Chapter Text
Cooped up in her room, Riza Hawkeye tried to concentrate on threading the stitching needle on her school socks. October had arrived in her county with leaves being showered away by unusually violent storms, flooding rivers and turning most roads to and around her tiny town into muddy streams. To most in that rural area of Amestris, that was more than an inconvenience: the Eastern region was closest to the Great Desert, and Riza's village was located in a prairie of soft rolling hills, as if the desert wanted to reach as far as possible with its dunes. The sirocco blew often and strongly, pushing humidity away, and only being decelerated by the gently sinuous geography of the East. So the rain season was long, but moderated: six months with rainy evenings, only for the sun to dry the puddles in the morning and a heavy invisible cloud of steam loom over them until dusk. Rainy days were unusual, tempestuous skies rare.
It had been storming for a week.
When the needle fell on the bedspread for the fifth time within an hour, Riza cursed audibly, biting her lower lip in self-awareness. She tried picking it up; it slipped again. She rubbed her hands and intertwined her fingers, forming a shell shape and blowing hot air to get rid of the rigidity, and picked the needle up firmly. Now it was a race: the last pair was rushed through as she fumbled to knot a new thread and mend the fabric as well as she could before the cold settled over her already strained muscles. The stitches were sloppy, but Riza just folded everything quickly and leapt from her bed to shove her garments and sewing materials into her dresser, and then hopped back under the old velvet blanket that had been on her lap.
She sighed, considering the remaining chores on her mental list with teenage melancholy. At least her current duties - sweeping the upper level of the manor and doing a couple of Natural Sciences essays for school - didn't require her to do anything to aggravate the biting cold. She would flat out ignore scrubbing the hardwood floors until the weather was less disgustingly humid, and doing dishes had become an every other day chore. The sound of the rain and the chill didn’t energize her and leave her eager to bounce around doing her duties, anyway.
Riza glanced at the clock. It was still early to begin cooking dinner, but the thought of being close to the oven for a few hours was tempting. They didn’t have enough dry wood, though, to keep the hearth going for longer than necessary to fix their meals, and the pouring rain and intransitable road would make ordering more wood impossible. She was doomed to shiver under a few layers of sweaters and socks too small or too big for her frame, and nevertheless always worn out, until it was appropriate to produce some heat in the kitchen.
The previous month Riza had caught wind about gas cylinders being used in heating and even in modern cooking appliances in Central. That definitely caught her attention, considering how many times wood splinters had ruined her hands. She had stopped by the repair shop to ask to see the publications they subscribed to, and was mesmerized by the chrome valves and enameled casing of those top-of-the-line ovens shining in the pictures like fantastic beetles. She had run the numbers as soon as she gathered information that week, but it was for naught. Gas cylinders were prohibitively expensive to acquire, and bringing them all the way from Central to her heaven-forgotten village was incredibly unlikely.
That realization came only after hours of Riza trying possibilities, counting tabs, recounting favors she could ask in the name of her family. When she finally threw in the towel, it was well into the night. Her notebook - the same she used for school - had two pages filled with graphite markings and numbers, and the magazine’s page was wrinkled from use. Riza got up with a growl of frustration, slapping her hands on the tabletop as she rose. After pacing a little, she decided she would do her best to end this day as miserably as possible by going to the porch in semi-darkness to gather splintery firewood for the morning, a final dramatic move to decorate her irritation. They had the luxury of electricity in some rooms, thanks to Father's maneuvering a while ago, and so light seeped from the kitchen door. Still, she wasn’t able to see spiders or mice in that amount of limited light, and there was a good chance she’d find herself touching a warm tuft of fur now that the weather was getting colder.
Darkness fell over her as she finished collecting what he had come for, however. Riza's head snapped back to the threshold, remembering that she wasn't the only person in the house who was grateful for a warm, bright kitchen.
