her face in his hands and kisses her square on the mouth, and just as he’s about to suggest they head upstairs, the phone rings. The shrill sound pierces the quiet, still house and he thinks he would almost prefer to let it keep going if only to invite a little bit of chaos back into his life. Al drifts down the stairs, though, and says, “Could one of you get that? I’m trying to read.”

Winry leaves Ed to go to the phone. “Rockbell-Elric residence,” she says. Ed can see her cocked hip in his mind’s eye, her finger twirling in the phone’s cable. Yeah, he’d suggest they go upstairs.

“Lieutenant Breda?”

Ed jolts upright. He springs off the couch and hovers in the doorway to the kitchen, his hand outstretched to receive the phone from Winry.

“Yeah, he’s right here.” She hands it over. It’s heavy in his hand.

“Breda?” Ed practically pants into the receiver. It’s been weeks and they’ve heard nothing. Ed had taken that as a good sign, but now that he’s got Breda on the phone his chest in swirling with fear.

“Hey, Chief,” Breda says, tone light but strained, “We’ve got a situation. Is Al still with you?”

Ed nods and then remembers he has to speak so he says, “Yeah, he is.”

“Good, at least something will go our way.” Now Breda’s voice falters. It stutters over something dangerous, deadly. Disastrous. Something he doesn’t want to know but will find out about anyway.

“What’s going on?” The words seem to come from him slowly, like he’s pulling them out of syrup. Breda’s voice pinches.

“They’ve got bombs, Ed,” he says, and that isn’t the worst of it, “and they’ve shot Riza.”

There was a time when Breda thought he would be prepared for anything. Homunculi? Okay, got it, let’s roll with the punches. It is what it is. Being reassigned? All right, he’s got the brain to handle that, the strategic prowess to understand how to survive it. The Promised Day? It was a chance to test Breda’s own version of Roy’s smooth talk, of his schooled demeanor. He’d gotten his team out of the day alive, so he was inclined to believe he’d done a good job.

But Riza Hawkeye dying? Breda’s whole being had fumbled over that one. His brilliant mind went blank, lost oxygen, crinkled into nothing. The world — the team — without Riza became something like a desert, cracked and broken, fractured without the reprieve of a cloudless and blue sky. Everything tasted like dirt; the office became a prison, home to the last remnants of her perfume; Roy’s eyes, which had once been able to light up under the influence of the sun, were now chronically black, fathomless pools of grief.

This is why Breda put his life on the line now, in Ishval. Why he’d agreed months ago to lend his general what strength he had and lay low underneath the unforgiving Ishval sun, out in an abandoned train yard. Hope that Riza Hawkeye might not be dead wasn’t something Breda much held on, not until he saw her wandering about in a crowd weeks ago, her hair changed but her soft, red-brown eyes still the same. It was hope that brought the tiniest, most minuscule stars of light back into Roy’s eyes, and Breda would have rather died than be the one to snuff them out.

Now — she’s alive . The thought comes to him unbidden every so often, like a gentle reminder. He’ll be standing under the shadow of a train and a hot breeze will run through his thin red hair and it’ll tell him once again — she’s alive .

Roy had seen her. Maria had seen her. There could be no doubt, and so Breda lets himself breathe again, for the first time in months. Really breathe gulps of hot, dry air, his chest and stomach heaving outward with each breath. It feels good to be living in the same world as Riza Hawkeye again, like a piece of him has been returned. Stars aligning and all that jazz.

…Except they don’t, and Breda should have known better than to breathe.

Rebecca’s mouth falls into a frown the moment she sees Havoc, his dark clothes glinting with wet in the light of the security lights. Breda can smell the iron of blood from here, it knots his stomach.

“Marsh?” Rebecca tries carefully, like she’s only just testing the name for the first time. Havoc shakes his head, his face caked in sand, streaked with tears. Above the black line of his collar is a fine spattering of blood, and as he comes closer Breda can see blood on his chin, dusting his nose, his lips, his eyelids. Breda is hit by a wave of nausea, and he has to steady himself on the side of the train. “Jean,” Rebecca amends, and he stumbles into her. She takes his face between her hands, her eyes already welling with tears. “What happened?” she pleads, her voice breaking, “Oh, God, Jean,” she touches his chest and her hand comes away bloody, “what happened?”

Havoc swallows hard a couple of times before he speaks, and when he does his voice is a low rasp, “Richard shot her,” he says. Breda doesn’t know who Richard is, he only knows the her . Her severe eyes, her blonde hair, the way her lips turned up into an almost smile when he’d say something witty. His legs wobble and Ryder has to lift him up by the arm.

“He—” Rebecca starts but has to pause to gather her courage, “he shot her? Is she— Why?”

Havoc must have run so far, so long to reach them in the time he did. Sweat mingles with tears over his skin, mixing to muddy the sand on his cheeks. He sobs once, quiet and hoarse, and says, “They know.”

Havoc has loved Riza Hawkeye all his life, it feels like. He tries to remember a time before Riza, but somehow she manages to worm her way into every piece of scenery, in every spoken word his mind can conjure. She has that same eastern tilt to her voice that he does, though she masks hers most of the time. But it appears on those rare occasions when it’s just her and him at the shooting range, bumping elbows into one another. He would tell her a joke that normally wouldn’t make her laugh, but she’d chuckle under the cream colored tents, diffuse sunlight filtering down onto her face.

He slams his eyes shut and tries to see her face now, lit up by the sun. Her hair gold and white at the same time. Instead he sees her lifeless eyes, glazed and rimmed by tears. One slips through and cuts a line over the blood trailing down her chin.

Rebecca grips his shoulder hard, her nails digging uncomfortably into his flesh. He barely notices. He can’t feel anything but the weight of Riza in his arms, on his lap, her blood pooling in his hands. She felt so hot, like she could sear through his skin and burn him.

Somewhere in the back of Havoc’s mind, he realizes Rebecca is sobbing. She’s trying her best to cover the noise with the back of her hand over her mouth. It doesn’t work, and Havoc instinctively places a hand at the back of her head and pulls her close. She cries into his bloodied shirt.

Breda is at a loss for words, his head caught in his hands. Ryder lets him slide down the side of the train until he’s made a nest for himself on the ground. Havoc is looking at everything through watery eyes. He can’t manage to force anything into focus, and he can’t manage to cry anymore either. A part of him wants to sink into the earth and never come back up, and another part of him wants to turn around and rip Richard’s head right off his shoulders.

Then there is another, more terrified part of him, that thinks of Roy.

“They know,” Ryder says, and he sounds dangerously calm, “that Emilia is Riza Hawkeye?”

“Yeah,” Havoc says.

There is a silent, unanswered question hanging limp in the air. Havoc isn’t sure he wants to answer and so he doesn’t bring it up. He waits for minutes that drag and drag until someone else gathers their bearings long enough to pry, and he isn’t surprised when it’s Breda.

“Is she dead?” Breda says, his eyes no longer on the graveled ground. He looks at Havoc with a clear, bright gaze. No tears.

“She was alive when I left,” Havoc says.

“And why’d you leave?” Ryder asks. His voice is tinged with something ugly, and Havoc elects to ignore it.

“They would have killed me,” Havoc says. “Or worse — they would have used me against the general, or Riza.”

He remembers Gina’s words. Get the fuck out of here before I shoot you myself, Marsh. Don’t be a fool.

Breda stands. He has to work hard to get up onto steady knees. He uses the side of the train to anchor himself when he’s up, and leans his head back against it. Havoc has never seen Breda so lost before. He has a sudden urge to rush his longtime friend, to pull him in cry into the crook of his neck. But then Breda turns his eyes on him, and they’re sharp, not dulled by pain.

“She wasn’t dead when you left,” Breda huffs, “which means she’s fighting. She knows not to die, Jean. She knows.”

Havoc’s thoughts drift again to the general. He won’t survive losing her twice. Was he right to have said that? Wrong? He was speaking from his heart, from his deepest fears, but as he ran from Riza while she bled out in the warehouse district he agonized over whether she’d die with that sentence beating around in her skull…or whether she’d live because of it.

“We need the chief,” Breda says. He’s speaking evenly with his strategic mind, the cogs running wild in his brain.

Havoc hasn’t seen or spoken to Edward Elric in years yet he knows Breda’s right.

“We need Al too. We gotta have an alchemist to stop the bombs, and there’s no guarantee General Mustang’s gonna be fit to do much after we tell him.”

Havoc is near tears again. Thinking about the general — about Roy — makes his soul hurt. Havoc loves Riza Hawkeye, but the general is a part of her as much as she is a part of him. There can never be any dividing of the two, and when one is cut loose the other withers slowly. Havoc starts to shake until Rebecca’s arms form a firm circle around his abdomen, keeping him upright.

“We’re gonna need Ed for that,” Breda says.

Ryder crinkles his nose and looks from Breda to Havoc. “We’re gonna need him for what?”

“We’re gonna need him to keep the general from blazing a line of fire through this whole region.”

Roy feels off, somehow.

It’s like the earth has tilted beneath him and he’s seeing everything at a slant. Lieutenant Ross says it’s exhaustion, that he should sleep, lay off the coffee, but Roy knows it’s more than that. The little threads of muscles that keep his heart together are coming apart, fraying like something’s willing them to break.

It’s dread, he realizes.

He had phoned General Grumman the night he found Riza in Ishval. He’d had to wrestle with the operator to push his call through in the dead of night, but after a handful of heated minutes he’d won his battle and had Grumman mumbling into the receiver, his voice still dripping with sleep.

“I found her, Grumman,” he’d said. No honorifics. This was a conversation between Riza’s grandfather and her dearest friend. Roy’s hands pulsed where he’d torn them apart on the shovel at Riza’s grave just nights before. It didn’t bother him. They served as a reminder of Grumman’s betrayal, and blatant neglect. “I met Jaeger too.”

Roy heard the rustling of sheets and then Grumman cleared his throat. “What have you done, boy?” he said.

What have I done ? Roy leans back in his chair and spins around until he’s looking out at the lights of East City. He twirls his pen in his hand and, despite being unable to bring Riza home, he smiles. What he’s done is find his adjutant, and what she’s done is give Roy valuable information.

He had Jaeger’s real name — Jian Miller — and he had Jaeger’s entire life splayed out before him. Resting on paperwork he ought to be filing for Ishval lay half a dozen photographs of Jian and pieces of paper with his every move on them. Born in Ishval, lived between there and Xing, has a sister named Guo; there was a brief time where Jian served in the Amestrian military after flunking out of university, and that tidbit on its own is enough for Roy to launch an internal investigation. He wants to find the soldiers responsible for supplying Jian with information, and possibly much more.

What have I done? Roy thinks, returning to a photo of Jian’s smiling face, his teeth white in the grainy shades of grey. He has the same eyes as Roy, dark and almond-shaped, but his cheeks are more pronounced, his nose a bit sharper. Jian looked fierce even as an academy boy.

Roy is stuck somewhere between wanting to burn the picture or rip it up. He settles for neither, though, not yet.

There is a knock on his door and he starts. “Come in,” he says, shuffling papers around on his desk until all of Jian’s faces are hidden.

Roy expects to see Ross coming to beg him to sleep again and he prepares his usual retort, but words fall from his tongue when Edward Elric walks into the room, Havoc in tow.

Havoc.

Oh no, no, no.

He’s showered, Roy can tell that much. Rivulets of water drip from his short hair to stain his white undershirt. He’s wearing his military issued slacks, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of them. His shoulders are hunched like he’s trying to fold into himself, and his eyes are bloodshot, shiny. Roy stands and is hit by the feeling again, by the dread. It threatens to knock him against the window, send him plummeting down three stories.

