Archive of Our Own

Roy couldn’t get to Central fast enough to see the crime scene or examine the body before the funeral. He’d read the reports; a few witnesses had heard a shot but no one had seen the killer, or at least no one was coming forward to admit it. The body had been found by a couple walking their dog. The animal had come back to them agitated, blood staining its paws. Then they’d seen the body’s feet poking out of the telephone booth and that was when they’d called the police. The autopsy report stated that there was a stab wound on the right shoulder and a bullet wound on the chest—the killing blow. The bullet had gone right through the heart. The report concluded that the death must have been almost instantaneous. Given the angle, the killer would have been facing Hughes, only a few meters away—to manage that shot, Hughes would have needed to stay still for a moment. Why would he stay still? Why not defend himself? A knife was found in his hand!

One of Hughes’ subordinates claimed that she’d seen him moments before the estimated time of his death. He was already bleeding from his shoulder, then, and had said that he wanted to call the Fuhrer’s office, but he’d changed his mind before the call went through. He’d left the building, presumably heading for the phone booth where he’d died, and where he’d tried to call Roy from. What did he want to tell me that he couldn’t say on the office’s line?

The questions wouldn’t let Roy sleep at night.

Before the ceremony, he and Hawkeye went to visit Gracia and Elicia Hughes. Elicia had gone for her customary jumpy hug to greet her ‘Uncle’ Roy, but she acted more subdued than usual, a cloud of confusion making her gestures hesitant.

“Is Daddy with you?” she asked, looking around Roy for her father.

Behind Roy there was only Hawkeye, who crouched to say hello to the little girl. While she chatted with Elicia, Roy shared a hug with Gracia, holding the trembling woman in the protective crook of his arm so that her sobs would be muffled against the heavy fabric of his uniform.

“I’m sorry,” she eventually said, composing herself with visible effort. “I’m a mess.”

“It’s all right,” Roy said. “It’s normal that you would be.”

She smiled tremulously at him. “You’ve been such a good friend to him.”

“I—”

“No, you have been,” she insisted, as if he’d been about to deny it. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant to say. “Maes had such respect and affection for you.”

Roy could feel Hawkeye standing behind him. He’d heard the swishing sound her uniform pencil skirt had made when she’d gotten to her feet, and her presence was a solid weight at his back, her eyes making the nape of his neck feel warm. He knew she was looking at him, thinking, without judgement, of the exact same things that were going through his mind.

“I felt the same about him,” he told Gracia Hughes.

Finding both Hughes and Hawkeye on the Ishval battlefield had been something of a mixed blessing. He’d expected to come across Hughes at some point. They were of the same promotion after all, and the conflict had taken such a turn that all hands were needed on deck. Which was the reason for Riza—no, Hawkeye—being drafted. Her presence was an unexpected heartbreak. He remembered her, young and trustful as she told him she would show him her father’s research, would offer him that gift that had allowed him to become the Flame Alchemist he was known as today. Mixed blessing.

Hughes and Hawkeye’s presence seemed to have dragged him back to the realm of humans. They were all older and changed, none of them unscathed by the things they’d seen and done, but they could put their fragmented souls together and feel almost normal and whole again. It helped to have people to talk about things, whether it was their current situation or the dreamland of civilian life. It helped Roy out of the isolation that his status as a State Alchemist forced on him, and it helped Hawkeye be someone else than the Hawk’s eye, high up on her perch, doling out death from above.

The nights were cold. They lit up fires and the soldiers clustered around them and drank too bitter tea, tapping their feet on the ground to keep the blood flowing. The sand was a curse, getting inside their boots, under their clothes and rubbing their skin raw.

“Hellhole of a place,” Hughes murmured in his tin cup. “It makes you wonder why they die to defend it.”

“It’s their home,” Roy said. “Their religion was born in this desert.”

“I know,” Hughes said, shaking his head. “I know, I don’t mean it. I want to go home so badly it makes me say things.”

They were alone next to their particular fire; without Roy really noticing it, every other soldier who’d been drinking with them had retreated for the night. Other fires were still alight and shadowed soldiers sat around them, but Roy couldn’t see Hawkeye anywhere. Beside he and Hughes, she didn’t socialize much.

“So, you and Hawkeye, huh?” Hughes said as if he could read Roy’s mind.

“What about me and Hawkeye?” Roy asked, irritated for no reason.

“I mean—have you ever…? You knew each other from before, didn’t you?”

