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Chapter Text

Riza stared up at the ceiling. It was only comparatively recently that she’d been able to lie on her back and stare at the ceiling, and a part of her thought that she probably ought to be appreciating regaining her mobility and not being in excruciating pain, but the fact remained that the hospital ceiling was not the most exciting of things to look at. Neither were any of the hospital walls, which she had been looking at for the past… She counted up in her head. Two hundred and thirty-seven days, during which time she’d barely seen another human being aside from the doctors and nurses who cared for her. In a way she was glad that she’d been doped up on pain medication for the most of her stay, or she would have gone completely mad from the isolation.

Once she’d been allowed to do more than just ‘rest’ and could hold a pen, writing the letters had helped, even if it had been a source of great frustration at first when her words had been illegible due to her shaking hands. Things were better now. She felt almost back to her old self again, at least physically. 

Mentally… Well, that was a different matter entirely. She didn’t think that anyone who had gone into the war would come out of it as their old self mentally, even if they didn’t sustain a single bruise or scratch. 

It felt strange to know that the war was over. The nurses had tried to shield her from most news of the outside world during her recovery, and she was too out of it to take most of it in for a lot of the time, but even she couldn’t misconstrue all the celebrations outside in the city. 

The war was over, and she had spent the last few months of it in hospital instead of out in the field. She couldn’t really be blamed for that, she didn’t think. It wasn’t really her fault that her sniper tower had been hit with a blast and collapsed whilst she’d been in it at the time, injuring her back and shoulders and burning the skin there to within an inch of viability. 

Riza shook the thought away. She revisited the incident enough times in her nightmares, she really didn’t want to revisit it in her waking hours as well. Almost unconsciously, she touched her chest where the dogtags lay against her skin beneath her nightgown.

Roy…

When she’d finally regained some degree of lucidity and found Roy’s tags hanging around her neck alongside her own, she hadn’t known what to think. Was he dead? Wasn’t he? No one at the hospital had been able to tell her, either out of a desire to spare her from the news or out of a genuine lack of knowledge. As time had gone on, she’d realised that it was the latter. It hadn’t stopped her from writing to him as soon as she’d been able to. The thought that he was alive and out there somewhere was one of the only things keeping her from giving in completely. It would have been so easy to give up and give in to her injuries. She hadn’t even known what it was that had kept her fighting and surviving against the odds until she was out of danger and on the road to rehabilitation. She’d heard the doctors and nurses whispering about just how remarkable her recovery had been. 

She tried to twirl the pen between her fingers, cursing under her breath when she dropped it on the floor, fine motor function still not fully there yet. Slowly, carefully, she sat up and reached down towards the floor, still not quite able to get used to the way that the scarred skin on her back stretched and pulled with the grafts. It wasn’t painful, well, not as painful as it had been at the start, but it was still a strange sensation. Her fingers touched the pen but couldn’t grasp it, instead just rolling it further away  along the floor and out of her reach. 

Riza sighed, flopping back down and staring at the ceiling. She could get out of bed and get it. Her physiotherapy had been progressing well enough for that. She just didn’t have the mental energy to do anything other than stare at the now far too familiar ceiling.

It was only after the doctors had started to talk about maybe discharging her that this strange kind of restless apathy had settled into her bones.

It was simply because Riza had no idea what she would do with herself once she was discharged. As tedious as her time in the hospital was becoming, at least here she didn’t have to think about what the future held for her. 

Riza had never known a life without the war. She had gone straight from her oppressive childhood home and the terror of her father to the military academy, and before she’d even finished her training she’d been sent out to the front lines for her superior marksmanship. She’d never done anything else. War and fear had been all she’d known for so long; she couldn’t remember a time when the country had been at peace as it was now. In a world without bloodshed, how could a cold-blooded killer like herself find identity and definition? She wasn’t a creature for peacetime. Neither was Roy, but he had always thought that she had a chance, more of a chance than he did. They had both lamented it, that last fateful night in the tower before it had all come crashing down around their ears. 

Whatever happens, Riza, promise me that you’ll keep going. Promise me that you’ll live after all this is over. Not just exist, but truly live, like you’ve never been able to do before.

Riza had been about to ask him what he meant, but then everything had been smoke and rubble and terrible, blinding pain shooting through every nerve in her body. 

“Miss Hawkeye?”

The nurse came into the room and walked over to the bed on silent feet, picking up the pen on the way. Riza was unnerved by how quietly the nurses always moved, gliding from bed to bed and room to room without disturbing the patients at all. She preferred to know when people were coming. 

“Are you feeling all right, Miss Hawkeye?”

“Yes.” 

The nurse smiled. “Excellent. You have a visitor.”

Riza’s heart immediately leapt to her mouth and started beating painfully. It was probably a good job that no one was taking her pulse or blood pressure at the time as it would certainly have given them cause for alarm. Carefully, she pushed herself up so that she was sitting against the pillows. This was the first visitor that she had received whilst she had been in the hospital. 

