Work Text:
The drive back from Resembool is a quiet one.
It pales greatly in comparison to the drive there, when the atmosphere in the car had been laden with banter and healthy debate.
Roy makes wisecracks about what he expects the Elric brothers to be like—he tries to bet the handful of change in his pocket that they would be pompous, arrogant, and Riza had countered that she expected one to be a hermit and the other, a showboat. Of course, all this was before Roy walked in to find a transmutation circle and they were redirected to a house with a sign on the porch that read Rockbell Automail.
The sun is setting by the time they pass the Resembool city limits and it truly sinks in that Roy had just recruited two actual, literal children: one still wheelchair-bound and the other, bound to a suit of armour. The rationale had been that the boys would be better taken care of (and kept a closer eye on) by the military and would benefit from the resources that came with an eventual state alchemist designation.
It was like a slap in the face to say that, robotic and detached and patriotic, standing in the very home where the boys lived and thrived and recuperated, where they were probably far better taken care of than they would ever be under the state.
(The fact that the Elrics had only been alive on this earth for a little over a decade is a thought that turned Riza’s stomach. She remembers Roy proudly boasting his newly minted state alchemist watch at the age of nineteen—even then, she’d thought of him as too young. What more for the boys who had literally have been uprooted from any kind of normal, for the boys who were still children, not teenagers, and most definitely nowhere remotely close to what they'd envisioned the infamous Elric Brothers to be. Perhaps this is why she'd told him that Edward was beyond help, her words and true meaning muddled by concern, hoping that maybe it would stave off Roy's gritty determination to have him mobilized so early.)
A few miles out from the first major town, Roy is the first to puncture the silence.
We are terrible people, he says, to her and to the dashboard of the car and to no one at all.
Who is we, Riza wants to ask—is it him, is it her (after all, they are always lumped together as a matching set: the Colonel and the Lieutenant, his aide), is it the military, the state? She doesn’t need to ask because she knows he means it all.
Riza hums to signal that she did, in fact, hear him. She sits on that thought the rest of the way home, until they get clearance at the East City gates and they are about five minutes from her apartment.
They hit a stoplight just a few blocks from the command centre and she tells him: They’re just children, Roy. Give it time.
He hums, the sound landing closer to a grumble before settling back into the quiet of the car. When they bid each other goodnight, Roy smiles and pretends that he didn’t lose his temper at a crippled child and she smiles back, pretending that she hadn’t tried to justify her career and killings to a bright eyed little girl who unearthed the ugly of the military right in her face. Winry Rockbell is the girl’s name—Riza remembers her for fidgeting in her seat, shy but talkative, hospitable, with long hair and pierced ears and an honest voice. She is one half of the Elric boys’ current caretakers, about as old as Edward; Riza remembers seeing her perk up every time there was particularly loud talking from the closed door where Roy had been debriefing the brothers and Pinako Rockbell, and all of her attempts to direct Winry's attention by fielding her questions with as much honesty as possible. She even tried for girl-talk as a reprieve among the doom and gloom, and apparently succeeded when she was met with a handshake on the way out.
(And when Rebecca drags her out to the tattoo parlour the very next weekend to watch her get some boyfriend’s name etched into her collarbone, Riza throws in the towel and gets her own ears pierced with surgical steel studs.)
They receive updates on Edward's recovery and eventually, reports on the Elric brothers’ whereabouts through the months and eventual years, all about Edward’s training, research, certification and most importantly the bills they’d accrue that would have to come out of Roy’s pocket as Edward's commanding officer.
The boys are wary, keen, and intelligent—smart at the mouth in ways unique to their own, driven and foolhardy and so incredibly, frightfully young.
Riza doesn’t think she remembers being that young. Roy seems to forget, too (he'd fervently denied that he was ever that difficult as a teenager—a statement which Riza immediately called bullshit on), with the way he’s being so impatient and curt with Edward.