“So did you and I,” Roy replied.

“True, that.” Hughes tipped his cup at him.

“She’s my master’s daughter. She’s so young.”

“Not too young to kill, apparently. And she isn’t your master’s daughter anymore.”

“These are hardly the right circumstances for romance,” Roy said, getting more annoyed by the second. His face felt hot and he wondered how the fire could warm it while leaving his hands and feet numb from the cold.

“Who said anything about romance?” Hughes said.

Roy let out a loud breath. He knew he was being obtuse, but he didn’t care much for the subject. He’d always been a driven man; there’d never been much room for anything else, and a war didn’t feel like the right moment to change that.

“And I bet you don’t have anyone waiting for you at home either.” Hughes tutted, shaking his head like a disapproving grand-mother. “This is the surest way to get killed, Roy. Men who have something to fight for are the most likely to survive.”

“Says who?”

“Trust my experience.”

“You’re hardly older than I am. And why would ‘having something to fight for’ translate only to ‘having a girlfriend at home’? Maybe I believe in this war.”

“But you don’t.”

They were silent for a moment. The flames from their fire licked the rim of the tin can it had been built in, and a part of Roy wanted to snap his fingers and make the flames jump. It was an insane impulse and it made him worry that he’d come to enjoy the powers his alchemy gave him too much, and that one day he wouldn’t be able to stop himself anymore. Would succumb to the crazed blood-lust that affected Kimblee. Would all this one day start to feel not only normal, but desirable?

Behind them one of the soldiers barked a laugh, the sound startling and almost unrecognizable as human.

“Also, I didn’t say it had to be a girl,” Hughes said, his words even but very quiet.

Roy turned his head to look at him. Until now, they’d both looked at the fire rather than at each other, as a lot of soldiers tended to do, especially this late at night. It was all too easy to get lost in your own head, but suddenly Roy felt like he’d been drawn out of it and forced to fully become aware of Hughes’ presence at his side. Hughes was looking at him with a smile, tiny flames reflected on his glasses. Was he making fun of Roy? He usually was, having made it his mission to force Roy to stop taking himself so seriously.

Roy had always been a driven man. It didn’t mean that he didn’t want things.

He was reminded at this moment, rather incongruously, of the day Riza—she’d been Riza, then—had shown him the coded tattoo that her father had made of his research on her back. How she’d turned her back on him and taken off her shirt and bra, demurely folding her arms over her bare chest even though he couldn’t see her front from the angle he was standing. His attention had been mostly focused on the tattoo, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself from feeling—something. He’d felt acutely, almost unbearably alive, his senses attuned to every signal of hers—the line of her neck, the curve of her spine, the angles of her shoulder blades; her soft breathing, audible in the oppressive silence of the room, a little too fast, almost jerky; her scent, not the heady, cloying smell of perfume, but something fainter and subtler, the herbal fragrance of a soap. She was shaking a little, maybe from the cool temperature, and he’d wanted to take her in his arms.

He was feeling it again right now. This painful sensitivity, this sensation that he’d been asleep before but was now startlingly awake. Hughes smelled like blood, sweat and ashes, and that dry sun-warm desert scent. The fire made shadows dance over his face. The air between them was hot, sizzling, like the lingering heat that existed when Roy made use of his flames. Roy leaned forward, almost unconsciously—

—and caught sight of the white corner of the letter that Hughes had received from his sweetheart, poking out of his pocket. Gracia. The one he was fighting for.

Roy stood up, throwing the rest of his cooling tea in the fire. “I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

He didn’t look in his friend’s direction. He didn’t want to see if he looked disappointed, or relieved, or if the intensity of the last minute had been all in Roy’s head.

“Good night, Roy!” Hughes called after him as Roy walked away.

Roy and Hawkeye had to spend the night in Central before they could go back to East City. Gracia had told them they were welcome to stay with her and Elicia, but they’d declined, arguing that they didn’t want to be a burden to her when she was already housing family members who had made the journey to Central City especially for the funeral. This was not the true reason of their refusal.

Later that night, Roy was sitting by the window of his hotel room, looking out on the city. He’d taken off the top part of his uniform, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. A glass of whisky sat untouched on the table at his elbow. He wasn’t sure he wanted to drink it; drinking would put him to sleep, and sleeping meant dreaming too.

A soft rattle on the door wrenched him from his contemplation. “Come in, Hawkeye,” he said.

