Chapter Text
1908
The man who sat across from her was a ghost. Roy had been in Ishval for only two years, but to Chris he looked like he’d aged at least ten. He’d lost weight, he was in need of a shave, and his hair looked like it hadn't been washed since he returned to Central two weeks prior. He’d slunk into his childhood bedroom the day he came home, leaving it only to go to the bar downstairs to eat too little and drink too much, or to engage in hushed phone conversations that would abruptly end when Chris entered the room. Chris had never been overly sentimental or emotional in raising her nephew, but Roy was scaring her. She had needled him relentlessly to leave the house with her, until he had finally agreed to let her buy him dinner.
The Imperial Grill was always the place she had taken him when there was something to celebrate–birthdays, his acceptance from Berthold Hawkeye, when he’d visit home from his apprenticeship. This didn’t feel like a celebration, it felt like a wake.
Roy fidgeted in his seat, clutching his whiskey with an iron grip. He didn’t speak to her, and quickly flagged down the waiter for another drink, a double that time. They ordered their food–two flank steaks, medium-rare, with a side of mashed potatoes–that, at least, had not changed. Chris was about to resign herself to a silent meal when Roy finally looked up from his drink and met her gaze.
“Thank you for this,” he said quietly. There were purple bruises under his eyes that spoke of sleepless nights. “You’ve always been good to me.”
The Roy that Chris knew would have followed that with a playful jab or sarcastic joke to break the tension, but the man that sat across from her simply stared back at her with unfocused eyes. She wanted to shake him.
“Hm,” was all she said instead, and then took a deep drink of her martini. There was far less gin than she would have put in it. “The Hawkeye girl called for you again, before we left.”
Chris wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Roy paled further.
“Did she say anything to you?” He looked more alert than she’d seen him since he returned.
Chris had been surprised to learn that little Riza Hawkeye had been on the front lines of the war. She had met the girl once, several years prior, when Roy had brought his friend to visit Central, the teenage crush written plainly on his face. Further surprising had been when she realized that it couldn’t have been Riza that Roy whispered to on the phone, not when he repeatedly refused to take her calls. Not when Chris had heard the girl pleading on the other line to talk to him for only a minute.
“If you could just ask him to call me, Madam,” Riza had begged. Her voice was always level, but rough, like she was pretending she hadn’t been crying. Roy refused to answer in-coming calls himself, and would lock the door in his room when he’d hear Chris call him to come to the phone. Chris’d never thought of her nephew as cowardly, but he was certainly hiding from something.
“You need to call her,” Chris told Roy firmly. “She sounds…desperate.”
Roy looked around, suddenly attentive. It was Friday night, the restaurant was nearly full, and noisy with chatter and the sound of knives on plates and the clink of wine glasses. He leant across the table anyways, as if to tell her a secret.
“I owe her a favour,” his face twisted like the words tasted bitter on his tongue.
Before Chris could even begin to unravel that, their waiter returned and placed their steaks in front of them. Roy instantly looked relieved, and Chris–who had been in intelligence in some way or another for over twenty-five years–knew that whatever favour he owed, it was something terrible. She let him look away from her again, allowing him this reprieve, and cut into her dinner. The steak was perfectly cooked, buttery and fragrant, juices bleeding into the potatoes, the way they’d always both liked it. Chris savoured a few bites, and began to turn her mind on how to re-approach the conversation, when she was startled by the sound of his heavy, laboured breathing.
Roy was staring hard at his plate, so very pale. A trickle of sweat fell from his temple and down his cheek like a tear.
“Roy?” She was unable to conceal the concern in her voice. Roy began to pant hard, and swallowed audibly, before pushing himself to his feet, upturning his chair. He rushed away from the table as fast as the crowded dining room would allow him.
Chris paused for only a moment before rising from her chair, ignoring the stares and murmurs from the other patrons. She followed him into the men’s room, which was blessedly empty, entering in time to see Roy throw open a stall door and fall to his knees, vomiting violently into the toilet. Someone tried to open the door behind her, and Chris shoved it back closed. “Occupied!” She barked, and dragged a garbage can to block it for good measure.
She marched toward the stall, where Roy seemed to have expelled everything he had eaten and drank that day, and was coughing up stomach acid. She leant over him and rubbed gentle circles on his back, like she had done when he was a little boy. Finally, Roy finished his purge and collapsed against the side of the stall, eyes closed, as he wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve.
“Roy…” Chris didn’t know what to say next. She didn’t know what she wanted from the young man trembling on the floor of a restaurant bathroom. What she didn’t quite expect was for him to bury his face in his hands and begin to cry.
She stood above him for an endless minute, and then sat down on the floor beside him, silk pantsuit be damned. Slowly, she put an arm around her weeping son, and even slower, he leant heavily into her embrace.
“It smells the same,” he confessed between violent sobs. “It smells the same as the steak.”
Chris wasn’t stupid. She didn’t have to ask him what he meant.
She recalled when he first came to her, six-years-old and mourning the fresh loss of his parents. She’d only ever met him a few times before, as her brother had chosen to stay in Xing after falling in love and starting a family while studying abroad. Roy had been a precocious little thing, headstrong even as a little boy. The broken man she held in her arms then was nothing like that child. He buried his face into her arms, tears and snot bleeding through the sleeve of her shirt.
“It smells the same,” he repeated miserably, “and now I have to do it to her, too.”
Chris wasn’t stupid.
I owe her a favour.
She couldn’t help the gorge of revulsion that rose in the back of her throat.
She held him tight anyway.