"Oh- sorry, Riza. I thought you had forgotten the door open." The boy blocking the light exclaimed, clunking to the side. Riza huffed as low as she could manage as she entered the house with the wood in her arms.
"Do you need any help?" His tone was timid, but he was hovering over the magazine with an intrigued expression.
"No,” she declared, marching towards the side of the oven. Riza could feel his eyes on her back until his voice echoed again, accompanied by the sound of flipping pages.
"You're looking to get one of those fancy ovens? I haven't seen any of them since I left the city."
"Mm."
"Well, not that I've seen these either. These are the latest releases, some with military technology."
"That's what they say to sell more." Riza cleaned her hands on her skirt, ready to pick her things up and not exchange more words with anyone else for the day.
"Perhaps. But in any case, it's not like Master Hawkeye can afford any type, right?"
Riza reached the table, grabbing the notebook, pencil, and magazine, and staring into the boy's eyes. His surprise turned into embarrassment in a few pathetic seconds, and he lowered his gaze.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--"
"We don't need a luxury appliance from Central to make things due, Mr. Mustang." Her murmur was icier than either expected. "The reason we can't have it is because the gas cylinders necessary for them are impossible to bring here. Otherwise, we are creative and skilled enough to have arranged this, like we’ve done on several occasions. You're supposed to learn that from my Father."
Riza turned on her heel, chewing on her own petulance as she marched towards the staircase. She made a point to not look back at him as she left.
From early on, Riza Hawkeye had decided she didn't like the young man who was now living in her house, that Roy Mustang. Her Father had brought him in as both his disciple and as extra income for their meager gains. She’d had little warning of Roy’s arrival, just enough to prepare his room and get some groceries and knick-knacks for his welcome. Riza had taken a look at the lad down at the station the afternoon he arrived and ran back home to face her father with every tool she had - complaints and arguments, huffs and pleas. He had stood impassible to her wishes, and on top of that, judgemental of her outburst. In the end, Riza was the one opening the front door for Mr. Mustang, a mask of neutrality and quietude to cover her aching defeat.
Had she had any kind of power to change things, Roy Mustang wouldn't have ever known of her father and his alchemical knowledge and willingness to take a protegé. Had she had a word in the business he wouldn’t be anywhere near the Eastern area or her village or her father or herself. He would be gangling around the capital very much away from them, thank you very, very much.
But Riza didn’t have either, and in her gelid bedroom, shrinking into her sweaters, she wished she didn’t need to.
Riza's business was already a handful, however. Go to school, study, take care of the house, cook, and hunt whenever possible, as meat was expensive. Even with her best efforts, she couldn't help support the household any more than she did. Berthold Hawkeye, her father, clinked his silver implements mixing substances in crucibles all day, and positioned his hands under the dripping hot wax all night to have time to put down his findings in feverish, squiggly handwriting. Twice a month he would take their old orange bicycle and ride towards the town. Once to mail his papers to the few independent alchemical labs in Amestris, and once to receive his modest stipend in return.
When Riza was smaller and Father, stronger, they'd make this bimonthly ride together in the morning and stop for cinnamon buns on the way back. On weekends they would also tend to the house, with Father reaching to dust where she couldn't, and washing their clothes of the most obstinate stains she wasn't vigorous enough to scrub away.
"Do you know what Lucía’s mom got?" Riza had asked, breaking the morning bread in pieces for dinner.
"Child, I don't even know who Lucía is." Father set the bowl filled to the brim with pork broth in front of her with his left hand, tossing a slightly stained handkerchief over her head with the other.
"My friend from school, Father!" Riza squealed with mocking annoyance as she pulled the cloth from her eyes. "The one with the carp pond I went swimming in last February."
Father had settled on his seat across from her with his own bowl, stretching his bony arm on her direction to take a piece of bread. She met him halfway with the biggest half.
"Ah, the one that looked like an overgrown weed someone forgot to pluck, so thin and ugly she was. She looked at you with such envy you could've dropped sick at any moment."