She’d changed out of her uniform and into a white blouse and beige dress pants. Her hair was loose, making her face look softer and somehow younger—even though as a younger woman she’d worn it short. She smiled at him and sat at the table across from him.

“I see that you can’t sleep either,” she said.

“I didn’t even try,” he said.

“I tried but couldn’t. Reminiscing, you know.”

He did know. Hughes’ death seemed to have opened the dam on the flow of his memories. When his mind wasn’t buzzing with questions about Hughes’ murder, it was stuck in the past. Obsessing over what ifs.

“I’ve never felt guilty about Gracia before,” he said. “Thanks for backing me up, by the way. I don’t think I could have stood staying at their place.”

“I did think that this was why you seemed so uncomfortable. There’s no reason to feel guilty, though. Nothing happened.”

“I don’t know, maybe guilty isn’t the right word.” Maybe jealous was a more appropriate one.

She looked at him, with that air of serene compassion he wished he could imitate. He knew it was just an air, though. She was haunted by the same demons he was. As she’d told him once, the war had never really ended for her. He took advantage of the moment to observe her in a way he rarely allowed himself to do, looked at the new lines at the corners of her mouth, at the shadows that nestled in the hollow of her throat, at the way her hair reflected the light. Suddenly he was struck by the thought that he could lose her too, as easily as he’d lost Hughes, and his hand sprung forward to grab for her. He didn’t take her hand, like in an ordinary gesture of seeking or offering comfort, but instead he circled her wrist with his fingers, as though he wanted to keep her from leaving or to pull her into him.

“Colonel,” she said, fondly reproachful.

“Lieutenant,” he replied with a hint of playfulness. He could feel the brittle bones of her wrist, so delicate it seemed like he could crush them by squeezing too hard.

This would be so easy. They both wanted it and had wanted it for years. But they’d also made each other a promise that they wouldn’t let anything get in the way of their lifelong project of reforming their country from in the inside. Hughes’ death had only added to the work pile. If they succumbed tonight, this would either morph into something that would muddle their priorities, or it would remain a one-night stand that would cheapen the depth of feelings they kept locked inside; something that would tarnish the memory of Hughes and what had existed between them.

And of what had almost transpired between them.

Roy snapped his fingers and the flames roared and billowed. The screams of agony were ear-piercing but fortunately short-lived; the kind of death the Flame Alchemist gave was painful but quick. Roy didn’t bother checking for survivors—no one survived the heat at which his flames burned. Instead, he went for the blue-clad bodies of the soldiers he’d tried to defend. The first one was very obviously dead, wide open eyes turned skyward, the jaw shattered from a bullet. The second one… Roy checked for a pulse and then shook his head. One more failure. And the third one was a familiar face.

“Hughes!” Roy exclaimed, reaching for his friend’s shoulders, his pulse suddenly racing like a panicked horse. “Hughes, can you hear me?”

Hughes coughed and his eyelids fluttered open. He saw Roy and smiled, surprised and pleased. “Roy, buddy,” he said, as though they’d just run into each other in the street.

“Don’t move,” Roy ordered. “I need to see how badly you’ve been hurt.”

Hughes submitted himself to Roy’s examination with surprising good will. It turned out that he’d been hit by a shard of rock that had splintered from a wall when a bullet had ricocheted on one of the stone buildings. The wound on his head bled abundantly, and the fact that he’d lost consciousness indicated that he probably had a concussion, but he was otherwise intact.

“Who else was sent with you to secure this district?” Roy asked, after telling Hughes about his two dead comrades. “Any other survivors I should be looking for?”

Hughes shook his head and then winced. “No…. Or rather, yes! Little Riza was with us. She was covering for us from one of the nearby buildings…” Hughes tried to push himself up with urgency. “Some of the Ishvalans were looking for her! They were searching the buildings to get to her, and—"

“Calm down,” Roy said, pushing him back down. “I’ll go check on her.”

Finding Hawkeye was a matter of finding Ishvalan bodies full of bullets holes and then figuring from what angle the bullets must have traveled. A three-story building stood mostly intact in the middle of the rubbles from its neighbors, and Roy headed for it. The area was as silent as death, but Roy still kept his thumb and middle finger pressed against each other, poised to snap at a moment’s notice, all of his senses in alert.

He climbed up to the building’s last floor and had to step over bodies to get there. He found Hawkeye, looking unhurt but keeping herself very still. The body of a very young man, so young he had probably still been in his teens, was sprawled at her feet, half of his face blasted from a shot.