Ed, while grown now, still studies the toes of his boots like a boy. He, too, is wearing slacks, though his are a dull brown. His hair’s gotten longer since Roy saw him last, and that ridiculous scruff over his chin and his upper lip has been cleared away. Ed opens his mouth and then closes it again, his eyes skittering between Roy and Havoc. There’s a quiver in Ed’s lip.

Maria Ross presses herself into the room behind them.

“Sir—” she begins, then stops. She closes the heavy double doors and Roy glimpses a familiar head of red on the other side, waiting by her desk.

“What is this?” Roy says. “What the hell is Ed doing here? Havoc, you— What is this, Ross?”

No one says anything, clearly unable to speak — or unwilling.

The world slants just a bit more as Roy’s heart rate speeds up, up, up. Havoc isn’t supposed to be here. Havoc is supposed to be at the Flour, watching Riza’s back. Havoc isn’t supposed to look so destroyed, his mouth isn’t supposed to twist like that, he’s not supposed to be here, Why is he here?

Roy can choose confusion, or he can choose anger. Somehow anger seems easiest.

“Why did you leave your post, Lieutenant Havoc. I’m not asking, that’s an order.”

Havoc filters a breath in through his teeth but Ross comes to his rescue before he can say anything.

“Captain Riza Hawkeye’s been shot, sir,” she says, with all the tact she can.

Now Havoc says, “She was alive when I left her, sir,” the words come out fast, like he’d practiced saying them so many times that they were now second nature.

Roy is clear-headed enough to understand why Havoc’s here now. His cover has been blown, Riza’s cover has been blown. But still Roy crosses the distance between himself and his first lieutenant, a hand reaching out to take Havoc’s collar in his fist. “You left her?” he snarls, and then his arm is falling, stiffly, to his side.

“Don’t blame Lieutenant Havoc, General.” Ed’s voice bites through the anger that starts to muddy Roy’s mind. He whirls on the boy, his eyes tipping downward out of habit but having to re-adjust themselves to land on Ed’s face, which sits eye level with his own.

“Shot how?” Roy says, still looking at Ed. When Havoc doesn’t answer right away he raises his voice, “Shot how, Lieutenant Havoc!”

There is no fear in Havoc’s voice, just dread. That same dread that has slowly curled its way up Roy’s body like Pride’s tendrils. “A man named Richard shot her as she tried to stop him and Jaeger’s men from setting fire to the warehouse district, sir. The doctor on site said he punctured one of her lungs.”

This is news to Ed — his face flashes with misery and then rights itself again.

Roy has seen soldiers with punctured lungs, blood spilling from their mouths. His thoughts take him some place dark, forbidden: the tunnels under Central, blood seeping through Riza’s fingers, congealing on the floor. Is that why Havoc had showered before he came to Roy’s office? Had he held Riza as she bled, viscous liquid filling her lung?

In one swift movement Roy takes a vase from the bookshelf behind Ed and shatters it against the opposite wall. No one moves except Ross, who jolts upright at the sound.

He had been so close. So close. So close to bringing her home. He had Jian open and vulnerable on his desk, all his secrets laid bare there over the stained oak. He could have wrapped this up in mere weeks, maybe days if he’d been that lucky.

“Fuck,” he seethes, but his voice is shaky, as unstable as he’s becoming. The Hawkeye house burns to ashes behind his eyelids and he uses the vision to pull himself back in, to grapple with the sanity that’s been shoved beneath his fast-growing despair.

“She was alive when I left,” Havoc repeats. It sounds like a reassurance, but it’s not. She might be dead already. Roy remembers identifying Riza’s fake body in Central, the purple bruises on her face, the chill of her skin, the blue hue of the lights casting dark shadows over sunken cheeks, eyes. His Riza, ruined by filth like Jian. He stifles a sob and goes to find the photo of Jian in the mix of papers on his desk. When he does, he lights it on fire.

“Hey!” Ed admonishes, reaching for the flaming photograph. Roy lets him take it. “Don’t do this shit again, Mustang, don’t shut down and burn—”

“Shut up,” Roy says, and to his surprise Ed listens. “Get me to Ishval, Lieutenant Ross.”

“No,” Ed says, as stern as he can be for a man with no true power over a general of Amestris. “You’re not going to go there and set fire to that place. I don’t care who was shot.” He does care, he cares so much that Roy can feel it radiating off him in waves.

“She was alive when Havoc left,” Roy says, “and we’ll proceed like she’s still alive now. Lieutenant Ross, pull my car around. I’m going to Ishval.”

“Then I’m going with you,” Ed says. His gaze pins Roy in place.

“All right,” Roy says, “but try to keep up, Fullmetal. It’s been a while.”

Riza goes dark and Gina is on her feet, rushing to meet Richard where he stands like a phantom between two buildings. He grins at her as she comes for him, probably expecting a word of congratulations or a clap on the back. Instead she curls her hand into a fist and hits him once, hard. He wobbles on his feet but doesn’t fall. Gina might be disappointed if not for the fine line of blood oozing from a break in his bottom lip.

“Gina!” Opal calls for her, and Gina’s first instinct is to answer the call, but Richard’s face is suddenly shrouded with fury and he reaches for her. She releases a knife from the belt around her waist and touches the tip to his Adam’s apple. It bobs up and down with the unsteady pulse of his heartbeat.

“Traitor,” he says. Gina wants to laugh. She wants to spit in his face, slit his throat, and double over cackling as she watches him die. She has never declared her loyalty to anyone but Opal. She cannot be a traitor to something she never believed in.

She presses her knife into Richard’s skin until it pricks him and he bleeds. “You die if she does,” Gina says. Her thoughts go unwillingly to Riza and her general in the alley, his hands so gently touching her. Like she might fall away if he wasn’t careful.

“You’re going to have to do better than that, Gina.” Richard’s smile is laughing, but he doesn’t dare move. “I’m not afraid of Flame.”

“I wasn’t talking about him.”

Richard’s eyes narrow to slits. “You can’t touch me, Gina.”

Gina digs the end of the knife into Richard’s flesh, and while he doesn’t cry out she can see that he’s uncomfortable. His forehead is already sporting a fine sheen of sweat. “I already am, Richard.”

“Gina!” Opal calls again. Gina removes the threat of her knife and Richard deflates.

“Give me your gun,” she says before she turns her back to him, “and tell your lackeys to stay away and keep those barrels shut or I’ll gut you like a fish.” She holds her hand out to him, palm up. The hilt of her knife is gripped tight in her other hand. Richard has no choice: he surrenders his weapon and calls to Willard and Gordon.

“You think you’re untouchable,” Gina says, stuffing Richard’s gun into her waistband, “because you’re Jaeger’s favorite idiot. But you’re not untouchable, Richard. I am. Now sit there like a good dog and pray she pulls through.”

Richard’s face contorts into something ugly, and then he growls, “I was ordered to do it. She’s Riza Hawkeye.”

Gina feels the inescapable pull toward terror, and then she moves through it and it’s gone.

Riza is lying heavy over Havoc’s lap, his hands cupping her bloody face. Opal has some sort of tubing funneling into and out of Riza’s bullet wound, and she’s sucking on the end of it to get it to run blood through. Finally, as Gina’s approaching, the blood comes sliding out. Opal’s lips are stained with Riza’s blood but she doesn’t even stop to wipe it away. Gina places a hand at the base of Opal’s neck, her fingers brushing her girlfriend’s hair. Opal doesn’t even look up.

“We need Jaeger,” Opal says, fitting two fingers to Riza’s wrist and carotid, searching wildly for a pulse. “I need to get her back to the Flour.”

“Wha— What do we need Jaeger for?” Havoc sputters. He’s usually so composed — such a good little soldier boy — but now he looks undone. He’s painted with his friend’s blood.

Gina can tell him about Jaeger, about all of his secrets, even the ones she’s kept to herself. But she fears that if she reveals anything new about her brother now then Havoc might not leave, and if he doesn’t leave then he will die. Jaeger has no use for him, not even as a hostage, not when he’s got Riza Hawkeye. She turns her gaze on Riza’s unconscious form. Gina might pretend she’s sleeping if blood weren’t crawling out of the corner of her mouth. She swallows hard and finds her resolve.

“Leave, Marsh,” she says. Havoc gapes at her.

“No—”

“They’ll shoot you too.”

“I can’t leave her—”

“Get the fuck out of here before I shoot you myself, Marsh. Don’t be a fool.”

Havoc takes fistfuls of Riza’s shirt.

“This is what Jaeger wants,” Gina tells him. “He wants to own her life by bringing her close to death. Then he’s going to save her, but he won’t do that for you. You’re useless to her if you stay here and die. Go fetch her general.”

Havoc moves out from under Riza. He lowers her head to the concrete and lets his hand linger there in her hair for a second before he draws away to stand. He’s doused in her blood. It coats nearly every piece of him. Gina stands with him and wipes some of the blood from his face, catching a few tears in the process.

“Go,” she says. “We’ve got her.”

“You can’t do that, Gina!” Richard barks. But she already has, and Havoc is already running.

They return to Flour with Riza’s life intact. They return to the Flour and Jaeger is waiting there at the mouth, the white lights exploding out into the blackened Ishval night. Gina knows better to slug her own brother, but as Opal carts Riza to the infirmary Gina gets into Jaeger’s face. “What the fuck are you playing at?” she hisses. His features are disturbingly still, and then he shatters. His long, body fingers crush Gina’s upper arm and he yanks her into him, speaking against the shell of her ear.

“Talk to me like that again,” he says, “and I’ll have Opal’s fingers hanging on the bushes outside.”

“Get off me,” she tugs her arm from his grasp. “And you will never touch Opal.”

She starts to walk away from him, but he catches her by the wrist.

“How long have you been betraying me?” he says. There is no hint of emotion on his face. He’s impassive, restrained again. Somewhere deep inside herself Gina knows that he loves her — and she also knows that his love has been twisted into an evil thing. She takes too long to reply and he goes on: “Did you think you’d be spared by the general if you protected his precious captain? Did you think he’d grant you clemency for sticking a knife in her thigh instead of carving her into bits?”

“We need her,” is all Gina says. The fight seeps out of her achingly slow, and exhaustion creeps in to fill the space it leaves behind.

“No,” Jaeger says, shrugging past Gina, “she needs me.” He abandons his sister at the entrance to the Flour and disappears into the infirmary. Gina watches the room light up in jagged bolts of electric blue light and she breathes, and she knows that he’s stopped Riza’s bleeding.

Chapter Text

His mother had always told him this: You fixate, my boy , she’d clip in Xingese, and on all the wrong things too .

He thinks of her words when he runs his knuckles down the length of Riza Hawkeye’s bloodied jaw. He follows the corded muscle of her throat with his index finger, up and down over her clavicle to glide over the hard surface of her sternum, between her breasts, all the way to her navel. He’d never quite understood what his mother meant until now. But Riza Hawkeye, wicked as she is, has become this: a fixation.

Before, it was science. It was Eastern University and the library that sat square in the middle of the lawn, on the northern grounds. Its rotunda was painted like the sky, only there were purples and oranges mingling together and no blues; it was like a mash-up of a sunrise and sunset. He would tilt his head back to stretch his neck and there it would be, high above him and ever-present, like a God. He’d left a piece of himself in that faux sky when he abandoned university for the academy. An essential part of him had been ripped clean off his bones, leaving no residue, no indication that it had ever been there at all. This began his slow descent into a cognitive dissonance that would last well past his dishonorable discharge.