"Father, that's so mean! She's said I was her best friend, and that's true, because she only invited Briana and I for her birthday." Riza filled her mouth with broth-soaked bread. "And she's not that ugly."
"Manners, Riza." Berthold also filled his mouth with bread and soup, however, before continuing. "She's cunning, that's what she is. It's useful to call a girl who can win a brawl and cock a rifle your best friend when you're barely strong enough to carry your own bag to class."
"She does help her family carry things around. She's not that weak, either." Riza's ears grew pink as she dipped bread in the bowl.
"Fair enough. So what about this not-as-pretty, not-as-strong friend of yours?"
"Her mother."
"What about the mother of this not-as-pretty, not-as-strong friend of yours?"
Riza contorted her face, trying to keep her smile subdued. "She got something new to help washing clothes. A machine barrel."
Berthold reached for some stray crumbs, frowning in amusement. "A machine barrel."
"I think that's what it's called." Riza mirrored his frown, only in earnestness, playing with the few pieces of meat floating in the liquid in front of her. "Washing barrel? Something like that. It makes a -- it's quite noisy, and it shakes like Tatsu when it storms, but you add ground soap and anil and fabric looks fresh and clean with no work!"
"Hm-rumm," Berthold took another spoonful. "Can it wash Tatsu, too? It would do a better job than you. He stinks already. How long is it that the mutt hasn't seen soap, two months?"
"That's beside the point, Father!" Riza groaned, exasperated. "Also he -- have you ever tried to chase him for a bath? He goes like your alchemical processes."
"How so?"
"Evaporates, and condenses when I give up."
Berthold's barking laughter made Riza jolt in surprise as usual, but half a second later she joined him, giggling through her nose. He reached to grab her last, tiny piece of bread, shaking his head with a smile, and she playfully smacked his hand.
"Aw. What a mean child I made."
"From a mean father, that's what you get!" She swung her spoon in his direction in a fake lecture, and flicked the bread inside her mouth, picking the bowl up to drink the remaining soup.
"Sounds about right. An unruly bird is exactly what I made, from feathers, bullet cases, and some sulfur in an array in the basement."
"It sounds like that would be really ugly instead of Lucía."
"Not many things would be as ugly as her," Berthold rose from his chair, wiping his mouth on his handkerchief. "Certainly not you."
Riza knew for a fact her face was too round and her eyes too big, but that didn’t matter. She got up with a grin, taking their empty bowls and using the sleeve of her frock to clean red speckles from her face.
"Manners, Riza." Berthold chastised, more tired than annoyed, as she walked towards the sink.
"I wouldn't need to have manners if we had the machine, you know?" Riza hooked her foot on the short stool on her left and dragged it between herself and the sink, swiftly climbing onto it and reaching for the faucet. "No more sore knuckles, just add everything in the barrel and poof! In a few hours, it'd be all clean."
"I won't have an actual unruly bird for a daughter, do you hear me?" Berthold’s voice got a little farther as he walked towards the back door and opened it, flapping the tablecloth outside to get rid of crumbs. "Besides, your plan is fair, but you're missing something, Riza."
She wasn't. She knew what was coming, because she lived it every day, but she was ready for it. "What I'm not missing is the fact that it's made with a barrel, an engine, and some mechanical pieces and that you're an outstanding alchemist, am I, Father?"
No response came, and she turned her head from the sink. Berthold Hawkeye was draping the cloth over his chair, a crooked smile on his lips as he gazed at her. She bit her lower lip and beamed back, pulling her sleeves higher up her arms.
Their improvised washing machine project was something Riza would cherish forever. The girl, knowing her father wouldn't enjoy being dragged from his work even for a day, had already thought up a rudimentary plan to build the machine. She drew the plan in detail in her school notebook and pitched it with her best salesperson persona. Berthold observed her with a raised eyebrow and a glint of amusement on his watery eyes, prodding whenever he knew his questions would make her falter.