“Riza,” Roy said gently. He hadn’t called her Riza in years. “Let’s get down, okay?”

By an unfortunate turn of events, they were stopped from leaving the area by the beginning of a sand storm. They had to take refuge in the building where Riza had been, in a room on the first floor where they were rather sure that they wouldn’t get buried by the sand, but that didn’t have any dead bodies in it.

It was impossible to tell what the room had been used for before. It was devoid of any furniture, save for a broken chair. There were two narrow windows that barely let any light in, especially after the storm started in earnest. They made a fire using the wood from the broken chair, as much for the light it provided as for its heat.

Riza thawed by increments, slowly coming down from the killing trance that she used to do her job as a sniper. When she started fussing over Hughes’ head wound, Roy knew that she was feeling herself again.

The evening progressed lazily. They listened to the roar of the storm outside, conversing quietly with long bouts of silence. Roy found that he almost didn’t want the storm to let up. It wasn’t that their circumstances were comfortable—the fire was slowly dying and with nightfall came the cold, unrelentingly numbing. But he felt out of time, out of the stark horror of the present, and in company of Hughes and Hawkeye he thought that he didn’t really want for anything. There was nothing outside of here that he missed much.

“We should huddle for warmth,” Hughes said. Roy groaned. “What? You know that this is the surest way to fight the cold.”

Were his words slurring a bit? Beside a fierce headache, he seemed to be doing all right with his head wound, but Roy knew how tricky this kind of injury was. He inched closer to Hughes, trying to get a look at his pupils.

“I knew you would see it my way!” Hughes exclaimed. “Riza, come on, get on Roy’s other side. Right, right—isn’t it better like that?”

Roy was stuck between Hughes and Hawkeye, shoulder-to-shoulder, and the position was both comfortable and incredibly awkward. He had to open the collar of his uniform, suddenly finding it hard to breathe. Hughes chuckled warmly, then cupped the back of his neck with a heavy, calloused hand.

“Relax, Roy,” he said.

He didn’t take his hand away, and Roy didn’t really want him to so he didn’t try to pull away. On his other side Hawkeye was breathing in the quick, hitched way that she’d breathed on the day she’d taken off her clothes to show him the tattoo on her back. He focused on it almost at the exclusion of anything else, focused on it as he reached up and clasped Hughes’ wrist in his hand, rubbing his thumb against the protuberant bone, and then as he reached for Riza and let his hand curl around her knee. Her breathing quickened, and it was hard now not to recognize it as arousal. He was aroused too—violently, absurdly aroused given the situation. All of them were clothed, no one had said or done anything untoward. Riza leaned against his side and Roy sucked in a breath. He glanced at Hughes, who looked back at him with his eyes wide from something Roy couldn’t quite identity—was it excitement, fear, surprise? His fingers clasped Roy’s neck more tightly, almost in a convulsion.

For a suspended moment, a whole horizon of wild possibilities was open.

Who knew what could have happened? But then they heard someone come crashing in the staircase. They scrambled away from each other and Hughes and Hawkeye grabbed for their weapons. After investigation, they found an Amestris soldier half-mad from the sand storm. He’d wandered blindly to their building after being caught in the storm. His name was Clerke and he was a stocky little man, prone to nervous laughter. His presence made Roy both feel angry and ashamed of his anger.

They stayed in the building until the violence of the storm ebbed and faded.

Gracia insisted on accompanying them to the Central train station when they left. There, she hugged Roy tightly and he held her in his arms for a long time, feeling like he was holding an ailing bird. She hugged Hawkeye too, telling her, “You look out for him, all right?”

“Until my last breath,” Hawkeye said, with a little too much solemnity for Roy’s tastes.

Gracia turned toward Roy. “And you find who killed my husband. Who—who murdered him.”

“I won’t rest until I do,” Roy said.

Who and why, because the second part haunted him just as much as the first. Why kill an officer right outside HQ? Why take the risk of attacking him inside the building? This was insane and incomprehensible. Thinking about it made anger seize Roy’s insides, almost strongly enough to overcome the grief.

On the train, Roy looked out the window at the train station shrinking as the train sped up, Gracia’s solitary figure becoming indistinct in the distance. A chocked sound from Hawkeye made Roy turn toward her. Her eyes were wet, but she wasn’t sobbing, and there were no tear stains on her cheeks. She mustered a tiny smile for him.