He feels it in his head now, pulsing behind his eyes. This dissonance that presents like tinnitus. A whirring in his ears that he can hear even when he’s slammed his hands over them. It sounds like a far-off alarm, or a dozen insects’ buzzing wings, or Riza Hawkeye, her labored breaths in his ear as he runs his hands up her bare back in his office, his nails dragging gently over her skin…

Opal’s here, but he bends down to brush his lips over Riza Hawkeye’s anyway, wishing her well despite knowing every terrible thing he wants to do to her when she wakes. 

He goes to stand outside again. He needs to put distance between himself and her; between himself and Opal too because he meant what he said to Guo. He remembers the rage in his sister’s eyes, and the despair that brought up its rear. He remembers holding fast to her arm, expecting to see that flash of familiar fear. Instead her face was defiant. Her words were drenched in hatred. He bristles with the knowledge that he may lose his already tenuous hold on Guo. He never should have allowed her to strut around with Riza Hawkeye, but he’d been curious: How easily could his sister be swayed? Very, as it turns out. 

The mouth to the Flour stays open, as per his orders. Lieutenant Havoc will no doubt have made it to headquarters by now. The white light exploding into the night will be the perfect beacon for General Mustang to follow once he’s heard his precious adjutant has been incapacitated. 

“How can you be sure he’ll come?” Richard had asked. A thin line of blood stretched from the center of his Adam’s apple to the collar of his shirt. 

“Love breeds fools.” Was Jaeger’s reply. 

He’s good at waiting. He has patience, when there is nothing else. Anger has numbed to indifference; want has been discarded and replaced by drive; vicious need comes in the form of images to placate it.  

He closes his eyes. His hands come together at his back. His boots sink into the gravel and the sand, shifting deeper one way or the other every time he moves. 

He’s very deep into fantasizing about splitting Riza Hawkeye’s femoral artery and turning her upside down to bleed into the cracks in the Flour’s floor when he hears the crunch of tires over the ground. Light from a car’s headlights washes over him, staining the backs of his eyelids red. He waits until the engine has been cut and the light has faded before opening his eyes. 

There are three people inside the car. One is a young man with light colored hair, and another is Maria Ross. Someone steps out from the back seat, his dark hair and dark eyes — his most notable features — show even in the dimness. He stands just outside the arc of light from the Flour.

“Jian,” he says, and Jaeger doesn’t allow himself to be surprised. Of course the general would know his name, “where is my adjutant?”

Lying naked and crusted with blood on a cot in the infirmary. Jaeger recalls the smooth press of her skin on his fingertips and sighs. “It didn’t take you long to get here.” 

“Answer my question.” It’s almost a snarl, but not quite there. 

“You know she’s inside,” Jaeger says, “so why ask? What have you come here for?”

“A trade,” Roy Mustang says. “You return my adjutant to me and I’ll go with you.”

Love breeds fools. 

Jaeger suppresses a snort. “My intention was never to take you, Mustang.” He says, and it’s true. He never wanted Roy Mustang like he wants Riza Hawkeye, and now that he’s got her, he isn’t sure he ever wants to let her go. “All I wanted was to cause you pain. Force your hand. Play a game. It’s been fun, hasn’t it?”

Fury curls Mustang’s lip. 

“The truth of it is that I like Riza Hawkeye. She’s a clever little bitch when she wants to be, but she’s useful too. Whoever commands her commands you.”

“Return her to me and I’ll never come back to Ishval.” Mustang says, and a thrill of excitement skitters up Jaeger’s spine at the desperation in the general’s voice. He is a puppeteer and Ishval is his stage and Mustang is his act. 

Jaeger takes great pleasure from saying no, but there is more to be had from this conversation than that.

“I mended the lung, Mustang. She was stripped to her skin, vulnerable beneath my hands, and I let myself breathe in every inch of her as I stopped her bleeding. Then I mended her hair next.” Jaeger smiles. “She’s quite pretty as a blonde.”

Mustang looks ready to burst, like a star edging toward explosion, but when he speaks his voice is deceptively calm. Disturbingly managed. “I’m going to get her back, and then I’m going to burn your tongue out of your mouth.” 

Jaeger laughs at this. “You’re mad but you’re relieved, too, aren’t you? And it pisses you off to be glad that I put my hands on her, but you have to be. Because I’m the one who saved her life, Mustang. I told you she would always belong to me, didn’t I? Did you think I was lying? Did you think you had the upper hand? I sent her to you that night on purpose. To test a theory.”

Mustang pushes a hand through his hair. Jaeger has caught himself tumbling toward becoming unhinged again, and he attempts to get a grip on his breathing, to still the shake in his fingers. It seems every time his rage builds, Mustang’s dissipates, and the man with the level head is the man with the leverage. 

“I want to see her. I don’t care that you don’t want me captured.” 

“Why would I do anything for you?” But Jaeger has already made up his mind. He decided hours ago that when Roy Mustang came calling, he’d open the Flour’s doors for him. It’s better that Mustang has time to see what Jaeger can do to Riza Hawkeye before Ishval is blown to pieces and Mustang is made to return to Central, visions of his adjutant’s blood burned into his irises. He can do nothing but suffer from now on. 

“Because what good is a hostage if I’m not convinced she’s even alive?”

“I’ll drag her naked body out here into the night if that’s what you want, Mustang.”

“Do that and I’ll turn you to ash.” A white glove flashes in the light of the Flour, and Jaeger recoils involuntarily. “I see her with my own two eyes or I assume she’s dead and set you on fire one limb, one eye at a time.”

Jaeger considers his options, decides he has very few, and then settles. “Leave the glove in the car. Tell Lieutenant Ross to drive away and that you’ll contact her when I’m done with you.”

“Done with me?” Mustang says, but he’s slipping the glove from his hand and passing it to Ross through the window. “You said you have no interest in catching me, but it seems you have plans.”

Jaeger grins. “This was always a possibility, General Mustang. I thought of everything before I had Richard pull that trigger.” 

Jaeger is walking through a fever dream. Surely he’s been here before, leading Roy Mustang into his home, his Flour. His people glare and bare their teeth, coming up on Mustang until they’re mere feet away. Jaeger is powerful in this place. Like the emperor of Xing, or the Aerugonian king. He could be his own king out here. A king of Ishval, ruiner of Amestris, the destroyer of Flame. 

Roy Mustang is taught, drawn hard like a bowstring. When he snaps he will bite anyone in the vicinity. Jaeger’s counting on it. 

His mother’s words filter into his mind again: You fixate. 

Jaeger is coming up on the infirmary door, Richard guarding it. 

You fixate, my boy. 

Jaeger mentioned Richard’s name on purpose before, and he says it aloud again now. “Coming through, Richard. Stand aside for our guest.” Richard’s return smile is wicked. 

You fixate. 

The Flour is called as such because it’s shaped like rectangular packs of flour, the outside a dusty grey and the inside bright white. So white, in fact, that every smudge on the Flour’s floor is spotted as easily as an Amestrian in Ishval. So white, in fact, that when Roy Mustang’s fist connects with Richard’s jaw and the blood sprays the floor it looks like someone’s thrown red paint over snow. It’s a stark contrast, a dangerous one, and here out east everyone is used to it. Especially Roy Mustang. 

Richard takes a fistful of Mustang’s collar and jams his knee into the general’s gut in retaliation. Roy Mustang coughs and spits, his knuckles red where he’d cut the inside of Richard’s cheek on his teeth. 

“You shot her,” Mustang wheezes. He struggles free of Richard’s grip and straightens, smoothing out his greatcoat. Richard wipes a smear of blood from the corner of his mouth. 

Roy Mustang is winding up; a bowstring. 

You fixate, my boy. You fixate. 

“Don’t be stupid, Mustang.” Jaeger says, but he enjoys Roy’s disheveled look. He enjoys knowing that here, Roy is weak. Here, Roy Mustang will come unhinged, not Jaeger. He opens the infirmary door. 

Opal is on the other side standing at the foot of the cot, her body shielding Riza Hawkeye’s. Her brows are drawn together over her eyes, which dart between Jaeger, Richard, and Roy so fast Jaeger can’t tell who she’s looking at at any given second. Eventually, though, her red eyes settle on Roy Mustang, fear and anger flash in the deep crimson, but not hatred. For a moment she watches Roy as Roy’s eyes rove over his ruined captain, his affection palpable, his fury a thick, bitter stick in Jaeger’s throat. Jaeger swallows hard. 

“Move, Opal,” he says. Opal does as she’s hold. Jaeger is a bit put off that Opal’s cleaned the spattering of blood from Riza’s face, covered her body in a thin blue hospital sheet. You can’t see her wound through it. It doesn’t matter, really. Jaeger pinches the sheet above her sternum and pulls it down. He’s slow, careful to take note of the general’s heavy breaths, of the rumble of anger in his chest. Opal turns away. There, under the dusty blue, is the purple-black bruise over Riza’s ribs, large stitches holding her together over an inches-long incision. Jaeger is not a very talented alkahestrist, so all he could do was stop the bleeding. Opal manually patched everything else. And it was ugly. 

“I’m afraid that’ll scar, Mustang.”

It means nothing to Jaeger that Riza is naked. Her breasts, that dip between either side of her rib cage, the gentle way her throat curves into her collar bones are not arousing. They don’t please him. Touching Riza Hawkeye — stripping her bare — are not things Jaeger does because he desires her.

But when he turns his head he sees Mustang’s eyes glinting black. A silent snarl on his face, his upper lip pulling over his teeth. He says, “Cover her.” His voice is liquid hot. 

Jaeger drops the sheet where he’d pulled it down to her stomach and leaves it there. “Didn’t you want to see it, Mustang? The wound is quite impressive — I think bullet entry wounds can’t be more than a few millimeters wide but Opal here had to cut into our captain.” 

Mustang looks at Riza’s abdomen and then at Jaeger. He seizes the sheet in his hand and lays it at Riza’s chin. His fingers brush the captain’s cheek, he takes her hair in his hand then lets it go and presses his fingers to the webbed scar around her neck. 

“You’re lucky she’s alive,” he says. 

You’re lucky she’s alive. 

“You’re lucky she escaped me in the north.”

It was hard imaging this Roy Mustang leveling Ishval the way he had. The skies were never clear back then. They were dirtied by dust and sand and the humid stench of burning and rotting flesh. Homes were singed around their edges, roofs were crumbling like bread left out in the sun too long. There were screams and sleepless nights. You’d be walking with your neighbor and there would be a pop and the neighbor would fall at your side and you’d know there was a sniper nearby, picking you off like lint from a shirt. That Flame, those snipers were Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye and Jaeger hated them. But when he imagined Roy in his mind he didn’t ever think about him having a soft gaze, a kind touch. Roy was monster in Jaeger’s memories — something that hunted for you from under your bed. Something with empty black eyes and venom dripping off pointed teeth.

Roy Mustang is none of that, evil as he is. And the knowledge empowers Jaeger even more. 

“I was going to take off her body parts.” Jaeger says. He feels a giddy kind of excitement. Opal’s head snaps toward him and she stares daggers into his temple. “I was going to cut her fingers off and send them to you. Or perhaps a whole hand. Her teeth. I wanted her to write you a letter begging to come and save her, and she was going to sign it in her own blood. I’d say considering she attempted to make a fool of me, Mustang, she’s gotten off easy with a gun—”

It happens like this: Roy, finally unhinged, finally undone, slams the back of his fist into Jaeger’s nose. Jaeger goes unsteady on his feet, grabbing at the wall for balance as Mustang rounds the cot, hands poised to come together. Jaeger shouts, “Richard!” but Richard is already on it. He’s taller and bulkier than Roy Mustang, and he throws his arms across the general’s body and hugs him to his chest. Jaeger’s nose is a mess of blood. It pours from between his fingers and he yells at Opal to get him some gauze. She does, and Jaeger has to place it gingerly over his nose because the whole thing is pounding, tender. “You’ve broken my nose,” he bites out. General Mustang is panting like a wild animal. He’s vibrating against Richard’s grasp. “Take him to the receiving room,” Jaeger says, and tastes blood as it trickles over his lip and into his mouth. 

