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When Riza was young, she was rarely ever sick. To have been afflicted by illness would have inevitably starved her father, she being the only reminder that he did in fact have such a mundane thing as an appetite, and invariably would have caused their entire household to rot in its base. Were it not for her own distaste for the dust- never ending, constantly piling - or the vigilant eye on all that seemed to go awry with the manor, it would have surely been gone. And subsequently, Riza Hawkeye was never sick, because she couldn’t be.
When Riza- now a woman, strong, made quiet by time- found herself in bed for any longer than her normally scheduled sleep, she couldn’t seem to sit still.
She spends her time thinking how her back will scar over, in valleys or marks, like millions of bullets having grazed her skin, or killer’s hands scratching out the ink; She wonders, in dread, horror.
The Flame Alchemist, the one who damned her there just as she had him to her bedside, insisted on her rest. No matter how terribly Riza wanted to argue this, to verbalize her endless objections, she could only ever seem to muster measly apologies, meek agreements- hoarse whispers in the night when she knew she wouldn’t remember in the morning and he certainly would .
She was terribly, awfully enclosed in a prison of bed sheets, medications, and bloody bandages- all the more crimson with each change.
She hardly knew where he slept, he who watched her when she was and watched her when she wasn’t. She hardly knew when he slept.
Ever since the fires in the desert sand, and the screams that reverberated off the dunes, she couldn’t find remorse for the man who had once been a friend.
She remembers in a daze sometimes, the moment her gun scope had found his face. A friend’s face, too. Instead of shooting him, ending him, scuffing the fires , she shot the Ishvalan man trying to do the very same thing. She doesn’t cry about it now, in her bed, but she cried about it in her cot and her shabby, sandy tent.
When she was young she willingly gave Roy the secrets, those dear, dear things (so insistently embedded in her flesh) because she loved him. She saw something in those eyes, storms trapped in sockets , that were churning with passion. Hope. Something her pitiful, broken hands could never learn to bear.
She watched those hands break under her weight, watched storms turn against her. He tore away at the world with that cursed knowledge, the god awful damnation of flame alchemy. She became a witness through her gun sight.
“Drink.” he interrupts her memory with an order, voice hoarse, entering the room with an exhausted stumble and shutting the door roughly behind him. She pulls her gaze away from the ascended cloud of dust shining through the window light, and looks pathetically at her untouched cup of water, avoiding his face.
The Major, surely soon to be promoted, heaves an exasperated sigh as he opens one of the room’s cabinets and tugs out bandages. His eyes, tired and red around the edges, glare down at her, “I wish you wouldn’t be so stubborn.” His voice is angry, and she hates it. As if he harbors the right to feel defeated, to feel as beaten down as she, standing next to her burnt, mangled body.
She scowls, voice just the right amount of dehydrated and affected to leave her practically mute to retort, and leans up towards the nightstand to grab a hold of the cup. She drinks reluctantly, she won't admit how much her throat did need it. She tries to ignore his approving glance as he continues to search for something in the cabinets. She pretends to not have drunk all of the cup’s contents in her thirst, and haphazardly places the cup back on the table, not once returning his looks.
He carries over the supplies he gathered, settles them on the nightstand, and she tries to push herself up from her pillow. She knew her bandages were going to need changed today, yet she still didn’t try to make last night any less difficult for him.
She still wonders why he even bothers returning to her apartment, day after day. She only shows him disdain and curt responses, hiding slights she wishes she had the heart to spit. He knows it too, the way he leaves the room quickly once making sure things are settled, waiting until she is asleep and no longer able to glare at him. Then she hears him return in the night sullenly to keep his watch. She never stops him.
Gently, he grasps her shoulders and helps her sit up, hesitantly gauging her reaction, but Riza knows she doesn’t have the strength to lift herself on her own so she says nothing. She begins unfastening the bandage at her front, and turns herself away from him. At this point, modesty seems unnecessary, but she tries to keep this distance from him nevertheless.
