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{summer}
They knew him as the deserter. As the cur, the craven, the coward, the rabbit-hearted thief who had sworn his fealty and worn the blue at his shoulders as any other of them, and then discarded a sea of navy behind him like a trail of crumbs to the manifestation of fear. Funny. The only sea in the desert sands of silica quartz. As the State Alchemists—their names checked off on the lists of equipments, worth five hundred men in the same manner that the convoys were worth a hundred—could tell her, and did.
Sitting on overturned crates, they clinked bottles of liquor filched from the cellars beneath the storehouses of burnt cadavers or sneaked in surreptitiously from the officials’ tent. Shared stories as if they were still students in the Academy. Snickered about their superiors. Offered crude illustrations of the valuable oddities and minutiae culled from their marks. Gestured wildly about the manners in which the marks had struggled and strained and given up: flies buzzing in a cobweb; mice clawing at their throats from the scaled coils tightening around their necks; horses sinking into the bog with the water rising over their heads.
They licked the glued ends of envelopes. Inside of manilla packets, nestled amongst letters with half of the words blacked out and censored, they stuffed medallions and scraps of fabric and children’s toys for the children at home to gawk at.
Of course, there existed the conscripted men and women who fought to their final breaths against the blood that slicked their palms, and there existed the men and women who had shouldered rifles over their backs with stars in their eyes and cast rifles to the sand with tears on her cheeks.
But the rest, one by one, became monsters.
Ripped open their chests.
Withdrew their beating hearts and crushed them down to slivers of scarlet stone before tucking them back amongst their lungs, charred from smoke and blackened from ash.
They staged competitions with one another: most taken out in a day, rack up ‘em points, bet the higher-ups loving hearin’ about this kind of shit. They waved letters from their wives and husbands at home, from their boys and girls in a paradise years and kilometres removed, in silent games of house: working men, waiting for the day’s end horn and the supper bell, sending back money and toys for the kids back home. They traded stories of heroism: should’ve seen the explosions, damn have you seen the Flame Alchemist work?, heard the Hawk’s Eye just up and blew out the old record for most taken out in a day, God that Colonel Armstrong took out a fuckin’ squad of those reddies with half a canister of phosgene and a broken gun—she shoved that bastard in the barrel and made the shot, and it fuckin’ worked like a charm! Their eyes glowed, from the stories or from the liquor or from the bonfires, and glancing around no one could tell the misguided innocent from the psychopathic monsters.
Not that there lay a difference.
One by one, they awoke the primal darkness within their breasts. To survive.
Survival of the fittest, she wrote on the inset of her arm in ink, on the inset of her mind in blood. Years later when she heard the words over again she would lean over the desk with her trembling arms encircling an imaginary being, as though protecting some sacredly innocent version of herself that had never existed on the face of the Earth. She would feel the bile rise in her throat, but whatever tears she would want to weep had long since dried beyond the zenith of summer’s end.
{autumn}
When the Flame Alchemist had finally agreed to cease exuding his fury on a people at large and begin considering the matter on a soldier-by-soldier basis—as though he had a right to present judgment day on anyone, much less his subordinate officer, but God had abandoned her and her guardian angel had perished with her birth, so she would take whatever avenging demon she could get—he missed the initial snap and had to blaze her back a second time. Her hands shook against the shower tiling, twice over, yet her knees never buckled, but she closed her eyes; she lowered herself to the nadir of the tub. Without speaking she lifted her hand to the shower string. Pulled. The water—water again, after the desiccation and drought and damned desert of desolation—pricked her skin with heated needles.
She passed out.
By the time the pain ebbed to a scarlet thread around her throat she awoke face-down in a wet bathtub with the shower plinking drops of agony into the small of her back: By some miracle the water had run out and the bathtub had drained adequately for her to survive.
They investigated and she claimed a jerryrigged firecracker had exploded on her back the instant she’d turned her back. Figures, she said with a laugh. Maes Hughes removed his square-rimmed spectacles, studied her from behind irises a cats’-eye olive green. “A firecracker,” he repeated in the timbre of a man whose weariness had ground him to the bone.
“A firecracker.” She cleared her throat. Parched. “Not in celebration, mind, but I needed something to do with my hands after . . . after all of the . . .” She motioned.
Wiping his spectacles with a dirtied cloth, he settled the looking glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “I understand.”
That made one of them. Oh, she understood: Retribution for her sins. She would bear the weight of her murders until the instant she took her final breath. The scar would hurt like thunder until it never healed. The blood on her hands would burn her flesh and haunt her dreams until her skin crumbled in her grave. From silt to silt, from dust to dust. Somehow she would find the strength to carry on, her heart fullmetal, despite the consequential gravity of her past.
And for what? No matter her actions she could never suffer as much pain or die as many deaths as she had inflicted upon the world. Equivalent exchange existed in tales, fantasies, legends. Oh, the Flame Alchemist believed that the threads of fate were woven as rationally as the so-called Truth—and from his lofty perch, perhaps they did—but the mortal humans who lived near to the ground would know the truth.