Opal escorts Richard and Mustang from the room. Jaeger removes the gauze when they’re gone. His nose is crooked, and purple. It screams at him when he moves. “Love breeds fools,” he says to the mirror. And then he turns to Riza Hawkeye. She hasn’t moved in the commotion. Jaeger can only tell she’s alive because the sheet rises and falls with her breathing. He bends down so his lips touch her ear, and he says: “He won’t survive losing you twice, Riza.”

Chapter Text

Roy goes to the receiving room. Easily, his stamina almost on empty. Richard throws him to the floor hard and Roy’s shoulder cracks against the stone ground, but he makes no noise. He doesn’t want to give Richard even a little bit of satisfaction, though he’s already on a losing streak.

The room is lightly colored, bare, a storage room with nothing stored in it. Roy sits with his back put up against the wall opposite the door and closes his eyes. His thoughts travel as naturally as a breeze to Riza. He doesn’t let them go much further than she’s alive, she’s alive or he’ll risk the unpleasant imaginings of her with a bullet hole in her lung. They come anyway, unbidden and fierce, and as hard as he wills them away they will not go. Like stray dogs they stay and beg for attention and Roy, either driven by guilt or his own masochism, feeds them. It’s only when he’s into his fourth rendition of Riza being shot that he understands that this room could drive people crazy — a kind of solitary confinement. He wants his gloves.

It’s a while later that anyone comes to bother him. He’d been sure that Jaeger would storm in, pissed and crooked-nosed, and Roy would get to crack a smile, dangerous and taunting. But Jaeger never came. Instead, some time later, Richard returns. He has a bruise where Roy had hit him earlier, and when Roy goes to mention it, Richard plugs his speech with a fist. Roy tastes blood and spits it out onto the stone floor, which he only then sees is stained — stained deep black in some places, reddish brown in others, and there, directly in the middle it’s close to fresh.

Richard rushes Roy before he has a chance to gather himself. He shoves Roy into the wall and stone presses hard into Roy’s spine, lighting it on fire. Roy hisses the pain out through his teeth. 

Richard’s knee again meets Roy’s stomach except this time there is no give, and the wall makes sure that Roy receives the full force of the blow. He loses his breath and coughs a bit right into Richard’s collar, and Richard throws Roy to the floor a second time in return.

“Get up,” he says. 

Roy doesn’t want to play this game. Through the fog of pain his mind keeps wandering back to Riza on that cot, that wound on her abdomen, the way the stitches crisscross through her flesh, striking blood on smooth pavement. He’s wasting time here wrestling with Richard when he could be in the infirmary waiting for his captain to wake, checking her pulse every couple minutes. 

“I said get up,” Richard spits. Like a slow-moving viper, or a tantrum-ridden child.

Roy rolls onto his back and watches the ceiling. Each of his breaths are tinged with heat. He can put his hands together…

He’d thought about it, of course. In the time they left him alone. But they didn’t bind his hands, and they didn’t use a pillory. This is part of whatever Jaeger is playing at, and he knows that if he uses alchemy it would mean something more terrible than being stuffed into a receiving room with Richard.

“You’re a coward.”

Possibly. But that is an insecurity that weighs heavy on Roy’s mind always, like a phantom. Richard can’t use it against him when Roy’s already perfected using it against himself. 

“And I suppose you think Jaeger is no different?” This earns Roy a swift kick in the ribs, of which Roy clutches hard until the pain subsides. 

“Jaeger doesn’t torch people.”

Roy looks up at Richard. The man seems to stretch onward forever. His square jaw and build camouflage with the stone. He’s like Armstrong, only not kind. “What do you think his bombs will do to people?” Richard loses himself and kicks Roy’s face this time, and Roy’s world goes black. 

Jaeger comes next. He comes as Roy is returning to the stone room, someone’s hands rough around his collar. He’s settled into a chair, unsteady over the stone surface, and given a tap to the ruined half of his face. He winces awake. 

“You broke my nose,” Jaeger says, same as he had before. His nose is a crooked mess. It’s probably shattered at the bridge. Its slope has now been disrupted, and the end of it careens off to the left. It’s black and blue and leaves dirty, tired-like bruises under Jaeger’s eyes. 

“You broke my captain,” Roy says. 

Jaeger smiles. “Richard broke your captain, General Mustang.”

Roy’s eyes skitter to Richard and then back to Jaeger. “Under your orders.” He hopes the disdain is leaking through. He hopes he’s not doing as fine a job controlling his temper as he should be. He hopes that when Edward comes, when Ross comes, when Havoc and Breda and Alphonse come, that he can rip the little Amestrian flag off Jaeger’s lapel and shove it down his throat. 

“She’d be dead if I wanted her to be, Mustang. You’re lucky she isn’t.”

“And why don’t you want her to be?” Roy grips the butt of the chair. Jaeger’s face flashes. He hadn’t meant to say that, to imply that there could be a part of him that didn’t want Riza dead. 

Jaeger seems to ruminate on his own words a moment. Where he was bent to look into Roy’s face at eye level he now straightens. He’s like an animal on the prowl, one caught snapping a twig by their prey. One that has to suddenly and unexpectedly reassess their strategy, and dumb their opponent. It’s nice to see someone like Jaeger fumble in the ways that he does. He’s a slave to his emotions as much as Roy is, as much as anyone can be. Though he pretends to rise above the confines of human emotion he has them smeared all over his face like shit. 

“You don’t want her dead,” Roy says again. He wants to coax Jaeger into talking — talking about Riza, about him, about anything. Jaeger knows the game, but he’s too playful for his own good. 

“You’ve wasted her,” he says. His voice is on the cusp of a snarl. “She’s quite exceptional. I’ve seen her pretend to be anything but and that might be the only thing she isn’t good at, Mustang — pretending to be unexceptional. And you waste her. You disrespect her by throwing her onto trains and hiding her away up north while you plan to gather up all her autonomy for yourself and fight her battles for her. Here you are, in my den, surrounded by my people, your woman under my thumb a hallway away, and she got herself there. And she could get herself out, without you, but you’re here, exactly where she doesn’t want you to be. Are your wants more important than hers, Mustang?”

This, more than the beatings and the talk and the bluffs, strikes a match. 

Roy leans forward, hands on knees now, and blows the fringe from his face. There is dried blood on his cheek, and his right eye is nearly swollen shut, and there are places on his lips where his teeth cut them, and he knows that he might be hit again, but he says anyway: “Don’t ever presume to understand the relationship between me and my captain.”

Jaeger is equally fuming. “You’re fucked, Mustang. She’s fucked. And you being here is going to hurt her as badly as being shot did.”

Probably. 

But Jaeger has it wrong. Roy isn’t here because he doubts the abilities of his captain. He doesn’t want to own her or waste her or whatever else Jaeger believes. He only wanted to see her alive, for his own sake. 

The rest is the cherry on top.

“We’re not that different,” Roy begins, then has to pause to swallow snot-blood as it slugs down his throat. “You and I, Jaeger, we’re not all that different. Riza Hawkeye, wounds in Ishval, an adjustment in Central. I’m terrible and you’re terrible, albeit for different reasons. And as much as you want to kill me, Jaeger, hurt me or whatever. I can promise you I want to do them tenfold to you.”

At first, it looks like Jaeger is going to take Roy’s words into consideration. And then, like a lighting strike, Jaeger plants his boot into Roy’s chest and sends him tumbling to the ground. Roy’s head whips into the stone with a crack, and he sees stars. Jaeger stands over him, practically straddling him with as close as he is, and breathes fire into Roy’s face. “I’ve stolen your captain,” he seethes, “and you killed my people. Those are not the same.”

Roy blinks continuously, trying to clear his head. What Jaeger says barely makes sense in Roy’s muddied mind. Somewhere off to his left, Richard laughs. “You’re planning to blow your people up, Jaeger.”

“A necessary sacrifice,” Jaeger says, “to end you.”

Time moves slowly in this thing she’s trapped in.

And she really wishes it wouldn’t. She pleads for it to go, for her to go. There is a line stretching out into a wall of white — faint, like a shadow. She takes a step onto it and it does not give beneath her weight. That’s how she knows this is a dream. This is a prison.

Sometimes she can hear things from above. Occasionally they’re thunderous, booming, but normally they’re titters in her ear, a string of muffled words. Things flutter over her skin once, twice, too many times. She can’t count the seconds here, and especially not the days. It’s always white, and her chest is always on fire. Each breath she takes buries daggers between her ribs and that line is becoming inviting. She wants to know where it goes, what it might take her to. Away from here, she pleads.

She gives her weight to it again. The line takes it graciously, like an old friend.

She walks. And as she walks the line comes off the floor. It curves up, up, up, until it’s almost at a ninety-degree angle, perpendicular to the floor. Somehow she stays on, and she keeps walking. The further she goes the shallower her breaths become. The pain subsides as she walks and eventually, like a man searching for gold, she comes upon a thing that’s wholly unknowable, yet familiar. She’s hanging nearly upside down now, her blonde hair dancing in the no-wind. She presses her hand to this unknowable thing, and it’s warm. It speaks to her.

“Captain,” it says, but that isn’t quite right. That isn’t quite her, or quite what the thing meant to say. Her temples start to beat. She uses her free hand to rub circles in them, willing the oncoming headache away. “Captain, please.”

Captain. Captain, please .

What is this? She presses harder against the flat white. Harder, harder. All the while the voice is calling Captain, Captain out like a hymn. The words work in tandem with her heartbeat, each pump, each Captain feeding the pain in her ribs, where the daggers are digging in. 

The white starts to crack.

She wonders why she hasn’t died. Why she hasn’t been let go. She thought, upon first inspection of this strange place, that she was on her way to hell. There was such a fire in her chest when she first arrived, one that seared the inside of her throat, and the line was calling to her like a lover. Air from her lungs came up and out of her and wept against her lips, wetting them with something sticky and coppery. Blood, she’d realized. Yet she didn’t — hasn’t — died. 

The white shatters above her. She braces for impact but it descends soft as snow. She and it float like feathers back to the white floor. She marvels in the way it wafts down, spiraling and dancing in the no-wind. It gathers her hair and makes that fly too, whipping about her face like she were standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking foamy waves as they slapped at the base below. 

“Captain, please.”

There it is again. She turns her face up to the source. 

Now, so unlike before, she’s in a hospital bed. A cot, more like. She sinks into it like it’s devoid of any support at all. Her left arm is littered with tubes, her chest dotted with wires. To her left there are clear bags of liquid, the incessant plip, plip of their drip assaulting her ears. There was nothing to hear in the white, but in this room there is everything. A monitor to her right, beeping. A man to her right, whispering, Captain, Captain. Above it all were other voices, some deadly and some not. 

Who is Captain? she thinks. Captain like a ship? Captain like the military? Captain like a game? A song? A riddle? She wants to open her mouth to ask the man, but she’s forgotten how to speak the moment she lays eyes on him.

Everything in this room is grey and white — bright, and artificial. The snow of the white still falls around her, breaking apart her vision in little bursts. But the man in unmarred. Behind him, a strong stream of light casts his face in semi-shadow. The line from the white goes on from his back, long and curious, but she can’t be bothered with it anymore. He’s here, his fingers playing with the hair at the nape of her neck, his dark eyes soaked in despair. Something about him is tilted, undone, but she doesn’t mind. She finds her hand and winds it into his dark hair. He feels real, as real as anything has felt. 

“Captain,” he says. He might have smiled once. A real smile. She can see it in her memories, it’s something otherworldly. “Don’t say my name.”