He opens the new bandages behind her, and they repeat a rehearsed duet. Eyes avoiding, sometimes searching but never receiving. He touches a burn, and she hisses in pain, he murmurs an apology, angry with himself, she shakes her head with eyes shut. She can’t do this on her own, she admits to herself, everyday, reminding the enraged, restrained part of her that wants to hurt the killer beside her.
When the bandages are changed, he cleans up, and asks her if she feels okay. She nods slowly, feeling like she could easily hurl. He closes the cabinets, and leaves to wash his hands. He hurries, as if he hates the blood, her blood , coating his fingers.
They hardly speak beyond this routine and in the nights at her bedside, but Riza knows that their suppressed words are bound to breach their stubbornly sealed mouths. Riza, who has never been one to not speak her mind, knows that her words will ignite in a wildfire, one that not even Roy could contain with his fire-bringing hands. Though, she’s not a fool to think that he doesn’t carry his own hatred for her. In the bile stuck in his throat when the bandages fall, and the weight he now has to bear because of her. When they were children, their lives always found a way to sneak into the other. She wonders how it became so different all these years later.
Roy with his younger, steadfast heart, found something in his master’s daughter, in that time not so long ago. He would read his textbooks to her late in the night, and eventually, inevitably the books would slide away, and only their own words would fill the stale air of the Hawkeye mansion. So much to say in the way of senseless bickering, and deep conversation, it’s hard to determine when exactly they lost it.
When he left you, a voice in her head suggests, before another can chime in, When he betrayed your trust.
Journeys out to town that were despised then, unless they were in each other’s company, become the moments she most wants to drift back to. Gentle dreaming, hands grazing the tall, overgrowing Arnica next to the path. Roy once picked some, and designed a bouquet just on the way to the general store. Riza teased and pestered him to find out who they were for, and he was insistent on her not knowing.
Upon their return, when Roy went up to the attic to continue his classes, Riza found the short bouquet resting in a cup on her nightstand. She remembers the way her heart leapt. Out of her own embarrassment, she wouldn’t mention them to him.
Riza drifts off to a relieved sleep, now that the bandages have been changed and her throat is feeling better, and Roy will probably be leaving soon. Her pillow has become very comfortable under her head now.
He re-enters the room loudly again, always does, thinking its some kind of warning before he enters it, but he stumbles and slows when he sees her tired eyes.
“They’re expecting me back at the office. I won’t be long.”
She sighs, stiffly trying to get more under the small bed comforter, “It’s fine. You can drop by tomorrow.”
She sees through her almost closed eyes a dejected expression, but it quickly morphs into something stubborn, and he looks young, “I don’t want you moving around whatsoever. I’ll be back with something to eat,” his tone is akin to the one he uses to command orders, “I left some pain-killers on the nightstand, and the phone’s right-”
“It’s my apartment, I know where the phone is,” she snaps without meaning to.
She has closed her eyes now, but it’s quiet in her comment’s wake. She regrets it.
“I moved it closer to you, I meant,” he audibly gulps in the room’s silence. The door creaks on its hinges, “Please, Riza, call me.”
She doesn’t respond, and the door eventually shuts gently behind him. She opens her eyes, and through the door hears him grab his keys off her counter and put on his coat before leaving her apartment.
She hates how angry she is. She hates her own vulnerability when she needs him, desperately wants him, and that comfort he once brought her. When they were children exchanging bouquets of flowers, conversing behind closed doors in the expanse of their mansion.
An unforgivable war of endless fires separates them now.
She takes in a harsh breath, and the cool air hits her dry throat with a jolt of pain. Her frustration only grows as she reaches up for her cup of water, and tries to sit up to drink it.
With the combined effort to do things that she isn’t exactly supposed to be straining her back to do, the edge of the glass collides with the edge of the nightstand in cruel and excessive punishment. It falls, now finally colliding with the ground , in a clash and splatter.