The government would sprinkle her with medals and the public would pepper her with affection. The Hawk’s Eye, they called her. The Heroine of Ishval, read the fifty-cenz stamps imprinted with her silhouette. False praises, false hopes, false ideals. Them admiring her to lift the burden of the genocide from their shoulders; her believing them to lift the genocide of the genocide from her own.
Yet she could not pull the trigger. On others, yes, of course, the bullets raining because she sought her enemies and she had trained and she was good, damn good. But on herself? No. Never. Either she valued her life too highly or—or she could not quench her fear. Not of pain, or even of death, but of nonexistence.
So instead she converted her core. No longer would she live for herself, but for someone else, someone whom she had to protect. She could forgive her sins—if temporarily—because she would bear the consequences of her actions selflessly. As she told herself whenever her fingers quivered on the safety.
Who—?
The Flame Alchemist. The vision to change the country, or so he said. As long as she could pretend she survived solely to bring him to power, she could forgive herself for breathing.
They’d called Major Armstrong a coward, but perhaps he was the only one with any measure of courage.
{winter}
“Major Miles,” she said over the liquor, wine for him, champagne for her.
“Lieutenant Colonel Miles, actually.” He smiled and offered his gloved hand; she responded in kind. “And congratulations on yours as well, Captain Hawkeye. I’ve heard much ado about you—and seen you in action, on that dratted Promised Day—and it’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”
Behind them a music filled the atmosphere with a curious electric charge. A new sort of tune fresh from Creta or Aerugo or one of those nations into which Amestris had carved crescent moons of blood as well. And then had the gall to carry away the spoils of music, of art, of literature.
The music sounded pleasant enough to her ears.
“I hear that you and General Armstrong are getting along well.” He sipped. The liquid rippled as he replaced it on the bar counter.
She laughed. “So that’s why you’ve come?” Lowering her voice, she leaned forward. Her hawk’s wing bangs shaded gold over her left eye. “Because she and I have been sleeping together, and you feel the need to intervene?”
He raised his hands in mild defence. “Please. You think me that kind of man?”
“No. But I’ve found Amestris that kind of unforgiving nation.” Funny, that the people would worship her for murder but ostracize her for love. The irony tasted metallic on her tongue. “There’s a reason we’ve been silent about it for so long.”
“I’m her lieutenant. If she so much as sneezes, I’ll be at her side with a box of tissues.” He paused. “Even if I’m on the other side of the country at the time.”
At that Hawkeye chuckled, because she understood. She tapped the rim of the glass; the champagne bubbled like vaporising blood. “Dedicating your life to the brilliant and lazy-type makes the day difficult.”
“Dedicating your life to altering the fabric of the country is as difficult.” They lapsed in silence, he for a quiet contemplation, she for the feeling of having been slapped.
In truth, the past several years serving Ishval had proved more challenging than she had ever imagined. Of course she would never repayment her debts, and the day the transmutation would recoil at last, equivalent exchange could never again balance. Yet watching the community build itself from the ground up, and seeing her name and the Flame Alchemist’s name in the papers as the great saviours and redeemers of the oppressed people, and never hearing the names of the men and women of Ishvala who spearheaded the restoration except whenever the papers needed to martyr the great Amestrisians who spent their time and energy graciously volunteering to assist in the great reconstruction of the decimated Ishvalan peoples—
She deserved nothing. At least General Armstrong had the decency to funnel funds into the region without proclaiming it her personal moral battle; Armstrong would win the Führership on the mere basis of existing in Central while the Flame Alchemist took the glory of Ishval’s supposed salvation. Perhaps on some level he believed that he were helping, truly.
He’d always made himself out a hair’s breath more naïve than he would care to admit, and to take the final scrap of innocence from the boy who had acted as her surrogate elder brother for years would be to break her oath of living to protect him.
At her silence, Lieutenant Colonel Miles pushed his shades up onto the crown of his head and in his scarlet irises she saw nothing but genuine concern. The worry for her—for her—left her sick and pale and trembling. Excusing herself, she made it to the bathroom before she lowered herself to her knees to vomit, to worship a porcelain god because whatever other God may have once existed had died long ago.
The years of peacetime had softened her. Perhaps the time would come when she would cease to winter.
{spring}
“Führer Armstrong.”
Olivier Mira Armstrong lounged in the Führer’s imposing chair as if she had been wrought from gold and steel for the express purpose of settling her weight upon the seat. She crossed one leg over the other, folding her arms over her chest. “Captain Hawkeye.”
Hawkeye saluted. Lieutenant Colonel Miles, temporarily returned from Ishval along with the captain and General Mustang for the inauguration, made a faint noise about tea—three cups—saluted in turn, and exited. The door locked behind him.
“Riza.” For the first time in their relationship forged of ice and fire Armstrong crunched through her beloved frost to kindle the flame. Hawkeye bridged the distance between the door and the desk. Looped around the corners. Bumped her hip. It ached down her leg and she welcomed the pain. “It’s great to see you again.”