I don’t know your name, she thinks, but it comes to her right then. It hits her hard as the bullet in the warehouse, tearing at her flesh, forcing her to gasp for air. Tears wet her eyes at once, and her body is flaming. Burning. She puts both hands on him now and tries to pull him into her. But he’s leaving, his touch no longer familiar and unknowable but missed, ached for. 

“Don’t say my name,” he says again. She reaches for the end of his greatcoat as he turns from her, his face completely shadowed now. She wants him to touch her forehead, to run his fingers through her hair, to speak against her collar bone, to be real.

She loses her grip and he disappears on the line.

Riza’s waking is less like coming out of sleep and more like emerging from a muddy swamp covered in layers of heavy grime. 

There was one time when she was a child that she got into a fist fight with a bunch of boys who lived down the road. They were older, most of them were bigger, and they were used to rolling hay and picking vegetables and throwing sacks of manure over their shoulders to carry around like it wasn’t the heaviest thing they’d ever hefted in their lives. She mouthed off to one who had said something nasty about Roy or about her father, she can’t remember, and when the boy rounded on her she kicked him in the shin. He retaliated by throwing a fist into her temple. All the boys (there were four, if she remembered right) swarmed her like flies after that. She got a few good kicks and punches in before they left her wounded and sore in the gravel road, her pride hurt more than anything. She went home that night and sat her pounding head in the refrigerator, waiting patiently for the cold to numb her senses. 

The waking after that felt much like the waking now. 

Riza tries to sit up. She notices a tug on her hand and on her chest when she does, though, and so she stops mid-attempt. Her abdomen smarts wildly under the sheets and it’s only then that she remembers being shot in the warehouse. She remembers Richard’s face shrouded in the dark, Gina’s cries, Opal’s steady hands, and Havoc clutching her to him, his face stained with blood…

Riza jolts suddenly, understanding falling like a curtain in her mind. This is the infirmary, she’s alive, this is Opal’s office, she’s alive, this is the Flour, she’s alive . She’s naked, her back is bare, her wound is sewn shut, the bleeding which shouldn’t have been stopped has been and she’s — here — in Jaeger’s home. 

Where is Havoc?

Where is Rebecca?

Riza twists as carefully as she can manage, moving through pain that rivals the severed artery from all those years ago, and places her feet on the cool stone floor. Wires and tubes leave her body in a web. She’s caught up in it, some going one way and others another, and she can’t tell what they’re for or which ones are safe to remove and which aren’t. But she can’t lay here. She starts to remove her IV, and then: “Not a good idea, sweetheart.”

That voice — his voice — chills her insides as well now as it did when they first met. Riza is very aware of how vulnerable she is here now, and so she pulls the sheet up to her breasts in a feeble attempt to regain some composure, some control. 

Jaeger is at the mirror, playing with his nose. Riza can’t tell what he’s doing but it looks to be painful for him. His shoulders hunch forward in a tense half-moon. He catches her staring in the mirror and smiles. “Your general broke my nose.”

Riza’s heart plummets. 

“My general?” She hopes and prays and hopes— 

“Yes, Riza, your general.”

Richard materializes in the room as if summoned in a seance. He’d been at the door and Riza, hawk-eyed as she supposedly was, hadn’t been minding the door. He’s got a nasty bruise on his face, and an even nastier look in his eye, and Roy’s standing on wobbly knees at his side, his features painted in varying shades of red. His one good eye stares intently at Riza.

“General—” She tries to rise but something yanks her back down again. 

“No,” Jaeger says, tone dark. “No, you will not go to him, Riza.”

Jaeger eases Riza onto her back. “He’s not here so that you can fuss over him, Riza, he’s here so that I can own the both of you at the same time. It’s efficient.” Riza can see the full damage done on Jaeger’s nose from this angle. And, despite herself, her chest swells with pride. He looks unmasked for once. Like the monster that he is. 

“How am I alive?” Riza says. She’s using her voice, not Emilia’s. She’s using her inflections, not Emilia’s. She can see out of the corner of her eye that her hair is blonde again, and she feels instantly calm. For some reason, although she’s both people, being Riza Hawkeye is much more grounding than being Emilia Enfield. She feels for the first time in weeks that she can reach for freedom and that it might even reach back. 

“Opal kept you alive long enough to get you here and then it was only a matter of stopping your bleeding. Which I did, of course. I’m not a talented alchemist or alkahestrist but I did my best on your lung and on your hair.”

Oh, the strange alchemic markings on the Flour’s walls and floors. They were Jaeger’s.

“Riza, I need to know some things. Help me understand,” Jaeger pulls a stool beneath him and sits at Riza’s side, “what possessed you to do something so stupid as infiltrate my home?”

Riza sets her jaw. It wasn’t stupid, she wants to say. But she has nothing to prove herself right. There is no single victory she can throw in Jaeger’s face. She can’t claim that her and General Armstrong’s plan worked when it didn’t. She cannot gloat. She has no leg to stand on only a ruined lung. 

It’s like she’s teetering on a line. On one side is Riza Hawkeye, Roy Mustang, and Ishval. And on the other side is death, and Jaeger.

“Havoc and Rebecca escaped,” she says. It’s all she has, and she isn’t even sure if she’s right.

Jaeger’s ugly nose twitches. “They weren’t the prize.”

“And I am?”

“Riza, you’re much more than that.” Jaeger clicks his tongue along his teeth. “Now please don’t fuck with me, sweetheart. I have to know. What’s the master plan here? Roy Mustang knows about my bombs. Who else knows?” Riza isn’t all that inclined to answer, and after seconds of silent indignation Jaeger tires of the game and pulls a revolver from his hip. He points it at Roy. 

“You won’t kill him,” Riza blurts. But her whole body becomes at once a jittery bundle of nervousness. Jaeger is unpredictable, he’s dangerous, he’s everything Miles and the others told her he would be and now he’s got a gun to Roy just like he had a gun to Reynolds and Riza’s skin is crawling. 

“What’s the plan, Riza?”

“I don’t know,” Riza says, and she doesn’t. Minutes ago she didn’t even know she was alive. 

Jaeger cocks the revolver. “He doesn’t need his kneecaps, Riza.”

Riza has been thrown into the ocean, her body cold and sinking and soaked, and the pressure is a thunderstorm in her head, pressing down on her until her teeth are so clenched she can feel the strain down her throat. “I don’t know, Jaeger!” The words are torn out of her by desperation. 

Jaeger stands, the stool flies back to smack against the floor, and turns the gun on Riza. She’s overcome with immediate relief. “She’s much more expendable, Roy Mustang.” Yes, she thinks, yes. “Don’t forget what I’ve told you. Maybe I’ll send you home with a souvenir.” 

Roy lunges but Richard’s arm comes out to pin him against the door like a vise. He hits it with a hollow thud and Riza wants to tell him it’s okay, it’s okay.

“TELL ME.” Jaeger bellows, and thrusts the end of the gun’s barrel into the wound in Riza’s side. She screams, the pain biting into her like a whip. He gets close enough that his wickedly broken nose could brush Riza’s cheek if she moved. “You’ve been smart not to use your alchemy, Roy Mustang.” Jaeger’s words themselves are jittery, unstable. Richard takes hold of Roy’s hands and Riza can hear the crunch of bone even through the ringing of pain in her ears. Roy cries out, one hand’s fingers dangle uselessly and the other hand is kept prisoned between Richard’s own. 

“We would have done that to her instead if you had.” Jaeger says. “I won’t ask again, Mustang.” He buries the revolver ever further into Riza’s side and Riza gasps; the pain blooms in her vision like black and red flowers, blocking out the light. Jaeger’s desperate — so desperate. Riza grabs his forearm and tries to pry it away, but it’s rooted to her. Her eyes meet his in the frenzy. 

It’s in this meeting of gazes that the world falls to quiet. Everything stills. The only thing that moves or breathes is the madness in Jaeger’s eyes, swirling in a vortex of anger and agony. 

And then the Flour rumbles. 

Jaeger doesn’t remove himself from Riza, but he does look up at Richard. Richard drops Roy’s hand and moves him aside. He wrenches the door open and there, on the ground, are the spikes that had decorated the Flour’s ceiling. They’re broken they’re piled they’re crushing cars and blocking exits. And, among them, are royal blues flowing through the mouth of the Flour like a waterfall. It’s a battlefield; it’s crumbling buildings and it’s an invasion. Jaeger’s breath hitches. 

It strikes Riza that Jaeger had been paying attention only to the isolated incidents in the Flour. He was so focused on his own excitement that he never thought to anticipate Roy Mustang’s play. He probably assumed that, because he had Riza Hawkeye, Roy Mustang would not try alchemy and he would not try tricks. But Jaeger fundamentally misunderstands Roy, and Riza reads that realization in his face. Roy’s infected the Flour with an overwhelming reality of titanic proportion — that Roy Mustang will not lie down to recover Riza Hawkeye, but will bare his teeth so that she might recover herself. 

Riza thrusts an elbow into Jaeger’s face. He howls and staggers back, his mouth filling with blood. “You bitch,” he fumes, blood dripping off his lip. He refocuses on her and she’s again staring down the barrel of the revolver, her body tethered to her cot and the machines around it. “I knew you were planning something. I knew you were—”

Roy, in Richard’s momentary lapse, takes Jaeger by the back of his collar. He slams him into the sink, Jaeger’s lower back bending to mold to the ceramic, and hits him with his unbroken hand. The mirror splinters where Jaeger’s head smashes into it. “General Mustang!” Riza warns, but it takes too much out of her to yell. He hits Jaeger again and again, each one crunching the glass more.

Riza steals a moment to breathe, to talk herself through the sizzling pain where Jaeger’s gun just was. She has to stand, somehow, and she has to go to Roy, somehow, and at some point Alphonse appears at her side. His short-cropped honey colored hair and large, brown-gold eyes hover above her like a savior, or a young man with abilities she desperately needs to make use of. 

“Captain Hawkeye, are you all right?”

“Alphonse,” she says. It’s not much of a response, but Al understands anyway. He transmutes her sheets into a thin shirt and pants and she shows him her gunshot wound, which is red and bleeding from Jaeger’s assault. Al’s eyes go wide as he removes little daggers from his pocket and draws a quick but careful circle around Riza on the cot. There’s a flash of light and, like a miracle, Riza is somewhat comfortable again. Whatever Alphonse did to Riza’s wound was twenty times better practiced than whatever Jaeger had done. 

“Oh — thank you.” Riza rips the wires and the IV off and out of her and Al helps her from the cot. Richard is being dragged away by a gaggle of military police, his bulky form disappearing into the chaos of blue and white.  And against the sink, Roy is cutting off Jaeger’s airway with a fist. 

“General Mustang!” Riza says, and breaks off from Al. “General Mustang,” she repeats, louder than before. He isn’t listening to her. She puts a hand on his bicep and he turns to look at her, but his eyes are not comprehending. There’s a flash of the tunnels under central and she recoils just a bit. “Roy,” she tries quietly enough that he can hear, but not loud enough for anyone else. His name works like a salve, and he drops Jaeger to the floor. He winds an arm around Riza’s waist and guides her back and away from Jaeger. 

“He’s not yours,” she says as they move. “He’s not yours, General.”

Jaeger is hacking and coughing on the ground, pawing at his throat. His nose is no longer a discernible feature, as everything on his face is bent and bloodied. He glances up at Riza from the floor, shows her his teeth, rows of red-rimmed white. Military police file into the infirmary, guns raised. One young man points his weapon at Riza and Roy barks, “Move your sights if you want to keep your hands, Sergeant.”