She buries her face into her pillow and groans. There’s no one to hear her distress, though, as has been with Roy’s form roaming the outside of her bedroom door, always listening, always guarding. His absence seems unnatural to her, she admits.
So, Riza thinks that she couldn’t possibly allow the idea of Roy returning and saving the day. Once again, coming to her supposed rescue. She absolutely couldn’t.
In defiance of this entire idea, she pushes herself up, her back screaming and every other part of her sore, aching body having been trapped to a bed for the past week. She gasps in pain, but imagines his stupid, pity-filled face when he sees her and that damn broken cup. It fuels her just enough for her feet to touch the ground.
She hitches on a breath, as she’s new to this position for the first time in a week. The skin on her back feels so thin and brittle under the bandages. She almost regrets the effort instantly. Yet, the ever resilient Riza Hawkeye wobbles onto her feet, because she and Roy had to have assumed that it was only a matter of days you could confine the soldier to a bed.
She uses the bedpost to stable herself, and then the wall, and then the doorframe. When she reaches the knob, she realizes her hands are shaking. Is she in pain? She doesn’t know, thinking maybe the pills she took are clouding it out.
She’s suddenly very, overwhelmingly thankful that her apartment is as tiny and practical as it is. Upon successfully exiting her room, she can quickly stumble onto the kitchen counter and depend on its stability for her weak, weak legs. There she finds, strangely, a pack of cigarettes, and a newfound desire to interrogate her superior about them. Since when did he smoke? How did I not know?
Something boils under her skin in response to this, but she ignores it the best she can as she reaches for a towel and completes the other half of her journey in the return to the scene.
Luckily, the cup, in its demise, hadn’t shattered to a million pieces, but rather three large and very sharp ones, and the water certainly hadn’t been filled to the brim. She’s thanking whatever god there is watching this disaster when she suddenly notices something strange on her nightstand.
Riza isn’t sure why now, of all times, this is occurring to her because certainly in her imprisonment she would have noticed the object’s presence right next to her. But, no, she hadn’t and yes, she almost drops the towel holding the remnants of the cup.
She catches herself, though, setting the towel and glass amidst the clutter of the nightstand what with spilled pills, various medications, the phone dragged a bit too far to the edge, and towels dried with horrors that ought to be burned to cleanse.
She sits on the edge of the bed, and grabs ahold of one of the dried flowers that rests on the stand. They were so very close to her bed, had she even bothered to turn her head for more than a moment, she might have noticed them.
The petals of the Arnica are tattered and torn away, some pieces rest on a napkin as if set out for her. She instantly thinks of something else, twirling the trimmed stem between her fingers. Her own gifted flowers from a past day probably have long rotted into the lawn she threw them into.
She remembers being only sixteen when Roy, the eighteen year old apprentice, came storming into the house. Black and blue and furious as he was, he almost got away with entirely avoiding her insistent string of demands for an explanation, for a purpose. They argued all the way up the stairs, Riza having left the dinner on the stove in her haste and determination, when she finally managed to corner him near their adjacent bedrooms.
And, Riza, as much as a recluse as she admitted to being, was not ignorant in the pastimes of a young, charming Roy Mustang. She would hear her classmates, most noticeably one named Amelia , swoon in their seats about him.
Riza knew Roy loved this attention, where a small town devoured all that was new and different and interesting as the young alchemist was. On days her father’s classes weren’t scheduled, he slipped out of the house, slithered into the crevices of their town that the classmates would rumor about for days afterwards.
Riza knew this, knew how terribly second-thought she was to Roy Mustang who probably only saw her as a confidant he could come back to when there was something to complain about. Regardless, she persisted with him, because Roy was very much the opposite with her, her only significance.
Their quarrel lasted only a little bit longer, until Roy thought it pointless to continue as your father is here, this is ridiculous, he’ll hear us. In which, Riza who had no real fear of either men in the house, scoffed. She was smug, and he glowered.