She thinks about how awkwardly the uniform first fit on her when she’d emerged from cadet school at eighteen, a little lanky and bony around the edges. Riza can’t even begin to imagine Edward in that uniform, how he’d practically be swimming in the dress blues. (She can barely stifle the grin that attempts to surface when Edward vehemently declines the uniforms Roy presents him with.)
They go out for drinks one night, in celebration of some throwaway occasion Roy had pulled out of his ass when really it was just an excuse to gather everyone together after a hellish work week. No rest for the wicked, is what he should have known and expected, because the party of eight he’d originally intended to be in attendance is reduced to two: a handful of cancellations and wave-offs blamed on overtime or the simple priority to just go home and sleep instead of getting shit-faced.
Like always, it somehow ends up just being the two of them.
Riza swirls a skewered olive in her glass while Roy downs an entire shot, over the noise of a scratchy record blared from a gramophone that sounded about a week away from retirement. When his shot glass meets the wooden counter with a resounding thunk, he looks her dead in the eye and says: We’re in charge of children.
She blinks twice at this.
(We. Always we. What's his is hers—hopes, fears, responsibility—and vice versa. It should be unfair, it should be heavy, and on some days admittedly it is. But it also brings about a wave of relief that reminds them: you are never to shoulder a weight alone.)
You only realized that now? she says, dryly. Riza presses her lips together in an attempt to stifle the highly inappropriate snort-turned-laugh that tries and succeeds in bubbling up from her throat—maybe it's the gin in her drink or the fact that their only audience were Roy's foster sisters and a few patrons seated several tables away, but the laugh comes easily, unexpectedly, like a gun cocking back with more force than anticipated.
It takes Roy by surprise: first he looks slighted, then his brows crease and raise to ask her silently what she found so funny about his plight and the fact that his wards are two insanely powerful kids who had landed on his radar indefinitely because they had attempted a cardinal sin. What in that morose realization could warrant a reaction like that?
A few seconds later and he's laughing too, his spirits infected by Riza's unexpected fit, the guffaw that he reserves for outside the office that was completely stripped of any suave or charm thundering out from his chest. Some heads have turned towards them now, when they'd previously just melted into the crowd—even the Madame herself gives them a raised-brow look accompanied by a knowing smirk from where she stands behind the bar, arranging the expensive liquor cabinet.
It is somewhere between catching their breaths and shaking their heads and shrugging on their overcoats that time seems to still, or at least tick by in slow motion, while Riza's tucking stray strands of her hair gone loose behind her ear and Roy is clearing his throat, that they share the same, resonant thought:
What a strange, strange pair we make.
He leaves a generous tip on their tab (to the public eye, he is a picturesque gentleman; to the Madame and the ladies of the bar, he is simply Roy-boy chipping in some rent money for the still-in-use room he had waiting for him upstairs) and walks her out to the curb, only to dissolve into a hearty laugh that has him in stitches.
It's Riza's turn to give him a puzzled look, to shake her head at him for about the fifth time that day. She is no better than him, though, because she laughs along too (quiet, more reserved, a little hiccupy), about nothing and everything at once.
Perhaps the consoling factor is that they both have seen far worse from each other than random, poorly-timed bouts of exhausted laughter.
Riza is numb after they investigate the Tucker case.
Fathers, alchemy, the children caught in the crossfire and the research that is put ahead of their wellbeing—tragedy had a sick way of spitting in faces and interweaving lives. The world is bleak and dark and crumbling, and when Roy visits her apartment that night, Riza cries openly in front of him for the first time in years. She thinks of herself as a hypocrite, having just said words of professionalism and strength to the Elric boys (who have also had a chaotic day themselves, to say the least) earlier that day, only to come undone the very same evening.
