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Roy lives in a brothel. No one outright says it, not even Roy, but it’s obvious even to someone who had a childhood as sheltered as Riza’s.
He somehow failed to mention it, all the years he was living in her house.
It hardly seems important now, when he’s as broken as she’s ever seen him. During the war, she could get him to focus on her for a few minutes, hours, days… always just long enough to keep him fighting, to keep him alive. Here, now, he barely seems to see her.
“Roy?” she whispers. He looks up at her from over the rim of a nearly empty glass. His eyes are bloodshot and hollow, and he flinches at the sound of his name.
She runs her fingers up his jawline, pushes his too-long hair back behind his ear. She’s tempted to kiss him. It wouldn’t be the first time he tasted like alcohol. But instead, she just settles back on her heels as she kneels on the booth seat. He’s tucked into the corner, curled away from her, lost in his own nightmare. She understands that. Ishval had a rhythm to it, an exhausted grind that helped to numb them to the reality of their actions. It was all heat and sweat and smoke, and water that tasted like grit and the metal of their canteens, and the kickback of her rifle in her hands, and the friction between finger and thumb as a spark turned into a flame. Actions and reactions, but very little time for consequences.
The consequences are heavy now, in the rainy cold of Central. The rhythm is gone, leaving them spinning out, clawed out from the insides by guilt and grief. Are you allowed to grieve for people you never knew, when it’s your fault they’re dead?
“Roy,” she repeats, and he lets out a little sound something like a whine, or a whimper. Riza bites her lip. “I’m here, Roy,” she sighs. “I’m right here. K?”
He nods slowly, and downs the rest of his glass. Riza lays down on the booth seat, her head now grazing Roy’s hip. He stares down at her. “Ri?” His voice is rough with disuse. He almost never talks, since they left Ishval. Not that he was a picture of verbosity before. Both of them are generally good with silence. But there’s silence, and then there’s this.
Riza lets her gritty, sleep-starved eyes drift closed. “Mmm?” she asks. But he doesn’t say anything. He was just checking in, apparently. She breathes in and out slowly, resting in between him and the rest of the world, unwilling to leave his side. They kept each other alive in Ishval, when Roy drank one bottle of rotgut after another and Riza almost-but-didn’t, more than once. Almost-but-didn’t go AWOL, almost-but-didn’t discharge her weapon against regulations, almost-but-didn’t deck a superior officer (and they were all superior officers, when she was just a cadet).
She had so much anger and nowhere to vent it. Nowhere except in Roy’s tent, where she bit her lip in silent fury and never cried, and Roy let her pummel him until her broken fast-and-shallow breathing overwhelmed her, and he grabbed her, and overpowered her because she let him, she needed him to.
Riza followed Roy into the army because she thought it would give her power when she needed it most. She had nothing but a dead father and a back stained with ink and blood. She was accustomed to pain and loneliness, and even fear, and the anger she kept hidden from everyone, especially her father, especially Roy. She went out by herself to run (only to run, never to run away , no matter how much she wanted to). She took a gun into the woods and fired clip after clip of expensive ammunition at nothing but paper or tin cans, or sometimes nothing at all. She screamed when no one could hear her. She never cried, not even at her mother’s grave.
She cried when her father coded his notes into her skin, because it hurt, but also because the tears were another form of screaming, a way of begging for connection that she could only seem to tap when he was hurting her. Her father was always locked in his own head. She’d known that since she was old enough to assign him a name, since her mother urged her to play quietly and stay out of his way when he was working. But during those sessions when he etched his circle into her flesh, she could almost, almost , break through. The almost kindled the anger, so that when Berthold disappeared into his study and left her alone with tears still streaking her face, she had to fight the urge to destroy whatever her hands could reach. It wouldn’t work, though. Everything he valued was either in his head or on her body. She couldn’t destroy it without destroying herself.
She thought about it, sitting alone in a deer blind shivering in the springtime dusk while her back still ached enough that she couldn’t easily fall asleep, even days later. She thought about falling. She thought about the gun. But even if she killed herself, her broken body would still contain her father’s array. She needed power she didn’t have, but she did still have her life, and that was better than nothing.
And then, Roy Mustang came along, wearing a military uniform and talking about making the country better. She listened to him talk, and she felt his hands, and his breath, on her skin, as he struggled to decipher years of symbols and shapes and fragmented Latin. She helped him. Just like when they were kids, the two of them bent over the kitchen table or sprawled out on the floor of the sitting room, and he drew circles and she translated dead languages for the boy who could barely handle Amestrian in written form. He talked about the academy when she asked, but he was distracted, fully focused on the promise of flame alchemy. Too much like her father, but they were too far down this road for Riza to take it back now. She gave up even more of her power to him, and she felt so fucking drained when he got what he came for and left again.