"What if the library won't have the engineering magazine subscription you need?"
"Well, Mr. Donnel from the shop certainly will. We can ask him for his once he has no use for them."
"On what grounds will we pop up in the shop and ask the mechanic for his old magazines, without looking suspicious?"
"I'm in school! I can say it's for homework! Some... Sowing mechanism study, some rifle enhancement."
"What kind of rifle enhancement would need mechanical knowledge from a magazine?"
"That's not important!"
"Fair enough." Berthold sighed, bringing a hand to massage his temple. "You're not giving up, are you?"
"It would help us so much!" Riza was already so frustrated she could feel her voice quivering in her chest. "The house is too big, you work so hard, and I need to work on my grades, and now we don't have Mother..."
She heard her voice fall from the weight of the words. They rarely summoned the ghost of Mother. It had been excruciating enough to have her vegetable garden slowly withering for their lack of ability with plants, no matter their efforts; the paintings she made hanging on the living room getting duller with dust; and Riza - her big brown eyes, her instinctive fawning, the way she would sing-song the syllables of words she needed to remember. Riza knew in her heart Father ached just by looking at her, just like she knew she missed being embraced as lovingly as she once had been. She knew the house had grown darker, and haunted, ever since Mother was eaten by the earth.
They kept opening windows and chasing shadows away, however, as survivors ought to do. They would live, with little money and less happiness, but still there. And the mundaneness of daily chores always found a way to taint events with complete disregard, but also offered a chance to carry on.
Berthold closed his eyes, inhaling deeply and exhaling in many seconds. When he raised his head again, he was a few years older. "You are right," he muttered, with another sigh. "We need to be efficient."
Riza nodded quickly, pursing her lips in controlled excitement. She rounded the table and motioned to give her father a peck on his forehead, but Berthold Hawkeye got up, rasping the chair on the stained floor, oblivious. Riza watched him walk into the darkness of their hallway, and the only sound for the rest of the night was of her dog, Tatsu, chasing rats in the yard.
And so, on Friday nights they'd sit side by side on the kitchen table after dinner with her trusty notebook, listing everything they would need to do the next day to move the project forward. All Saturday was dedicated to hopping on the bicycle and riding downtown to look for all kinds of bits, pieces, books, specialized magazines, tapes, and materials. Berthold managed to get some extra rare metals from his patrons at the lab when claiming a new experiment. A long, loud bargaining session with Old Penny from the junkyard allowed them to look for whatever they needed in a specific section in exchange for Berthold producing a kind of oil only available in Drachma, nearly impossible to find in Amestris due to the tensions between countries, for Penny’s exclusive use. By the end of the month Berthold and Riza began experimenting with their building plans, and Riza excitedly ran around in circles with Tatsu when the handyman, Jack Lowell, very kindly brought them an empty wine barrel ruined in an accident.
At this point in the project, Berthold would shoo Riza away and sit on the back porch with a box of chalk sticks, making alchemical circles on the slate floor and experimenting while consulting the material they had racked and his own books. The girl wasn't offended. She knew Father needed his focus and she was only going to distract him with her utter disinterest in all things hard science. Instead, Riza would carefully clean and oil her shotgun and run to the woods, only to reemerge a few hours before sunset, her bag stashed with fowls and rabbits. Father, still on the porch, would preach and rant about how she shouldn't be running alone in the bushes with a loaded weapon all alone, like he always did, but, as always, he wouldn’t complain when she cleaned and cooked the meat for dinner.
Less than a month after that, Jack Lowell saw the Hawkeyes' beagle running down the hill, whining, and hiding in a burrow under the Lowell silo. Jack didn't think much of it, and was amused at the pitiful state Riza Hawkeye was in, all covered in twigs and sweat, when she clapped at his door in the evening and asked (among apologies for the inconvenient hour) if he had seen Tatsu. Jack offered to help lure him outside of the burrow.
"Your pup has always been bold to a fault. What made him so spooked?"