She has always been a good soldier: good at compartmentalizing, skilled in the art of separating Miss Riza from Lieutenant Hawkeye. Talented at never letting her emotions and repressions get the best of her. She had been doing so well, having put as much distance from her old self and the new one as possible—Thereza Hawkeye, Berthold's daughter, an orphan for the last stretch of her teenage years: that girl had been pushed so far down that she'd been all but buried. The new Riza is a Lieutenant and dutiful and driven, far removed from her stolen childhood and pitiful beginnings. She’s never forgotten where she started, but neither did she enjoy remembering it.
They find themselves on the carpeted floor mere steps away from her living room sofa; they didn’t quite make it far enough from the door (which Roy had habitually closed shut and locked) in the split few seconds before Riza's knees buckled and she sank to the floor.
She is vulnerable and she hates it, curses it — fears it.
There is only one person she’d allow to see her through such a state, and he is here, now, with his arms wrapped around her shoulders. Riza didn’t have enough fight in her to tell him to let go, and selfishly found herself wanting to feel his touch and the pressure that came with it because she desperately needed to be grounded, to be anchored—to not be alone.
Roy cradles the back of her head with calloused fingers and she clings onto the fabric of his shirt.
Such gentle hands for killers, for dogs of war.
Too proper to be a tangle of limbs but interlocked all the same, Riza leans against him limply, and his back is against the wall to support their combined weight. He breathes steadily, deep inhale and long exhale to match, and in time, she adopts the same pattern. She doesn’t remember how long they stay like this or who pulls away first, but even when they do, Roy doesn’t leave. He doesn’t scoop her up in his arms or carry her to bed like how some convoluted love stories would have it; neither does he try to whisper saccharine words in an attempt to console her.
Roy knows Riza—maybe more than either of them would readily, outwardly admit. He’s learned how to care for her, knowledge born from necessity and dependency all the same; whenever Riza was not alright, Roy’s world always seemed to grind to the same offbeat, undone existence. At the very least, he’d feel the same state of disarray, low in his belly and residual like an unpleasant aftertaste. At worst, her brokenness rendered him useless, clueless, off his axis. He needed her well, and over the years has learned to care for her in a balancing act of exacting the right amounts of concern and commiseration while also being sparse enough with it all so as to not scare her away.
So instead, he waits for her to gather her bearings at her own pace and to come down on her own accord. He offers Riza his handkerchief to wipe her face and blot her eyes, helps her stand up from where they’re slumped, her filed-down nails still digging crescent moons into his forearms as she steadies herself on shaking legs.
In the meantime, he sits cross-legged at the knee on her living room sofa and turns on the radio.
Over the din of faraway sounding music, Roy listens to the turning of taps and the running of water and Riza’s footsteps as she pads around the space between her bathroom and bedroom.
He takes in the apartment then—although modest, it is a total far cry from his own. Roy’s place is bleak, with nothing but eggshell walls and a single couch in the sitting room, barely lived in because he still spent much of his nights bouncing off couches and haunting his old room above Madame Christmas’ bar. He’s been known to seek refuge on Riza’s couch on odd evenings when he’s bone-tired and wayward, never having paid the details any close attention beforehand—perhaps on those nights he’d been all too focused on her laugh (modest yet pitchy when it was just the two of them) and the sound of her kettle and the wave-like bump in her hair when she lets it down at home after a long day of being in a bun.
The lights in Riza’s apartment are incandescent and warm, the shelves decorated with photographs of her, Rebecca, and a few other friends—when Roy looks hard enough, there’s a weathered, antiquated frame that sits behind the picture of her cadet school graduating class, of a woman that looked so much like Riza it gives him a shock; he makes an educated guess that it is a portrait of her mother. There is even a small bouquet of dried roses tucked neatly in an old, repurposed wine glass, satiny ribbons still wrapped around the stems. Roy steels himself from reading the note attached, out of respect for her privacy—wheresoever their lives were intricately woven together, they have also made attempts to put distance between themselves in order to live somewhat of an autonomous existence, apart.