Eventually, she remembers more vividly than the rest of it, they ended up sitting on her bed, and Roy admitted it all to her. A classmate of hers, one long since forgotten, said something about the big house away from town that hid a deranged man and his even more strange daughter, a common thing for that boy to say, she knew well enough.
Roy reasoned his behavior and wounds with only that, it making enough sense for him, and Riza was left silent. They sat in that quiet for a moment, Roy running his fingers across his bruised cheek, cringing. And she, in her avoidance of anything regarding him, maybe in embarrassment, gratitude, relief for something she didn’t know, found her eyes falling on the vase holding the dried, and withered Arnica he had picked her. She was overcome with a very sudden realization.
Riza leapt off the bed, startling him, and tugged out a flower from the vase, and brought it to him. He took it, but squinted up at her, asking silently. She leaned over his hands, tearing off a fragment, remembering her mother doing the very same thing for her, when she came home with bruised knees and a pitiful face.
She told him to eat it, and when he shows his obvious reluctance, she told him what her mother once told her. Arnica is medicinal when taken in small amounts, she explained, and deadly when taken in abundance. She started her usual string of reassurances, and the insistence that it was the least she can do when he abruptly took her face in his hands. And he brought her real close, so close she could smell the alcohol from his lips, and then he leaned in and kissed her nose, her cheek, and she was frozen in his palms. A frail and giddy part of her teased him, you missed , but it never reached her voice. He laughed and pulled away, maybe, not completely, at all, sober, she thought. Her heart beat fast and she still stared, with those wide, wide eyes.
She also thought that she may not have been as insignificant in the young alchemist’s eyes as she might have assumed.
Those very same flowers become her solace in the months after the engravement of flame alchemy onto her spine. Her mother always dried the arnica she would pick in the sun, then grounded them to be kept in jars. Simple painkillers to get and to make without committing to the trek to town, which Riza would refuse to do in the wake of the tattoo, always feeling like they could see right through her shirt, the disgrace. She felt dirty, and found the only way to cleanse herself was to seclude her entire being from everyone and everything.
The Arnica Roy had given her saved her the struggle of leaving the house, the winter stealing all signs of any flower from the ground. She took it in remnants, hiding away in her bed until finally remembering her mother’s words. Too much of a good thing, is not so great a thing, Riza. And she remembers what she said to Roy, that an abundance of arnica is fatal. Each remembrance bringing her more solidly to the question of why?
Why take so little to stifle the pain? Why wait in constant, ceaseless anticipation for Roy’s letters, his words from the academy while she lay in her bed, her father wasting away in the basement just below her. She was nothing more than a slate, a book to someday be opened by the wrong hands, seen by the wrong eyes , and to be the cause of destruction. She twirled the final flower in her hands, and considered eating each and every part of it.
But she didn’t. She dumped the vase out her window, and returned to her bed.
Her father dies in the spring, and Roy returns to her, dressed in blue.
Let me show you something , and she gave him her burden.
Riza, now rid of the tattoo and war-torn, twirls the new flower in her palm. She’s angry with herself, very suddenly, very righteously. She thinks of her friend, the bruised alchemist that punched someone for saying something wrong about her, and the man who would have taken all the weight from her hands if he could, if he had the power. She thinks of the arnica on her nightstand, and the phone dragged so close to the bed, and the cigarettes on the counter, and how she’s so, so, so sorry .
How awful she has been to him, from the moment she found him in that hot, hot desert, and till the train ride home. She dragged him into something she couldn’t have expected him to want, but wished oh, so horribly much that he would just suffer with her. He would heal her, and save the day, and share it with her. How is it fair?
The fires of Ishval seemed only a manifestation of her mistake. His hands were the ignition, but she was the key.