Riza grinned in the dusk, waving a piece of beef jerky in front of the hole. "The washing machine works."
The homemade washing machine didn't work shinily and smoothly like the one in Lucía's home. The mended wood of the barrel was dark and rough, irregular where Berthold had used his alchemy to reinforce it, but still made of oak and hardwood and carefully coated with varnish by Riza. Old Penny had acquired them a third hand Maxwell-Barter 1890 motorcycle engine - the ones still used and repurposed by the military itself in the border conflicts for their reliable horsepower per liter of fuel. After a lot of trial and error, Berthold had discovered the ideal oil to make the chains and pumps of the machine work with the least issues and cost. Riza was glad he did, because the nauseous odor her father exhaled after the experiments made her stomach churn more than eviscerating fowls ever did.
But as the blankets unfurled on the clotheslines with the wind, pristine against the blue summer sky, after the machine's first run, Riza knew they had succeeded. That she had succeeded.
It took the three of them - Riza, Father, and especially Tatsu - a while to adjust to their new contraption, however. Unlike their non-makeshift, brand new counterparts, the Hawkeye washing machine was bestially noisy. Turning it on would bring the ire of Berthold towards his child every time, who, in turn, would try to sneak to the woods with the beagle before the engine began its symphony. Eventually, they settled on specific days and times to turn the thing on, in which Berthold would almost certainly try to be on his bimonthly trips to town. Now he was closely followed by Tatsu, their mutual distaste ignored in the face of a worse housemate.
It did make work less demanding, though, and eventually not even birds or lizards in their garden minded the rumble made by the appliance. Riza found it easier to ignore by the day, as she was absorbed in her school books or in other house chores. Moreover, the dark barrel meant something even in silence. Her fingerprints glistened on the dried varnish; Father's notes and blueprints rested rolled up at a nook in the mounting mess they had on the porch. Even Tatsu left his mark, small dents on some metallic parts he somehow took as a threat, as if guessing he wouldn't have peace after it was done. In a way, it was the most important thing Riza had done in her life, more than her first A in Mathematics and more than killing an elusive pheasant the previous winter without damaging its gorgeous plumage.
That was then, however. Since that time Riza's dresses had grown short faster than she could afford to replace them, and Father's skinny frame only got less and less meat on it. She still needed to incline her body over the table to reach his side, and her cheeks were still pink and round when she grinned, but she knew she was growing. Soon enough her clothes wouldn't bear any more adjustments and she would need things young women wore, and would not need Father's help to dust the upper beams of the manor.
The upper beams had been caked in dust for months.
A distant rumble of thunder dispelled the girl from her brief reverie. Her hands, hidden under the velvet blanket, were again as cold and damp as the rest of her room. Daylight fled from the world like it, too, feared the storm.
Time had made itself still again in the gloom. Riza knew better than to let it shroud her.
They had built their washing machine long ago, and they couldn't make an oven. That meant she had to save on their fuel because they would hardly find dry-ish wood in the entire village in this downpour. Riza had mended her school socks and still had to sweep the upper floor and do homework. Later she would light the hearth, bake some fresh, hearty vegetable pie, and drive the men off the kitchen for her to bathe. She would wash quickly in the warmth, feed and let Tatsu relieve himself in a secluded and dry area of the backyard, and run up to read in bed until her oil lamp went out.
(Winter would be hell. When they were only two - when they were the first three - it was bearable, easier. She didn’t want to keep bathing in the kitchen - like she always did in the cold months - when Roy Mustang existed and sought warmth, too. If those autumn showers were anything to go by, it was going to be a particularly nasty next few months. It was going to be insufferable, and she was going to go through it with them and Tatsu)
Riza jumped to the hardwood floor like a startled cat, her oversized and undersized garments fumbling over her thin body. She put on her slippers, breathing resolutely through her teeth, and marched towards the upper level supply closet for the broom.
Riza’s business was plenty, after all.