Riza defuses Roy with a wave of her hand and addresses the sergeant directly. “It’s all right,” she says. She catches sight of Edward over the sergeant’s shoulder. He’s helping MPs clear debris and capture stragglers. “I’m Captain Hawkeye, and I need you to do me a favor.”

The young man nods rapidly, and there on his chin is a spray of sweat. He’s nervous. 

“Give me your holster and your guns. And your boots and jacket, please.” The sergeant looks dumbly into Riza’s face, his mouth going slightly ajar. Someone behind Riza asks, “This is Jaeger?” and Roy affirms. “I can make that an order, Sergeant.”

“Ah,” the sergeant starts, unsure. Then he removes his jacket to remove his holster, and hands both to Riza. He takes his boots and places those at her feet. He salutes, says a crisp, “Captain Hawkeye, sir,” and Riza dismisses him. 

“What are you doing?” Roy says, coming to shield Riza from the view of MPs. She slides her feet into the boots, which are a bit too large for her but they’ll do, and attempts to place the holster over her body. Roy stops her, his eye blazing. “What are you doing?”

“My job, General Mustang.” If he wants to continue his power play with Jaeger with her instead, then fine. “I think you forget that I’m not currently on your orders, but General Armstrong’s.” 

Roy lifts Riza’s shirt just enough to see her wound. “You’re going to a medic, Captain Hawkeye.”

“No, sir, I’m not.”

Roy groans. “Why, even now, must you make everything so hard?”

“I thought my purpose was to make things easier for you, General.”

“So did I, but it seems I’ve complicated things. And you’re quite stubborn.”

Riza slowly begins to place the holster. It stings a bit when she lifts her arms above her head but the discomfort is fleeting. She shrugs the coat on next, keeping the holster underneath so she can act as though she’s weaponless if she comes upon any of Jaeger’s men. The leather is comforting, the jacket is a welcome weight on her shoulders. 

“I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble, General. It wasn’t my intention.”

Roy takes her face in his hands, and the affection is as jarring as it is alarming. They are surrounded by the military here. Riza means to send him away, but his broken hand is hot on her cheek and his fingers are sending his pulse into hers and his swollen eye is swelling more and she wants — she just wants. 

“General—” she starts, but she’s interrupted by the crumbling of the walls. 

Chapter Text

The dust settles and Jaeger is gone.

Riza pries herself from her general’s arms. He had grabbed her as fast as he could and turned the both of them away from the wall at the moment it came apart. There is dust and sand and little bits of ceramic on his shoulders, in his hair, stuck in the sticky film of blood over his face. He gives Riza a sheepish smile. She does not return it.

Foolish man.

“He’s gone,” an M.P., his ear a bloodied mess, runs a shivering hand through his dusty hair. “The bastard is gone.”

Riza’s ears are ringing. She barely notices. It’s one thing to be this young M.P. and to see something explode for the first time; to smell the acrid stench of sulfur and feel the dry heat of destruction. It’s another thing entirely to have lived it, day after day, and then feel as though you’ve come home to it after almost fifteen years. It’s jarring how little it bothers her.

Eventually, in just seconds, the ringing stops.

“He is,” Riza says, and turns fully away from the general. She dusts herself off. Her mouth tastes like dirt. Being here, in this desert, with grit between her teeth and the taste of rubble on her tongue is plucking disturbing memories from her mind. Her gun had slipped away in the mayhem and she picks it up now, kicking chunks of the Flour off it. She inspects the barrel, runs her fingers over the handle, and slips it into her waistband. There is no elastic, so she has to untie and retie the laces to get the gun to sit snug against her hip.

“I’m going after him,” Riza says. She leaves no room in her tone for anyone to object, yet Roy inevitably does.

“You’re wounded,” he says.

Yes, she’s wounded. So is he. So is everyone else near the wall. Riza looks to Al. He’s helping others out of the debris, linking his arms with theirs so that they can lean on him as they pull their feet from beneath stone, as they shake the feeling back into their legs. His face is smudged with dirt; his hair misty from the sand. He notices her watching him and gives her a reassuring smile. She returns it.

He’s a little beat up but he’s okay. The explosion had taken out a large chunk of the wall and choice portions of the ceiling. All things considered, a few bumps and bruises were the best case scenario. It looks like the alchemic energy had crawled up the wall and swelled outward at the crease where the wall met the ceiling, tearing them apart from one another. So instead of the energy bursting outward at level with those near the wall, it shot perpendicular to the ground — using the wall as a conductor — and the force of the explosion took already-unsteady pieces of the ceiling along with it. Neat.

Riza says, “I know where he would go.” Even though she only thinks she might know. It’s not a guarantee, nothing is, but it’s an idea. It’s a starting point. And she doesn’t know where Gina is (hasn’t seen her, doesn’t have the time to look) so it’s as good a guess as they can get right now. Better, actually. She should give herself some credit.

She knows Jaeger quite well.

Edward comes stumbling over the mess, shouting Al’s name. Riza is reminded once again how tall the young man is. His left arm, which was once frail-looking, is now as big as his right one. And he isn’t gangly like most twenty-somethings, he’s got a weight to him like his father. He changes every time she sees him and she has a sudden and fierce urge to pull him close. It’s been weeks since she last heard from him, and she wants so badly to apologize to him because surely his children are still in Xing, and surely he misses them. But now is not the time.

Her abdomen aches where Jaeger had aggravated her wound. She craves ice or liquor. Something to numb the pain. It’s spreading through her body like fire, her nerves passing the sensation along like a baton.

“You’re not going out there.” The general’s voice breaks through Riza’s musings. Her instinct is to think, You can’t tell me what to do. But rationale says that he can. He is her superior and while it was rare that he ever exert strict control over her, she thinks he would do it now. She knows he would do it now. She would do the same if their roles were reversed, truthfully.

Still, she has a job to do. Jaeger is her job. After everything she’s been through, all that she sacrificed to get here… He’s hers. The pain in her abdomen proves it.

It doesn’t make sense for anyone else to go after him anyway. The M.P.s are busy with clean-up, a sizable number of them are hurt, either from the ceiling or the fight from Flour’s untamed occupants, and the alchemists — Al and Roy — will be needed to find and safely detonate the bombs. Or, ideally, find and successfully deactivate the bombs. Whichever they believe they can do better. Or well. Or at all.

“I am going wherever I am needed, sir.”

The game’s been set and she’s already got checkmate. He knows she’s right. She sees it flash in the inky-black pits of his eyes. And there’s something else there too, flitting around the rounded edges of his eyes.

He’s terrified. He spells it out plainly in his gaze, which roams over her head to toe. He’s searching for new things: Scars, bruises, cuts, a premonition. No doubt he would tear the air from her lungs and carry her away to a medic himself if he weren’t so inclined to respect her autonomy. He’s probably daydreaming of it right now as he turns words over in his mouth, teasing out a sentence. Finally, when he’s found the courage, he says, “That’s an order, Captain Hawkeye.” The sentiment is weak. She’s already got checkmate.

“Respectfully, sir,”— and she means that — “but your orders are not being made with the safety of everyone in mind. If I may speak freely, sir,” — and she doesn’t wait for him to say yes or no — “you are being emotional. The longer we stand here arguing over what should be solely my decision the longer Jaeger has to get to wherever it is he’s going. I’m sure you’ve got the locations of his bombs. I gave that information to Lieutenant Catalina to pass on to Lieutenant Breda to pass on to you. You and Alphonse are needed at those locations, whereas the M.P.s are needed here.”

Roy sets his jaw. Bruised and bloodied but still cut thinly sharp.

“And I am needed where Jaeger is.” She finishes. He knows she’s right.

Roy’s mouth twists. Something shifts over his face, then—

“I’ll go with her.” Ed, tall and valiant and young comes between Riza and her general. He has an earnest look on his face. His eyes, though always piercing, are unusually severe.

“No,” Riza says. There was no way she was going to be okay with these boys sacrificing more for her. There was a chance Jaeger could hurt her or worse, that he could hurt Ed, and she didn’t know how she would live with that. Not well, was about all she knew for sure.

“You can’t go alone, Captain.” Ed clipped. “You have a gaping hole in your side.”

Riza is going to mention that it isn’t gaping, not technically, and that Al had done a good job pulling a thin layer of skin over it but she understands that’s a reach. It is dangerous, there isn’t much to be said to the contrary. Ed’s offer of help is a selfless one, especially as a humble father from the quaint town of Resembool. He has many things to lose by chasing a terrorist.

“This is not your fight, Edward.”

“We’re wasting time, Captain.”

Roy is a battle.

Edward is a war.

Riza sighs. It’s easier to concede now than to regret she hadn’t later. Besides, she reasons, she’ll have a weapon. Which is more than she’s had for the last twenty or so days, and she’s managed to survive those. Gunshot wound, knife wound, almost being choked out in the back of a vehicle notwithstanding.

“All right,” she says.

Roy grabs Riza’s forearm before she can walk away from him.

He looks like he did back then, all those years ago, minus the wrinkles coming together around his mouth and eyes. Thirty-five wasn’t old to most people. But Ishval veterans feel a lot like they’ve lived two lives already; like they spent a lifetime at home, and a lifetime on the sands. He’s thinner now, his hair a little too long, the bags under his eyes deeper than what she would consider to be normal. She wishes she could send him away to a medic or back to Central, but he won’t budge any better than she will.

He is pleading with her. Silently, like he does everything else.

“I’ll come back,” she says just quietly enough that only he and Ed can hear. Ed looks away, giving them as much privacy as he can afford to without also calling attention to them. Roy’s hand over Riza’s arm tightens. “I’ll come back this time, sir.”

Will she? She doesn’t know that for sure. She can’t know anything for sure. There is a chance that he might not come back to her this time.

It doesn’t matter. They have important things to do. It doesn’t matter.

Roy lets her go.

They watch one another for a minute longer, each sizing the other up, making quiet promises.

 Ed tugs a little on Riza’s shirt. “We gotta go, Captain,” he says.

Ed trades his brown coat for a black one. He tells the M.P. he hands his coat off to that it’s special, it technically belongs to his wife, and she’d kill him if he ruined it. He takes thirty seconds to fold the thing, careful to go along the creases so it doesn’t wrinkle. Roy says, “Winry’s put a lot of work into you, Fullmetal,” as he slips into a holster.

“Clearly more work than the Captain’s put into you, Colonel.”

It feels, all at once, like five years ago. Ed’s face flushes and he amends. “General, whatever-the-fuck.”

Riza and Ed start off in one of Jaeger’s extra cars. It’s a junker, but like all the other junkers in the lot, the keys are still sitting in the ignition. And Jaeger might be less inclined to flee if he sees one of his own cars. Maybe he’ll think one of his people got away, lead the M.P.s on a wild chase like in one of those radio shows.

It’s more likely that he’ll know exactly who is behind the wheel, but still it doesn’t make sense to take a shiny military vehicle. Gina is missing, and there was no way all of Jaeger’s men were captured, and strutting around Ishval in a glossy black car would be as bad as painting arrows that pointed to Riza that said HERE I AM, JAEGER, I’VE COME TO TOIL WITH YOUR PLANS ONCE AGAIN. HA-HA-HA!

Riza catches sight of Maria Ross bounding over the sands. She’s rushing Roy, her pockets overflowing with white, and Riza can just make out the shape of the general’s gloves as Ross pulls one from her pocket and helps Roy slip it onto his broken hand. Something inside Riza snaps like a twig, quick and definite. She tries not to think about seeing those flames come to life over these sands again.

Riza turns the car’s engine over. It sputters, black fumes seep from the exhaust pipe. It takes a few tries but eventually the car does her bidding. She can feel the hum of it in her feet, up her legs, all the way into her head. It makes her teeth rattle.