He’s been privy to most of her relationships, as she has been to his—again, their lives bridge over the fact that none of them ever last, whether it’s because their work schedules have proven to be too demanding for a civilian partner or that it was caused by the unspoken but understood way they felt (about each other) that both impeded and strengthened their lives in such complex yet uncomplicated ways.
Roy guesses the flowers are from the most recent person she’s been seeing, an upstart young professor named Joachim who taught a few lectures at Eastern University. Riza had told him about the guy a few months ago, upon the very same couch he sits on now, with her knee absently knocking into his and completely at ease. She’d said he was too needy and that his laugh sounded a bit like a broken down engine, then candidly asked Roy to place a bet on how long he thinks until she ends things with him.
Clearly, he’d lost the bet—there were still flowers sitting on her shelf, after all, and whatever exposed part of the obscured tag is signed with a swirling, almost calligraphic J. He’d put two hundred cens on two weeks (Riza didn’t accept the money and instead told him to keep it and put it towards a fund for a lamp or a coffee table for his place). It had been almost three weeks since that proverbial evening, which had ended with an embrace that lasted a few beats too long, at the very same threshold she’d broken down into his arms tonight.
(What he misses are the details. The note reads: Riza, I’m sorry we had to cancel dinner the other night. Call me, we should catch up soon. J x. and she only kept the flowers because Rebecca had told her the place needed more colour, with the insinuation that she should try to work things out with Joachim and call him back. Riza did, in fact, call him a week ago, with her well-practiced I don’t think this is working out speech in play, the whole ordeal meeting its expected, fated end. She hadn’t gotten around to throwing out the bouquet, between work and work and more work—what a sight it would have been for Lieutenant Hawkeye to arrive home late from the office or a mission only to throw out a bouquet of flowers in the back dumpsters of her apartment complex. They were perfectly good flowers anyway, she’d rationalize, until they dried up and wrinkled and gained a new sort of charm that she thought she’d keep around for the sake of decoration.)
Other things Roy notices when he uproots his fixation from the flowers are as follows: there is a pair of dressy flat shoes he doesn’t think he’s seen her wear before toed off by the entryway in a haphazardly neat way only Riza could have achieved, and a few house plants that look to be thriving by the windowsill. There are newspapers and magazines stacked neatly on her coffee table, and even a half-empty, cold cup of coffee sitting on a coaster on the dining room table.
Where his living space looks dull, Riza’s evidently shows signs of life and comfort, and Roy can’t help but bask in it.
He is proud that, in this sense, Riza is worlds ahead of him in normalcy, balanced and adjusted and living in the heart of the city surrounded by work and friends—miles away from the girl she once was, the girl only he knew of, the girl that she and him will take to the grave. Only Roy knows of her in that much grave detail, an honour he will wear with quiet pride in the privacy of his own company—a thought that he sits and revels in, if only to look back on and see how far she’s come.
He pinpoints this as the very reason why it hurts him so much to see her broken, especially by a grim parallel of her past he knows she would sooner prefer to forget.
Riza had escaped, albeit scathed, branded, broken, stunted—but alive and with the chance to live out the rest of her life on her own terms.
Nina Tucker did not share that same fate.
Roy notices a smashed vase in the hallway, effectively taking him out of his reverie. Before he can mention it or the gash on her hand, Riza is already two steps ahead of him (as she always happens to be) and emerges from her bedroom with the inside of her palm neatly bandaged.
It’s fine, she states, before he can even voice out his concern.
And when she joins him on the sofa again, her hair is damp and she’s changed into new clothes. They are quiet, but it bothers neither of them. He lets her lean into him first.
They stay awake until their eyelids fall too heavy to keep the pretence going.
Under the warmth of incandescent lights and to the tune of a crackly radio station playing ballroom music, Riza is wedged into the bend of his arm and Roy has his feet propped up on her perfectly good coffee table.
He leaves before sunrise, locking up with her spare key that he slides under the door onto her welcome mat.
Still, she arrives at the office earlier than him.