“Are you all right, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s just—I was just thinking—” She shook her head. “It’s silly.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I was just thinking about everything he’d done to be able to come back. Everything he’d gone through—to end up like this. I guess it was the train station that made it fresh in my mind again.”

This wasn’t anything Roy hadn’t thought himself, and he told her so. But she’d composed herself already, no trace of her momentary lapse in control. Roy looked again out the window but the train station was out of sight now. It felt like only yesterday that they’d done this trip in reverse, coming back from the East after the end of the war had been proclaimed. It was the first time Roy had met Gracia.

The trip had felt like a dream. Like at any moment, some brass-button was going to come into their wagon and announce that it was all a big joke, and that they were meant to return to the desert and stay there until the end of their lives. The desert was one of those places that felt like it was meant for the end.

No such things had happened. Hughes had chatted the whole time, talking mostly about Gracia, his fiancée. Roy thought of Madame Christmas, his adoptive mother, for the first time in maybe weeks. It was difficult to imagine her as anything but phlegmatic, but he wondered whether she had worried about him, about the sort of welcome she would reserve him. On the seat across the both of them, Hawkeye was reading, a faint, unconscious smile on her lips.

The train station in Central was crowded in a way that Roy wasn’t used to anymore. The sheer amount of bodies pressed together on the platform, the shouting, the odors of sweat and perfume, were almost enough to make him jump back on the train. Hughes laughed uproariously at his discomfort and dragged him by the arm through the crowd, Hawkeye on their heels.

A joyful voice pierced through the general hubbub. “Maes!”

“Gracia!” Hughes shouted back.

They ran to each other and she leaped in his arms. She was a lovely young woman—Roy would be the first to acknowledge that. Chestnut hair, hazel eyes and a smile that could light up the whole city. These were Hughes’ own words, but they were true enough. Once the introductions were made, she greeted Roy and Hawkeye almost as effusively as she had her fiancé and invited them both to her place.

They exited the station onto the busy streets of Central. Roy watched the young couple walk a little ahead of him, hand-in-hand. He was all too aware of Hawkeye’s presence at his side, at the distance that they scrupulously kept between them. The path that lay in front of him was long and tortuous and he couldn’t afford to be distracted.

“Hughes!” he called before the decision had even fully formed in his mind.

Hughes let go of Gracia to backtrack toward him. “Yes?”

“I just remembered that I need to visit my mother.”

“You’ll have all the time you need to do it later,” Hughes said. His expression was unhappy, his brow a little furrowed, as if he could tell what it was really about.

“She won’t be happy with me if I make her wait any longer than necessary. She’s not the kind of person you want to get on the bad side of.”

“Roy.”

Roy softened his tone as much as he dared. “We’ll see each other later.”

“You’re not getting rid of me this easily,” Hughes said before he let out a quiet, self-depreciating chuckle. “I guess I should get used to you getting your way. Once you become Furher, you’ll be downright unbearable.” His eyes crinkled behind his glasses. “Don’t make me wait for too long, Roy.”

All the breath trapped in his lungs, Roy dared holding out a hand to cup Hughes’ cheek. Gracia stood a few meters away, waiting for them, but hopefully the angle at which they stood would hide the gesture from her. Hughes’ skin was smooth under his palm, as he’d shaved himself with painstaking care before they left. Roy felt his jaw move as he swallowed

You shouldn’t want too much, Roy thought. And the bigger the things you wanted were, the fewer they had to be.

“I’ll see you later,” Roy said, but he meant ‘goodbye’ and knew that Hughes knew it too.

“Are you leaving too?” Hughes asked Hawkeye, who nodded.

“I don’t want to intrude on your reunion with Gracia,” she said.

“You wouldn’t intrude,” Hughes protested.

“She’s as lovely as you always described her,” Hawkeye said.

The three of them separated then, on the sidewalk by the Central train station. They would see each other again, of course, many times over the years, but something ended at that very moment. Something that had never even managed to begin, but an ending it was all the same.

“Hawkeye,” Roy said suddenly. “You remember what you promised me?”

“That I would shoot you in the back if you happened to err from the right path?”

“I’m holding you to that promise, Lieutenant. I have a feeling that I will need it more than ever.”

She was silent for a long moment. He was looking out the window at the landscape unraveling along the track, giving her space.

When she spoke, her voice was cool and smooth like the dormant surface of a lake. “Until my last breath, Colonel.”