Could it be Roy? There had been a time, right back at the beginning when everything was a haze of morphine, that she’d envisaged Roy walking through the door every time it opened, but as more mental clarity had returned, she had soon realised the foolishness of that notion. She hadn’t stopped hoping though. She would never stop hoping that he had got out unscathed, and he was trying to find his way back to her just as she was trying to get through to him.

“Hey, Hawkeye.”

The voice was not Roy’s, and Riza’s heart sank, but only a little, because the voice was familiar nonetheless and still a welcome one to hear after all this time without any word from a friend. Hughes came into the room, giving her a weak smile. He looked older than Riza remembered him, but then, she probably did too. War changed people. It aged them, haunted them, gave them a look that a soldier could recognise anywhere, even far away from the battlefields and out of uniform.

“Hello, Hughes. It’s good to see you.”

“It’s really good to see you too.  When they told me what happened out there that day…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t want to believe that it had happened. But you’re here, and you’re alive and well, and that’s all that matters.”

It wasn’t, not really. There was still the elephant in the room, and Riza already knew that neither of them would mention Roy. Not right now, at least. Not in the first few minutes of this first meeting. They were both glad to see each other alive, and ruminating on Roy’s fate would not help either of them, casting a dark shadow over what should be a happy reunion. The dark shadow was there anyway, but neither of them needed to draw attention to it.

The nurse withdrew after plumping Riza’s pillows a bit, and Hughes came over, more relaxed now that the two of them were alone together. After a moment of awkwardness, Hughes gave her a hug, a little tentative and nothing like his usual exuberance, likely concerned about hurting her more than she’d already been hurt. Riza returned it, squeezing tightly. She was not usually tactile, and had never really been one for Hughes’ hugs back during the war, but it had been so long since she’d had any human contact outside of the medical context that she needed this now.

“The doctor told me that they’re going to discharge you soon,” Hughes said once they had broken apart and he’d pulled over a chair, settling beside her and stretching his long legs out under her bed. 

Riza nodded. “Yes, they are. My rehabilitation’s almost complete. I’ve nearly got my full range of motion back.”

“That’s really good to hear. When I heard it was your back, I got worried. I know how tricky they can be.” He paused, and Riza knew what his next sentence was going to be even before it was out of his mouth. “Do you know what you’re going to do next?”

She shook her head, staring up at the ceiling again to avoid Hughes’s eyes. War was all she’d ever really known throughout her adult life. What was there for her out there?

“Well, I have a proposition for you, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Oh?” Riza looked across at Hughes, her previous apathy beginning to die back. She had no idea what kind of opportunities might be open to someone like her, but if Hughes had got something for her, then she wasn’t going to dismiss it. Right now she wouldn’t dismiss anything.

“You could come and work with me.”

For several seconds, Riza just stared at him. On the face of it, it made sense that Hughes would have another job now. The war was over and a lot of people had been demobbed or just plain left the military, unwilling to go back after the horrors that they had experienced in Ishval. It made sense that Hughes would be one of them, and that he would have found something else. It was just hard to imagine him actually doing anything else when she had only ever known him in a theatre of war. 

“Doing what?” she asked eventually. 

“The postal service.” 

“What?”

“You know, delivering mail and telegrams, sending messages, keeping communication lines open, all that kind of thing.”

Riza sighed. “I know what a postal service is, Hughes. I just…”

“Yeah, I know, it wasn’t my first thought for a career path either, but the opportunity to form the new postal service presented itself, and well, everything kind of spun out from there. The communication systems throughout the entire Eastern sector are in chaos after the war and it’s going to take a lot of work to get things moving again. So, the postal service will help with that, and you can help with the postal service. If you want.”

Try as she might, Riza could not imagine Hughes running a postal service.

“I think it would be good for you,” Hughes continued when she still hadn’t said anything after several minutes. “All of us… I think we’re all trying to find a way to give back and make amends after everything that we’ve done. I think that this is one way of doing that. We’re reconnecting people who’ve been torn apart by war; we’re helping the lost become found.”

Riza nodded. “Yes. I like the sound of that.”

Hughes grinned, a proper smile like the ones she used to see on him back at the beginning, when they were all fresh-faced and hadn’t had time to become scarred and jaded. 

“Excellent. I’ll come and fetch you once you’re discharged; we can set you up with somewhere to stay. To be honest you could stay in the post office. You wouldn’t be the only one.” He tactfully didn’t mention the fact that since selling her father’s house after his death whilst she was still in the Academy, Riza did not have a home to go to. The barracks had always served her well enough as a home. The house she had grown up in had never been a home to her. 

They continued to talk for a long time, although it was mostly Hughes talking, giving her a rundown of everything that he’d been doing since the end of the war and filling her in on how the post office was operating. At times, the talk drifted back to their shared history, to the war and the things that they had seen and the people they had known. Roy’s name never came up, even though he had been the one who had introduced the two of them in the first place. Riza couldn’t decide if she was glad about that or not; the more he was avoided as a topic, the more she thought about him. She’d sent him so many letters, and she had no idea if he’d received them or if they’d just got lost in the ether somewhere. 