His coffee is piping hot on his desk (accompanied by a breakfast pastry placed neatly on a napkin to its left, an extra she must have swiped from the very in-demand and meager morning offerings in the mess hall), and an arm's length away from where it sits is his already abhorrently large pile of paperwork for the day.
He tries to make her smile during the lunch hour, saying something or another about the weather outside. Riza smiles, (he notes that she didn't first roll her eyes or meet him toe-to-toe with her own witty quip) a tired, tight smile that doesn't reach her eyes, and shovels down the rest of her plate in her own quiet.
Small victories, he'll tell himself.
Maes Hughes is dead.
This is a fact that has been known through the ranks and to the masses—except for a certain three: two Elrics and a Rockbell, a fact that twists and tugs at just about every organ and muscle, registering as guilt masqueraded as duty (or thinly-veiled cowardice, but that is a plot of uncharted territory neither of them can muster up the strength to address), as news to be broken in due time—for about a month to date. The earth on the grave no longer sat brown and fresh: there is a lush patch of grass growing there now, and more often than not had a lovely bouquet of flowers sitting at the base of the gravestone.
Some days Riza still expects the phone to ring in that specific, tinny way it did when (the now Brigadier General) Hughes would call Roy’s desk phone at the peak of the work day. It wasn’t only Roy’s line that he would ring up—sometimes, others desk phones would jolt to life and it would be Hughes on the other end, with some kind of joke attached to an apology of a misdial, and always punctuated with a genuine well-wish of have a lovely day. Riza’s phone would ring from time to time; misdials for the most part (as her number was only one digit different than the Colonel’s) unless Roy had been totally unavailable and then he’d pass a message along through her.
She remembers Hughes as bright smiles and sheathed throwing knives and for drinking sodas at the bar because he had designated himself as the one to get them all home that night yet still managing to get atmosphere drunk each time without fail. He also exists in the voices strewn in her memory, muddled among those remembered from Ishval, the ever-present reminder drumming: we just have to make it home. Above all, Riza remembers him for being ballsy and smart and proud—of his beloved wife, of his beloved daughter, of his friends, of his colleagues and subordinates and his work.
It did not take a genius to know that Maes Hughes is more than sorely missed, by his loved ones and his comrades alike.
Roy, for all his bravado and anger and thirst for revenge, continues to grieve.
He is very good at hiding it.
Until he isn’t.
Riza sees it all pan out while walking home one evening after turning down some colleagues’ offer for drinks at a dive bar in the underbelly of the city, then deciding to take a shortcut through one of the building’s back lots. Some would call it dangerous to be out this late in a poorly-lit and less frequented area, but the two sidearms holstered beneath her jacket (and the lesser known handgun strapped to her lower back) always put her at ease. She spots a familiar-looking car, parked terribly between two vacant spots with a person evidently sitting in the driver’s seat. Riza keeps a healthy distance between herself and the vehicle, especially when she sees the driver pick his head up and knock back a swig from a flask.
She doesn’t expect it to be Roy’s face looking back at her when the hand and flask lower to reveal a pair of dark eyes, red-rimmed and heavy with sorrow.
And she has to knock once, twice on the window for him to unlock the doors. She slips into the front seat and as soon as she shuts the door at her side, Roy comes undone. His breathing is ragged and whatever words he’s trying to string together are violently interrupted with sobs—he almost sounds like he’s choking, like he’s drowning, inundated by an ocean of grief and guilt.
Riza says nothing except through touch. Her hand reaches out for his shoulder and the contact seems to send him further into collapse, but after a few moments, he raises his head off the steering wheel and looks at her with the same eyes she’d seen through the dashboard mirror earlier. His hair is sticking to his face and his cheeks are ruddy and tear-tracked—she doesn’t know how long he’s been here, in his car, in this lot, in this broken state.