“Don’t approach him without my okay,” Riza says to Ed. She has to shout a little over the car’s roar. “He’s dangerous, Ed.”

Ed’s got a hand on the dash and another on the car door. Both curl into fists. “I know,” he says. “You’ve got a bullet wound in your chest. I know.”

Ishval whirs by in flashes of tan and blue and dull red: Sand, military, sand, mud roofs, stucco, sand, military, sand, sand, sand. Riza should feel more anxious but all she feels is a sense of calm. Jaeger has come apart like the flesh of her abdomen. He’s been cut clean open, rancid and rotten insides spilling out into the endless ocean of sand, but Riza has been put together again. She has the upper hand this time. She has direction, an aim, whereas Jaeger has a crumpled plan. Something that was build on paper and promise, nothing substantial like her connection to Ed and Al, or Ross’s to Roy, or Roy’s to her. Jaeger’s as flimsy as wet parchment paper.

Twenty minutes and they reach the apartment building where military personnel hunker down for their Ishval stints. Every military grunt has to spend part of their first tour reshaping Ishval, and the apartments were supposed to be a buffer for that. A way to appease the younglings fresh from the academy. To convince people who are used to air conditioning that stuffy ‘ol Ishval was just fine. However the complex is not very nice, all things considered. You can hear your neighbors through the walls, the carpet is as flat as concrete, and smells travel easily through the vents. The only positive is that the apartments come furnished, though the furnishings are the cheapest Amestris could have provided. The higher-ups did all they could to spare themselves a few cenz rather than give their men proper places to stay. That was something else to add to Roy’s docket.

Riza glances out the junker’s window and spies the floor where she had stayed. It wasn’t long ago that she was falling asleep on the lumpy couch in that apartment, her head resting on Havoc’s shoulder. That night could have happened worlds away for all she remembered of it.

“That place is kind of a dump.” Ed says. He’s craned his neck and is looking up at the tall complex. It really does stick out like a sore thumb in Ishval, where most things are built low to the ground to withstand sandstorms and the occasional dust-and-sand storms. It’s the size of something built in Central made out of material from Ishval. It looks empty, disingenuous.

“Stay close,” Riza says. She takes her gun from her waistband, checks her clip, and sets foot on the sidewalk. It isn’t long before she starts to hear the distant wails of bombs being detonated. Her palms starts to sweat; her heartbeat skitters. Everything about the noise recalls those tents, the iron stench of blood, the sweat-soaked soldiers gripping their weapons in chapped and bleeding hands. Besides the times she’s been to Ishval as a piece of its voice, Riza has never made a kind memory here. Everything she’s been here — everything she’s done — haunts her across the country, in her bed, in Roy’s. Perhaps that’s her divine punishment. Maybe she’ll be made to return to Ishval over and over, never freeing herself from the noise and the pungent smell of a past worth burying.

The sounds of the bombs are bloated, but dulled. And they buzz in her chest.

“They’re setting them off underground.” Ed says. He is, of course, right. The best way to avoid damaging nearby structures would be to dig holes to drop the bombs into. (Very, very deep holes.) There would be little risk if you dug deep enough and if you knew where to dig. Roy had some practice with this sort of thing back in the day, when Ishvalans were leaving bombs strapped to transport vehicles and crates of supplies and on their own bodies. Riza shudders.

She leads Ed across the street. They slink low like cats, afraid that a lurking Jaeger might startle and run off if he spots them. Honestly, Riza will be surprised if he’s made it to his destination before they do. She had been certain that she’d see his wounded body in the aftermath of that explosion at the Flour, but instead all she saw was a hole in the wall and another hole in the other wall and another hole after that one. He’d blown holes in almost every one of the Flour’s western walls and in the chaos managed to slip away in minutes, undetected by either the dozens of M.P.s or Riza herself. It’s enough to be impressive, if it weren’t already so terribly annoying.

Surely, though, someone would notice if a broken-nosed terrorist were thundering away in an old junker. So how did he manage to slip by?

Jaeger is full of many surprises, alkahestry and shoddy alchemy are a mere few. Maybe he has super-speed or can fly.

The merchant streets are quiet at this time of day. It’s too hot to be selling much of anything besides drinks in condensation-slick glasses and some dried fruit. A few old men are stationed at their pop-up shops. Riza guides Ed in and out from behind and between unoccupied shops and buildings to keep out of sight. It would be troublesome if a merchant went hollering at them, as merchants do, and drawing attention.

They clamber up the sandy hill past the line of merchants and come to the top, their boots covered in sand and half-sinking in it too. Ed is huffing at Riza’s side, his breath catching in the dry heat. It’s different out here than it is in Resembool; there is no moisture in this air. Ed’s lungs are probably on fire, his lips starting to crack. Again Riza wishes he hadn’t come.

“What is this?” Ed sucks in a breath and gestures to the bottom of the steep hill.

There, where the ground starts to level out, are water tanks.

And there, coming around the end of one, is Jaeger. Riza yanks Ed to the sand. He goes down open-mouthed and gets a mouthful of sand, of which he promptly begins spitting out.

“Don’t swallow it,” Riza says. “You’ll choke.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Ed says, letting globs of sand-filled spit roll off his tongue. When he’s finished combing the granules out of his mouth he says, “Is that him?”

Looking at Jaeger is like feeling coals heat up. At first Riza thinks she’ll be fine, and the fear will not be debilitating, and then, as time stretches, she gets hot. She remembers all of what he’s done to her, every searing look; the way his hands felt wrapped around her soft and vulnerable throat. But anger comes with the fear too. Anger, and a fierce desire to protect herself and those around her.

“He’s scratching something into the sides of them.” Ed says.

Sure enough, he is. Riza is too far away to make out any of what Jaeger is etching into the water tanks but she knows from experience that volatile alchemists cannot be trusted with anything they can use to make a circle. She had wanted to wait it out and spring herself on Jaeger when she was in a better position to protect Ed, but it doesn’t look like she’ll be afforded the luxury. Whatever it is Jaeger has planned with the water tanks, it isn’t good. She leaps from her place beside Ed. He grabs for her but misses just barely, his fingertips ghosting over her shirt. “Captain!” he squeaks.

Riza half-runs half-stumbles down the hill. Jaeger hears her and whirls around. His face is a grotesque play on what it once was. The blood layers over Jaeger’s sharp cheek bones, crusts the tips of his dark hair. His nose is nearly touching his right cheek, and his hands are bony, bloody, like that of a dead man. Riza brings the gun from her waistband to level the barrel at Jaeger. He grins, and it’s all red-stained teeth. His eyes are filled with malice. There are few things Riza can think of that are more terrifying than this man. Right now, though, he looks like a wild animal, and Riza has spent plenty of time hunting those.

“Whatever’s in your hands,” she says, “drop it now.”

“The hawk can’t see what I’m holding?” Jaeger purrs back at her. “Maybe she’s lost her touch.” His voice is rough out of his throat, spindly like the swirls on a screw. Riza cocks her weapon.

“Now, Jian. Don’t make me tell you again.”

His carefully crafted smile breaks for a fraction of a second, and then it’s back again.

“You’re calling me by my name now,” he says. “I didn’t know we were so close, my sweet Riza.”

He makes her stomach turn. She’s close enough to him now to see that what’s in his hand is a rock, and what’s crafted onto the side of the water tank is an array.

“Alkahestry,” Ed says, suddenly at Riza’s side. “That’s something long distance… I’ve never seen one exactly like it. It’s been modified. Probably to set off the bombs from far away.” Jaeger’s intense focus falls on Ed now. His lips pull down into an ugly frown.

“Little alchemist boy. Little orphan alchemist boy.” He sneers at Ed. “Where are your children, Eddy? Where’s your pretty wife?”

Ed means to make for Jaeger, but Riza places a hand over his arm and he stills. “He’s not worth it, Ed.”

“Tell me, Ed,” Jaeger goes on, fiddling with the rock in his hand. It coasts over one finger to the other. “How does it feel to have all that knowledge but to be as useful as one of these rocks?” He holds the little rock up in his hand, between two fingers.

“You’re twisted,” Ed snarls. He’s right. As undone as Jaeger has become in weeks prior, Riza’s never seen him like this. He doesn’t normally accost anyone but her or Roy. He must be grappling for control anywhere he can get it. It’s sad, really. A boy from a war-torn country being sent to live in the country that tore his apart in the first place. Riza wonders what sort of prejudice he must have faced in Amestris, all those years ago. Gina had said something about bullying, but Riza could no better understand what that meant than she can understand what it would mean to be a man who belongs to Ishval.

She is neither, and Jaeger is both. And a part of her hurts for him. A small, almost imperceptible part. But a part nonetheless.

“You’ve spent weeks being the monster under my bed,” Riza says. She’s sure to watch both Ed’s movements and Jaeger’s, keeping an eye on his hands especially. “You’ve been haunting me.”

Jaeger smiles. “I’ve been punishing you.”

“You got cocky,” Riza says, “and you screwed up. You’ve lost the game, Jian. Put the rock down.”

Jaeger still does not let the rock go, but he drops his arm. It hangs limp at his side. His eyes fetch Riza’s and they hold one another’s gaze. The space between them is pregnant with tension. Riza feels it ice her bones.

“I’ve only known fury,” Jaeger says. His voice has dropped to a near-whisper. “That’s all I’ve known, Riza Hawkeye. My whole life it’s been flames and it’s been fury.”

There was a time when Riza used a pocket knife to bite into the ripe flesh of a rabbit. She had never skinned a rabbit before, or any animal for that matter. Cutting into it felt intimate. Like the rabbit was giving away all of it’s secrets, soft and squishy and warm. The truth was that the rabbit had no choice, that Riza had caught it in a corner, pinned it under her knee and slit its throat. She still has its mummified foot resting at the bottom of a box in her closet.

That is what this interaction with Jaeger feels like now.

“There is nothing I can say to you, Jian.” Riza says.

Jaeger peers up at her from beneath his lashes. The blood on his face shines orange and bright red. His cheekbones cast long shadows in the shape of daggers below his eyes. Riza does not deserve to win this fight, but she has.

It happens faster than Riza can anticipate. Jaeger slams his open palm over the array on the water tank and it sparks blue.

Riza pulls the trigger automatically, muscle memory guiding her way, and in a final act of kindness she shoots Jaeger in the hand and not in his chest. He pulls his hand from the array screaming, his blood pouring from the wound. Behind him, water leaks from the water tank in a pulsing wave where the bullet hit it.

Jaeger comes wildly at Riza, teeth bared. She doesn’t want to shoot him to kill. She doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of dying without paying for what he’s done — without answering for his sins.

She steps away from him too quickly. One ankle catches the other and she falls. She lets another bullet loose and it plants itself in his thigh, but the bullets are light enough that it probably glanced off his femur and buried itself in his hip. He howls, his legs buckling beneath him sending him tumbling to the ground.

Riza ends up sprawled in the sand, panting, her side lit on fire. Jaeger is in the sand too, gripping his bleeding thigh with his bleeding hand. Ed goes behind him and wrenches his arms behind his back, shoving a knee between Jaeger’s shoulder blades. Jaeger thrashes against him but Ed’s hold is tight.

“You could have just died,” Jaeger spits. “You could have just died in those mountains like the good dog you are.”

Riza goes to Jaeger when she’s caught her breath. His head is lowered because of the position Ed has him in so Riza lifts his face by a fistful of his hair.

“You belong to me now,” she says. “You will always belong to me.”

The tent is quiet, but outside everything is screaming.