She always knew he couldn’t stay. But she knew how to shoot a gun. It couldn’t be that hard to be a soldier, right? She followed Roy into the military, but… she didn’t join for him. She’d honestly never expected to see him again. It’s a big army, and it’s not like State Alchemists mingle with the rank-and-file. She joined because she wanted to fight.
But then they sent her to Ishval before she even finished school, and what greeted her wasn’t the respect she’d been promised, the code of honor and integrity and courage, but a quagmire where the only way out was totally annihilation. And Roy was there, haunted and desperate, sparking fires and shivering in her arms until she coaxed him to life. Her hands were callused by the gun that almost never left her grip, and his were marked by friction burns. And they both felt anything but strong. They were drowning. Helpless, powerless, formed into weapons, unable to disobey.
They only had each other. It’s all they’ve ever had.
Riza shifts a little, curling up on her side in the booth seat, letting her arm dangle over the side. Her stomach still clenches tight around the familiar knot of cold anger that she can’t release. Sometimes it melts away under Roy’s touch, but Roy hasn’t touched her since before the surrender, the sudden end of everything they knew. She has no idea how to be with him when the war is over.
She squirms a little when his finger ghosts over her spine. Her eyes open, but she can’t look up at him without craning her neck painfully, and she resists the urge. She concentrates on her breathing, out and in, and he can surely feel the shift of her muscles contracting and relaxing as she does so. Only her thin (civilian) shirt stands between his hand and the more complicated version of the simplified sketch on the glove that allowed that same hand to kill thousands. Riza’s aware of the promise she forced him to make, and she’ll hold him to it, but not yet, not today, not now .
It’s the first time he’s touched her since Ishval, and he needs it to be a comforting touch, a reminder that he can do more than destroy. She knows him enough to know that. And she could use the comfort, too, even if she’ll never say it aloud.
Roy has nightmares every time he sleeps, even when she’s right there next to him. Riza barely sleeps at all. It’s that time when it’s so stupidly early in the morning that it’s still night, that hour when the stars are still out, or would be if it wasn’t drizzling under heavy cloud cover in the streets outside the bar. The place is closed, locked up, but not empty.
Roy’s aunt is still bustling around, organizing liquor bottles and wiping glasses and occasionally frowning down at a ledger and making a few notes in it. She is also, obviously, keeping an eye on the two soldiers in her corner booth. Riza can barely remember what it’s like to have a parent who cared enough to look after her. It’s odd to think that Roy still has that, especially since he barely mentioned Chris Mustang in all the time Riza’s known him, beyond the basic fact that he grew up with her instead of his parents. But he could’ve gone anywhere he wanted after the train dropped them in Central. He came here, and knowing that Riza didn’t have anywhere else to go, he begged her to stay with him, because he didn’t want to be alone. He couldn’t explain Ishval to his family, and although he feels safe in his aunt’s brothel, he doesn’t feel safe in his own head.
Riza had watched the way he held his gun in Ishval, the way he looked at it and saw a means of escape. She saw the burn mark on his arm that could’ve been an accident, but if it was an accident, he would’ve said so. She heard the way he talked, the words he said that felt all too familiar. She sat up in a deer blind and thought about falling; Roy talked about the world being better off without him in it. He was a killer, but so was she, and she slapped and kicked and fought him until he woke up enough to fight her back and she always made him promise to stay alive. Because the war had to end eventually, didn’t it? And didn’t they deserve to be alive to see it?
But now they’re here and there’s nothing to see but the water-soaked streets of Central, and there’s nothing to hope for but a lifetime of trying to make up for what they’ve done.
“If there’s any justice in the world, we’ll die screaming,” Roy had said, in one of his more lucid but harshly bitter moments. Riza couldn’t even disagree. But she doesn’t want to die. She wants to fight.
She pulls up to a sitting position as Roy’s aunt comes toward them. Riza leans against Roy, and his arm rests against her back; his hand, curled into a loose fist, presses against her hip. Chris Mustang slides into the booth across from them and pulls the empty glass across the table to rest in front of her. Her discerning gaze takes in both Riza and Roy, and an approving smile brightens her face despite the obvious worry in her eyes. Roy moves like he might push Riza away, but in the end he doesn’t have the energy. He looks at his aunt with the same uncertain grasp for comfort that had melted her heart when he was four. Chris sighs heavily.
“Look, kids, I can’t pretend I have any idea what shit you’re dealing with. But you’re safe here, alright?”
Riza frowns, and looks to Roy for a cue. He nods, and still doesn’t let go of her, but he relaxes, and she can feel him breathing, steady and strong, and they will get through one more hour, one more day, one more night. They’ll stay alive.