Can I, he begins, his eyes glancing to her shoulder (she doesn’t know if he’s truly asking to lean on her or if he just couldn’t finish his sentence, much less meet her eyes). Roy looks guilty for asking this—whatever he had wanted to ask—of her. Riza blinks once, twice, and it falls quiet except for the hitched breaths that Roy takes in an attempt to pull himself together. She is the first to move after a few moments, bringing her arms around him as he tenses then wilts into her hold. Roy keeps sobbing into her shoulder, and she lets him.
She hopes to be solid and safe and at least half of the immovable force she tries so hard to be.
When he calms considerably and his breaths become closer to even than ragged, Riza has to peel him off her. It’s really late, she starts. Already she sees the panic in his eyes—he doesn’t need to tell her, she can read it from his pupils and the wrinkle in his brow and the thin-lined, trembling press of his lips:
He is afraid that she will leave him.
I’ll drive, this takes him by surprise, and numbly, he nods his head. It’s too much trouble for them to switch spots, and probably too much instruction for his clouded head to handle, so she just helps him into the backseat. Roy obliges, half slumps and half trips into the leather seat, and assumes a position halfway between curled up and splayed out.
By the time they arrive at his apartment, Roy is asleep.
Riza drives around the back roads of the city through the night (what little of the night they had left, anyway), and shakes him awake close to five thirty in the morning. He jolts up, groggy and embarrassed, wiping a dribble from the corner of his mouth. He combs a hand through his hair, half trying to recollect the night and half trying to apologize to her (to which Riza had said, There’s no need to apologize. If anything, I should apologize. I must have used up all your gas—that, he’d laughed weakly at, voice dry and chased by a cough).
She drops him off at his apartment (I’ll see you at the office, they both said in unison, into the quiet of the residential street) and leaves as soon as she gets him to the door.
Riza walks home, changes into her uniform, and twists her hair into its signature up-do. She imagines Roy is at home shaving (she’d seen the shadow crawling up his jaw and chin last night, another tell that she should have noticed as a hint to him being unwell and coming undone) and having somewhat of a good breakfast (she also smelled strong liquor on his breath, and he certainly needs a generous helping of greasy food to recover from that).
They are both at the office by six forty-five. She notices that Roy’s dress shirt is not ironed and the office lights seem to exaggerate the already pronounced bags under his eyes and the lines on his face. But his shoes are shined (small victories, she'll tell herself), and when they catch each other in his office, she passes him a file folder and his hand touches hers underneath it, index fingertip pressing on the inside of her palm below her thumb. He taps thrice, gentle with measured pressure: to them, this means thank you, personally, kindly, wholeheartedly. The kind of thank you that needed long run on sentences to formulate, far too personal for their work environment.
The kind of thank you that needed to be saved for a time when he has the capacity to properly put it into words, and she, the capacity to digest and accept it with abandon.
When she exits, Riza turns the doorknob once to the right and once to the left before pulling the door open. This means: Acknowledged.
She hopes he watches the hand she keeps behind her back, because she signs the letter A, with a firm, curled fist.
To them, this means: Always.
He wakes up in a hospital bed with a start.
It’s so early in the morning that there is no light outside, that it might as well still be nighttime. Roy has lost track of his days and nights and he’s only been admitted for one set of them. There is soreness in his middle—most likely dulled by the pain medication he’s been given—and a weight on the arm that he rests on the bed. Before he can jolt, he sees that it’s Riza and relaxes back into his pillow. He wonders exactly what time it is and what stunt she’d pulled to visit him after hours, and if she had orchestrated to slip in with the knowledge that Jean would have gone to his second surgery tonight and have had to spend the rest of the evening in a specialized recovery room for monitoring.
He doesn’t question it and instead basks in his gratefulness that she is here, that his company is none other than Riza Hawkeye herself.