The doctor — a sweet young woman with cherry red hair — gives Riza a shot of local anesthesia. Then she uses a scalpel to reopen Riza’s wound. Riza doesn’t feel any pain, just a strange tugging sensation. Pressure. She stares at the top of the tent the whole time the doctor works and watches the nylon ripple in the wind. The sunlight streams in cream-colored, warm, softer with the buffer of the tent. She eventually closes her eyes.

Her wound needs to be packed is what the doctor says. It needs to heal from the bottom-up in order to prevent future infections forming in the pocket it would leave behind otherwise. Riza doesn’t mind — the anesthesia feels nice, and fixing Al’s fix now will save Riza future doctor’s appointments later.

“No baths for six weeks,” the doctor says.

“No lifting over ten pounds for six weeks.”

“Try not to twist your torso for a while.”

“Do not push or pull things. Move as though you’re living in a tube.”

The whole process doesn’t take long. Riza hands Jaeger off to M.P.s and five minutes later finds herself in this tent popped up in the middle of the merchant’s street. Clearly someone (clearly Roy) exaggerated Riza’s situation a bit, making it sound like Riza had been shot over a day ago and hadn’t been worked on at all since. The doctor was eager to take blade to skin, eager to force Riza on her back on one of those foldable cots, her body sinking into the fabric. The doctor’s brows had pulled together anxiously above her green eyes as she worked, delicate fingers pushing cotton into a hole barely three centimeters wide but most definitely a few inches deep.

“This isn’t new,” Riza says. “Jaeger patched my lung so I wouldn’t die.”

The doctor’s forest green eyes flit to Riza’s face and then fall back. Probably she’s wondering why a man like Jaeger would rescue his enemy. She doesn’t understand that it was never about rescuing, but about control. Everything had always been about control.

“You’re lucky,” the doctor says as she finishes. She tapes dressings over Riza’s ribs. She packs her supplies into a little white box. Riza stares at it, this tiny thing with scalpels and cotton and dressings and anesthetic. A life-saving box. “You could have drowned on your own blood.”

Riza wants to say that it wasn’t luck that saved her from drowning but an Ishvalan doctor. But she hasn’t seen Opal or Gina since the military stormed the Flour. Since before then, actually, when she was dying on the concrete, her only audience Havoc, a gaggle of people who hated her, and a bunch of warehouses. She thinks maybe Opal and Gina got away. Maybe they fled. She hopes they did, for their sakes. And so for their sakes she won’t mention them, not even the good they did. The military wouldn’t see any of it that way.

We need you. That’s what Gina had said to Riza. Back then Riza thought that meant they had plans for her, something in store that Riza would find neither pleasant nor comfortable. It doesn’t seem like that is the case.

The doctor leaves. Riza’s gaping hole cost the young woman ten minutes of her time plus however long it took for someone to erect the tent and cot. Riza rolls her shirt back over her abdomen. She hasn’t been alone in the tent more than thirty seconds before Roy comes in, the blood on his face cleared away, his knuckles red and raw where they peak out from the edges of bandages.

His face is dusted with bruises.

At first Riza is annoyed. Can he not leave her be? Trust her to her own self? And then she amends because, well, isn’t that what he’s done for weeks?

“General Mustang,” she says, cordial as always. “Is there something I can do for you, sir?”

“Grumman gave me three minutes.” He says. He comes toward her, slow and deliberate. She can see just how small he is in the cascade of light pouring in through the filter of the tent. It deepens the shadows under his eyes, makes him look ancient, tired. She stands to meet him halfway, suddenly afraid he might fall over or disintegrate or both.

He grabs for her when he’s close enough, his hands coasting up her arms until he has her face in the meat of his palms. His broken hand is hot through the bandages, fiercely angry. His other hand is rough. Calloused. She touches them both with the tips of her fingers.

“For wha—”

He kisses her.

He is not gentle. He is desperate and hungry.

He tastes like ash and weeks of absence; like stale coffee and summer heat. His hands map Riza’s every curve, all the lines over her hips and cheeks and arms. He takes fistfuls of her hair to pull her close and then releases her. He does this a few times, and each time he tilts her head back farther, and presses his lips to the ghostly scar that rounds her throat. She sighs when she feels the backs of her thighs meet the edge of the cot behind her, and her hand shoots out to steady her. She can barely keep up with this man — with his feverish need. Eventually he pulls away from her, his breath spilling out over her lips, and lifts her onto the cot. He places his hands on either side of her and cages her between his arms, then leans forward and kisses her once again for good measure. Her body hums its agreement. 

“That doesn’t seem like a productive way to spend your allotted three minutes, sir.”

Riza expects Roy to smirk or to chuckle, but he instead rests his forehead on hers. “I don’t care,” he says.

Riza pries one of his hands off the desk and touches his ruined knuckles to her mouth. They’re red hot against her lips, swollen and angry. She says, “I’m sorry.” For everything. For surviving the north but pretending she didn’t. For expecting so much from him.

Roy moves close and takes her face in his hands again, tipping her head back so he can look her in the eyes. A tear escapes from her, and Roy thumbs it away as it makes its descent. Somehow Riza knows that this is the way the two of them were always meant to be. Connected, even at a distance; separate, even when they shared a soul.

Jaeger had tried his best to rip Riza away from herself. He wanted so badly to be the only thing that tethered Riza to anything; to her identity, to Jaeger, to Rebecca or Havoc or Roy.

Jaeger didn’t do a thing in the end.

Chapter Text

He finds her on the balcony, puffing on a cigarette.

“You don’t smoke,” he says. “At least, you didn’t smoke. Y’know, before.”

She laughs a little. “There’s a reason you’re gunning for the führer’s seat and I’m not, General.”

Roy smiles. “Because I’m prettier?”

Riza elbows him. “Because you can handle the attention. Actually, because you can play into the attention. They start fawning over me and I get jittery.” She sucks on the cigarette again. He hasn’t seen her do that since Ishval, way back when. He nudges her to ask for a hit. She obliges.

It doesn’t taste good. It never has.

Führer Grumman wanted to claim Riza’s success as his own. It was a ploy, and while Roy admonishes Grumman for it he also admires him. It’s what Roy did when the Briggs soldiers won Central on the Promised Day. It’s what Grumman did when Roy won the people’s favor on the Promised Day. It is a legitimate strategy, swooping in to thieve someone else’s triumph as your own. And it works.

Grumman’s been in all the papers talking out of his ass about sending Riza north (Roy’s idea), conversing with General Armstrong, and planting Roy’s men in Ishval (again, Roy’s idea). The truth was that Armstrong and Roy had to fight tooth and nail to get their way those first few weeks. Roy had even gone so far as to send men into Ishval under Grumman’s nose. There was no way Grumman would openly admit that, though. If he did then he’d be admitting to weakness, to frailty. He’d be telling everyone that General Mustang did not fear his strong hand, and that the führer’s control on Amestris was thinning. Both those things were true, however the public wasn’t ready to know it yet. It’s probable that they never will know it.

Führer Grumman is a clever man.

“What did the führer have to say?” Riza asks, stomping out the white butt of her cigarette. He knows she’ll want to stay outside on the balcony, but duty will call her back to the ballroom eventually. She’ll sip on wine after that. Red.

“Things about change,” Roy says, leaning his forearms on the balcony’s rail. There were five balconies at Centurion Ballroom. All are rectangular outcroppings on the building’s southern-facing wall. Their railings are all adorned with pretty white flowers Roy doesn’t know the name of, and vines with flat green leaves. There is a flower pot in each corner, home to very green, very smelly plants.

Beyond Centurion, Central City is flecked with life. Headlights. Lamps. Illuminated windows at Hotel Bell. Children with flashlights chasing frogs at the park. Tail lights and street lights and the glowing eyes of alley cats. Riza’s hand brushes over the top of Roy’s.

“Change?” She says.

“It’s going to happen soon,” Roy tells her.

You don’t need to me to tell you who’s name I’m throwing in the hat. That was what Führer Grumman actually said. He’d dipped his head and whispered it low into Roy’s ear. You don’t need me to tell you.

It was almost nauseating how close Roy was.

It hadn’t been his idea to throw this soirée. It was Grumman’s, of course. People needed to be celebrated! Riza especially.

She has two medals pinned to her jacket, one for valor and one for sacrifice. Roy wonders idly if there’s one for reliving trauma, one for feeling abandoned, one for getting stabbed and shot and other things.

“What did the führer have to say to you?” Roy says. He needs to take his mind off Riza’s last few months or else he’ll become too angry to function.

“He’s promoting me. Or rather, he wants to promote me.”

That isn’t unusual. The public will be expecting that, as well as the higher ups.

“It’s about ti—.”

“To the rank of colonel.”

“Oh.”

That is unexpected. Certainly Riza deserves such a promotion. She’s always been a leader, whether she believes it or not. She commands men well. She’s great at compartmentalizing. She’s organized, intelligent, and disciplined. She will make a great colonel… But she will be stripped from Roy’s retinue.

The whole point of her joining the military was to work under Roy.

Until I reach my goal, he reminds himself. You don’t need me to tell you.

“Are you going to accept?” He asks. He tries to sound impartial. He might have failed at it if he hadn’t sucked down two glasses of bourbon already tonight.

“I think so,” she says. Warm summer air flutters her bangs, pulls her hair from the nape of her neck. “You’re close, General. I can take over reparations in Ishval while you run the country. I’ll report directly to you, if that’s what you want. But I’ve been thinking…

“What will happen in Ishval if we’re both sequestered in Central headquarters? I can only think that Jaeger was born because we weren’t watching, sir. Someone needs to be there, watching.”

She takes a breath.

“I think there was some merit to the things he had to say. I think we’ve relied so heavily on one another that we’ve stunted our growth in places. You’ve nearly reached your peak, sir. I’d like to find out where my peak is.”

She doesn’t need to explain. Roy understands. He does, he understands.

He’s proud. His chest swells with it.

Although he’s also hurt, in a way. He will miss her.

“I think I’m going to put a request in for Havoc.” She says. Roy crinkles his nose.

“Adding salt to the wound, I see.”

“I’m going to take Rebecca, too.” She goes on, ignoring him, a small smile tugging at her lips. “And Ryder. I may have to wrestle General Armstrong for him, but I’ve got my heart set.”

“Ryder? Lieutenant Ryder?” Roy’s met him once. The man is nice enough, sort of goofy. Handsome. “I think he has a crush on you.”

She laughs. “I think it doesn’t matter, sir.”

He’s about to retort when someone raps on the doorframe. He turns, and there’s a waiter standing in the doorway. Light frames his slight shoulders. Roy’s suddenly aware of the noise from the party inside, filling the balcony with voices and violins.

“Captain Hawkeye,” the man says. “Someone slipped this letter into my coat pocket, sir. It’s addressed to you.” He holds it out to her.

She takes it. “Thank you.” She says, then shoos him away. Sure enough, her name is scrawled over the white expanse of the envelope. Pretty cursive, Roy notes. Riza slips her finger beneath the lip of the envelope and tears it away in one swift movement.

“‘Hey, Em,’” Riza reads aloud. “‘You served your purpose. Thanks for that. We’re in my mother’s hometown. It’s really humid here. Tell that general of yours to do some good for once. I’ll be rooting for you from the other side of the desert. Best wishes, G.’”

Riza presses the letter to her chest briefly before folding it up and depositing it into her pocket.

“Who was that?” Roy asks. “What did they mean by ‘for once’?”

“I think it’s time we return to the party, sir.” She says, placing a hand on his arm. She disappears into the ballroom’s belly, crystallized chandelier light engulfing her form.

Colonel Hawkeye.

When Roy finds her again later, as guests are leaving and the only musician left is a drunk piano player, he takes her in his arms and they dance. It’s polite, of course. It’s as platonic as they can make it. It’s congratulatory, he says loudly to the emptying room.

Only she can hear him say that she’s magnificent.