She feels like she could vomit, she hates herself, shedding her clothes, and forcing him to see, to take, take, take it from her. She hates him, killing innocent lives with a power, that horrifying, awful power. She loves him , kissing her in a stupor on her nose, and keeping the phone close to her bed. She is sorry, he runs from the blood that is hers , coating his hands, and she only gives him resentment.
They’re both killers now, though.
Who’s to blame?
She thinks, both of us , as she lays her head on the pillow, the pills kicking in.
She wakes groggily, to the clanking of glass, and the movement of feet.
She jolts awake, instincts telling her to ready herself, but it’s only Roy cleaning the towel from the nightstand, looking startled by her sudden movement.
“Sorry, I uh… Did you break this?” and he’s whispering for some reason. She can smell the smoke from his jacket, and something angry fills her veins again.
She nods, embarrassed, and he gives her that look that she had been avoiding. He carries the towel out, returning quickly with a new glass of water, setting it down on the nightstand. There is a stool dragged from the kitchen to her bedside, but he dare not sit in it now, not with her eyes on him. He waits until she’s far into sleep to come near her. She wishes he didn’t.
He stands awkwardly in the dark of the room, night now looming over the city. He must have rushed out of the office as quickly as possible, she assumes, his hair misshapen from the wind still. He’s about to rush out of the room, as quickly as he came, to wait for her to go back to sleep, but she stops him with a question. A mundane thing, an easy thing, “How was work?” It’s so simple that it’s flustered, and it’s stiff, not feeling right.
He pivots on his heel, very, very confused by the interaction, and stumbles over his words for a moment, “It was good.” and then he takes a breath, slows a little. “They promoted me.” He releases a smile, a quick thing, only slipping past for a second.
She smiles in her subtle way, too, even if she saw it coming. She’s proud of him. She’ll admit it now.
He opens his mouth for a moment, but then closes it, the room is even quieter than before, though the atmosphere is heavy around them. It’s heavy with the words they’ve wanted to pour out for days. Roy hesitantly sits on the stool, maybe feeling the same way she is.
“I’m going to have to assemble a team.” he muses to her. She feels teleported back to her old, old bedroom where she and the young alchemist would lay and talk for hours, days. She feels light, laying on her side and looking up at him, the window giving light to his features. He looks weary. “I don’t think that will be so hard, I know some good soldiers.” his eyes linger on hers for a moment longer.
She nods, agreeing with him. As charismatic, and driven as she knows he is, there will be an abundance of soldiers jumping for the position. She thinks of resigning before that happens, she thinks of a lot of ways she could escape.
His small conversation morphs into something more somber, now, and his eyes droop, shoulders falling. He looks so tired, and he sighs, “ Riza …I...”
She tries to beat him to it, “It’s okay.”
“No, no it’s…” and his lip does that thing, the very same thing when she first showed him her tattoo, dropped her shirt and revealed what had happened when he was so very far away. Deaf to her pleas, screams. “I’m so sorry.”
And it’s the first time he’s said it since the night of the fire scorching her back. She was too paralyzed to respond to him that night, instead burying herself in his chest, tearing at his shirt. Crying, sobbing, begging for him to stop, and he couldn’t .
His head cranes near to hers, until it falls onto her hands, his shoulders are shaking, but his hands are still at his sides. “Forgive me, Forgive me,” he whimpers, cries into her palms.
She maneuvers so that her head is closer to his, and she’s holding his, keeping him steady while her hands shake.
“I’m sorry, Roy, I’m sorry, too .” she’s chanting quietly in his ear, and he brings his arms up and around her head, cradling her cheek, stroking her hair. They’re apologizing profusely and repeatedly into each other’s shoulders, hands, necks until they’re only just saying each other’s names in the dark, dark room.
They don’t speak of it the morning, but the air seems lighter around them.
Two weeks later, he asks her to be his eyes, guard his back, watch his hands, and she accepts, thinking he looks more awake than she has ever seen him.