This is what he remembers from the night before: searing his and Havoc’s wounds shut, limping down a hallway with Riza’s voice thundering down what felt a million miles away, the spatter of bullets, Riza’s guttural cry, and burning a homonculus to death. Burning, burning, burning—always burning. This time, he thinks it’s justified. They were left with one less enemy to which he'd exacted revenge, not only for himself but on Havoc's behalf as well, and he had protected the Lieutenant and Alphonse.
The burning was necessary, the burning was right.
He moves his arm slightly and finds that it has fallen asleep, much like the woman holding onto it. He swears that she makes a little sound, something like a small noise of protest at the movement, and adjusts to rest the side of her face into the crook of her arm. Roy can’t be certain, however, as it seems like every tranquil moment he spends alone with Riza gets caught up in the parts of his brain where he can’t distinguish reality from fantasy. In the moments when she lets her guard down, to him and him only, Roy finds himself awestruck, wondering if they were truly living in a moment of respite or if it was simply a figment of his imagination, his godless prayers for undeserved peace answered through make-believe scenarios in his head.
For all the years he’s known Riza Hawkeye, she’s always been a light sleeper; he wonders exactly how exhausted she is to have given in completely.
How many more hellish days she’ll have to survive because of her unflagging loyalty.
How many more times she’ll throw herself down onto the sword for him.
How he’d do the same and more for her, given half the chance.
The hospital room is quiet, save for their breathing—he’s trying to match hers, like a child stubbornly playing follow the leader. (This is how he knows he’s done for: Riza is sound asleep and he still finds the simplest things she does, virtuous.) Her hair is coming undone from its usual knot on the back of her head, the usually adept clip now giving way to let a modest blonde river flow through. He wants to run his hand through her hair, feel its softness against the callous pads of his fingers—he wants to feel that she is real and actually existing in this corner of the universe, in this slice of time they have been given to recollect, to breathe, to rest: to simply be.
What he would give to hoist her up and pull her close in the darkness of the hospital room, to let her hair spill over onto him, to feel her every breath as a reminder of her being alive. There would be no other witnesses to his affection for her, no one but themselves—precisely (and only) the way they’d ever have it.
The wound in his abdomen and the sight of her at rest holds him back—that, and the restraint that comes with the forbidden, unbreached aspect to them, so close yet forced to be so far away. He settles on focusing on deciding exactly what shade of blonde her hair is (honey? gold? warm? cool?) and the small rising and falling of her shoulders and back.
Roy thinks that if this is peace, he’ll take it.
When he wakes again, Riza is no longer there.
(Maybe it's for the better, because he is going to have to learn to be without her soon, in what will seem like the longest weeks and months of his life.)
She retires the gun that she points at the back of his head.
It has no more use, Riza rationalizes. The clip is empty and it feels odd in her hand, heavier than she remembers, and her fingers don’t quite curl around the handle as well as they normally did—she also chooses to omit the fact that her hand shakes when she poises her finger on the trigger, and instead justifies the decision with the fact that she couldn't afford to carry around an empty, dead weight.
Never mind that a pistol barely weighed anything to her usual load-out.
Never mind that he'd appointed her as his judge, jury, and executioner, and how she almost had to kill him.
Never mind that they'd both fallen to the ground in a pitiful mess of horror and disbelief (and silent gratitude), in front of Edward, in front of Scar, rendered useless and vulnerable and uncaring, save for the quiet words and breaths they shared in the inches between them, and remaining that way for a solid few minutes.
The sidearm is thrown into a derelict alleyway without any pomp or flourish, after its last two bullets (one meant for him, the other for her) were fired into the cobblestone, where they leave holes in the concrete.
Riza makes a mental note that the repaving of city streets should be added to the already mile-long list of 'when we survive this' duties.
She follows him into hell, as promised, which they learned is synonymous to the place directly below the city, in the heart of their country.
How fitting that the ugly, the rot, the source of all this evil, is right under their feet.