“You’ve gone soft,” Hawkeye murmured. Not quite true: Armstrong held her spine erect and her mouth in a thin line. Yet the years in Central had melted the sharpest tips of the Führer’s glacier. Or perhaps their love was to blame. Stretching out her arm, Hawkeye offered her lover her palm, and the Führer slipped her fingers into the sniper’s palm.
“I’ve adjusted,” Armstrong allowed. When she stood Hawkeye was dwarfed if for a moment by her golden magnificence. That strange emotion she’d learned to call love gathered up her insecurities and loathings, dropped them from the window to the gutter below. When Hawkeye slid her arms around Armstrong’s waist and buried her nose in Armstrong’s smell, she felt—
Home.
“Olive.”
Armstrong smiled against her neck, the curve of her mouth warm and welcome on her skin. After the heat of Ishval, Central deadened Hawkeye into a perpetual winter over again. “If you say that again I may have to bend you over this desk immediately.” Her smile morphed into a smirk. “Break it in, as it were. I’ve missed you.”
“I know.” Hawkeye swallowed, hard. Though she ached for Armstrong’s heat after these lengthy months of separation, she reminded herself of the secondary reason she had come. “But I need to ask you something, first.”
The Führer traced a thread of fire from the lower edge of Hawkeye’s jaw to her collarbone. “Mm?”
“The country needs reform.”
Armstrong snorted; the puff of her breath cooled Hawkeye’s skin and she curled her fingers around Armstrong’s hips. “Of course. I did not become Führer to act as a glorified seat-warmer, you know.”
“I know.” Her voice trembled. Damn her, she could hear the quiver in her voice, could hear the shiver that started at the base of her vocal cords and ran upwards through her throat until her entire form shook with the effort of not ripping apart entirely at the seams, until she had broken down once more like when she believed her reason for surviving—to protect the Flame Alchemist—had failed and she had to face living for its own sake over again. Armstrong stepped back, away from her. Grabbed the captain’s shoulder roughly to shake her.
Hawkeye’s knees did not buckle, but she closed her eyes. Had she spoken to the Flame Alchemist, she would have gazed into his stare, recalled their earlier conversations with the confidence of alliance. But with Armstrong the stakes differed: She could not watch her lover see her die. For the plan she would roll into action would make her no better than the walking dead. “And when you’ve turned Amestris over, I have a favour to ask of you. Something that . . . something that General Mustang promised me. And that you’re going to promise me.”
She felt Armstrong clasp her hands between two palms rough from years of the same line of work. Murder. Extermination. Handmaidens of the Angel of Death. “Anything for you, Riza.”
But not for her. Never for her. The instant she lived for herself her sins would catch up, overtake her, crumble her to smoke and ash, from silt to silt, from dust to dust.
{summer, revisited}
She chose not to wear the blindfold; she had swallowed her fear under supposed selflessness for far too long and even still she could never repay the death and destruction her hands had wrought.
Her heart thudded in her chest as she stood against the tiled wall. Her skin ached with gooseflesh. Her legs trembled from the desire to flee, every nerve firing, every muscle screaming for her to move, to run, to live.
Dying, willingly, went against every fibre of any living creature in this universe or any other. Faintly she wondered if the universe itself, too, feared non-existence.
When she was little she believed in God. After her father forced her watch a decayed cadaver of blackened flesh and rattling breaths form in place of the mother he promised, she believed in the Truth.
Armstrong’s execution would follow, in some days. Hawkeye had fought, had begged and pleaded and screamed for Armstrong to place her execution last: She remembered the Flame Alchemist after Hughes’s death, remembered how he had broken as though the bullet through Hughes’s chest had shattered his own spine in the same instant. The Flame Alchemist, after all, had retained humanity enough to mourn; she silently thanked Hughes for his years of friendship and camaraderie, donned black for his funeral, and moved on.
She’d watched too many die, really, for any one to affect her anymore.
And Armstrong, Olivier Mira Armstrong, her Olive—no matter how thick she claimed to build her ice, she had retained her humanity. No, she had lost her humanity and then reclaimed it by some power Hawkeye could not fathom. But Armstrong would weep without tears and cry without noise for Hawkeye’s death, and because Armstrong bore the title of the Führer, Hawkeye bore the title of saved from grief.
At least the Flame Alchemist had gone before her. At least he would not have had the chance to mourn.
Her regret, then—the sole regret she kept in her heart of hearts while the men in black lifted the hollow barrels of their guns, silver like the pocket watches of the State Alchemists.
In the final moment her knees did not buckle, but she closed her eyes. After all of her time, her sins, her legacy of blood and fire, she was still afraid, not to die, but to no longer exist.
To leave a world imperfect. To leave a lover grieving. To leave a debt unpaid.
Yet she herself had never been perfect—though the people both within and without seemed to believe so—and if inhumanity carved the world, then the world must carry imperfection in its very soul.
The thought comforted her as the bullet entered her heart and she gave her last breath, on the final day of spring, just before the summer would come again.