Later when she is bleeding out, slipping in and out of consciousness, fighting the tendrils that pull her closer and closer to the plane of the dead, she feels like if she closes her eyes for too long she'll actually fall through—to Hell, Riza thinks: veritable, true Hell, to the place that had been carved out for her the moment she pulled her first trigger with the intent to kill and all the times after when she’d savour each and every perfectly aimed shot. He’ll be following suit, too, but not anytime soon. He has a job to do first.
Roy screams Lieutenant until his throat goes raw.
It sounds milky and far away, even if she’s crumpled only a few feet away from where he’s yelling, frantic and commanding and absolutely terrified.
Riza is ordered not to die, and she (all but) orders him not to perform human transmutation.
One of them will have to cave, to compromise, to forsake.
The pecking order goes like this: he is a colonel, she’s a first lieutenant. His word and action and choice (although forced, although scrambled into reasoning and transgressing an oath because oh god she isn't moving she isn't speaking she isn't breathing) over hers.
She doesn’t die.
A part of him does.
(The law of equivalent exchange never truly equated to fairness, did it?)
Still, they do not yield. She props him up through the final battle, directs his line of fire, feels the dig of his fingers into her uninjured shoulder and the way his body is trembling against hers, from exhaustion and shock. Riza watches his head jerk to the direction of the sounds and explosions and screams and eventually, cheers. She tries her best to describe it all to him, tries to ignore the bitter, enraged press in the pit of her stomach that screams: he should be seeing this all for himself.
When the smoke clears, it's easier to think of new beginnings—Alphonse Elric is back in his original body, Edward Elric has outsmarted every single power that has tried to smite him down, and the world as they know it is not actively careening to its end. It is infinitely easier to focus on the crushing tidal wave of relief that makes her want to run up to the Elrics and take them by the shoulders or the hands and tell them sincerely, truly, without a shadow of a doubt: We are so proud of you.
She will tell them that, later. For now, Riza watches the brothers talk and embrace and seek out their friends. First, hold your own—and that she does, still attached to Roy and him to her the very same way as when they'd emerged from the underground.
Soon enough their own bodies give in to exhaustion and injury and they are admitted to the hospital to be taken care of, the realization hits and sinks like a shipwreck that there is also a significant ending presented to them, the one that they have skirted around despite the fact that it had been made apparent the moment Roy first began padding around in confusion and terror down below.
The question of the hour, of the decade, of the century: what good is a soldier—or a future leader—without his sight?
I will be your eyes, she'd sworn to him so many times: as a sharpshooter, as his bodyguard, as a friend, as a companion, as a someone they'd never dared bring to light. Riza Hawkeye did not believe in miracles and would be the first to disprove them and present cold, hard facts in their wake—this time, she finds herself desperate. If she could gauge her eyes out and swap them for his, she would do so in a heartbeat; she would hack off limbs and tear out hair and pull out teeth and skin and bone to undo it and restore his sight.
But right now she is too tired to scream and rage and plead and barter.
So instead, Riza pushes herself upright and swings her legs off her bed, planting her stance on abnormally unsteady feet. Their beds are only a few meters apart and yet it takes a lot out of her to maneuver herself to his side of the room. Her palms land onto his mattress first after successfully taking the few steps that made her head feel light and cloudy, her arrival hailed by a creak from the bed frame and the exhale of a breath she didn't know she'd been holding in all this time.
It's me, I'm here, Riza tells him, a hand coming up to rest on his arm.
Roy keeps his back turned but he nods, his own hand shifting from where it had been tucked and crushed at his side to rest on top of hers.
They begin and end the same—her and him, at varying levels of broken, of ill-fated and wronged and sinning and regretful.
And when the tears dry and new resolve is scraped up from the ashes of the skins they've shed and the people they have become and left behind through the decades, they continue and soldier on. (What other choice do they have?)
Faithful but godless, damned but repentant; determined, enduring, the very essence of gnashing teeth and distilled rebellion and marching into hell doused in gasoline but acting like they are fireproof:
Hawkeye and Mustang.