Well, if anyone would know, Hughes would. He would have been the one posting the letters, after all. She wondered if that was why he’d come to give her the job - he’d seen her letters going through the system, and had seen that she wasn’t receiving any of her own and had taken pity on her and given her a lifeline. Whatever the reason, Riza was just grateful that she had a place to go and a direction to follow once she was out of the hospital.

Eventually, Hughes got up to leave, and Riza steeled herself. She had to know. They had been tiptoeing around the subject all the time that he had been here, but she had to know. 

“Wait, Hughes?”

“Yes?”

“Have you… Have you heard from Roy?”

Hughes’ face fell, in fact, his entire frame seemed to shrink in on itself a little, and he didn’t need to speak for Riza to know that it was bad news. He shook his head slowly.

“He’s missing, Riza. They never found him. You’ve got his tags, but there’s no sign of Roy.” 

He tried to plaster a smile on his face, but it just didn’t gel. “Still, there’s always hope, right? If they haven’t found him yet, that means he’s still out there somewhere. I mean, surely they would have found him by now if he wasn’t moving, right?”

Riza nodded unsurely, not quite as optimistic about the whole thing as Hughes was and knowing that he wasn’t quite as optimistic as he was making himself out to be. “Right.”

There was a profound silence for several seconds as they both digested the deeper meaning of the exchange, before Hughes pulled himself up to his full height again, squaring his shoulders, letting go of the moment of pain and putting the mask of cheerfulness back in place as he went out into the civilian world again.

“Take care of yourself, Hawkeye. I’ll see you soon.”

“See you soon, Hughes.”

Left alone, Riza returned to staring at the ceiling, this time with her thoughts falling over each other in the tumult of her mind, wondering what the future would bring now that it tangibly existed for her.

Chapter Text

“Welcome to the post office.”

Riza would admit that she was impressed by what Hughes had managed to pull together in a comparatively short space of time. It was less than a year since the war had ended, but the post office seemed to be running like a well-oiled machine already, everyone knowing what they were doing and how they were doing it, no signs of disorder anywhere. That surprised her somewhat considering the penchant for chaos that Hughes had had back when they’d been serving together. 

“I know that look.” Hughes quirked an eyebrow at her. “Don’t worry, this isn’t all my doing. A lot of the infrastructure was here already from the old postal service. We’ve just expanded our remit a little. Let me give you the tour and you can meet everyone.”

Considering how big the building was and how many patrons it seemed to be serving, there were comparatively few staff keeping the place going. 

“We need all the help we can get,” Hughes said. “I’m so glad you agreed to come.”

Riza smiled; that was more like the Hughes she remembered. 

After being introduced to all the clerks serving the general post office functions on the ground floor, Hughes took her upstairs into the speciality offices providing more niche services in the name of improved communications inside and outside the region.

Hughes knocked on a door labelled ‘Translations’ before opening it a fraction and peering inside. 

“Hello?”

“Hi boss! You can come in, Miles is just being antisocial.”

Hughes opened the door fully and ushered Riza inside. There were two people sitting at desks in the room, a dark-haired young woman, who’d evidently been the one to speak, and a man with Ishvalan colouring who gave a nod of acknowledgement before going back to the texts he was pouring over. 

“Rebecca, Miles, this is Riza Hawkeye, she’s joining us today.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Rebecca extricated herself from her desk and typewriter and came over to shake Riza’s hand. After putting a deliberate and definitive full stop at the end of a line, Miles did the same. 

“With all of the upheaval and displacement caused by the war, we want to help as many people get in touch with their families as possible,” Hughes explained. “So we decided to start a translation service out of the post office in order to assist where we can. Miles is of Ishvalan heritage; Rebecca’s family is from Aerugo and she also writes Cretan.”

Rebecca nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t suppose you can speak Drachman, can you? It would be nice to get a full set.”

“No, sorry.” 

“Ah well, never mind. One day. Welcome to the post office! Do you know where you’ll be working yet?”

Riza shook her head. “No. I guess I’ll do whatever’s needed.”

Rebecca patted her hand. “I’m sure you’ll find your niche soon enough. Anyway, Gracia and I always take our lunch breaks together in the attic at twelve, you’re welcome to join us. Miles sometimes comes too but I think he feels overwhelmed by women at the best of times so I don’t think adding another one will help.” She winked at Miles, who just gave a huff of laughter and went back to his desk after welcoming Riza to the post office.

She left the room with Hughes, who proceeded to introduce her to Fuery in the telegram office,  and the empty mail delivery room. 

“I guess everyone’s out delivering already,” he mused. “Normally there’s at least one courier in here. Maybe they’re all just slacking off because they knew I would be out this morning.”

Riza decided not to comment, and let Hughes guide her to the last door on the corridor. Auto-Memory Dolls . 

The door was open and they went straight in. Riza didn’t know what she was expecting with the description, but it definitely wasn’t a couple of people sitting at typewriters in little booths. One of them, a young woman, was obviously engaged with a customer sitting opposite her, but the other… 

Riza had to double-take. She’d never really had all that much to do with Alex Armstrong whilst they had been out in Ishval; they had been in separate units and separate spheres of operation, with Alex forming part of the State Alchemist outfit alongside Roy, but she’d recognise him anywhere. It was hard not to; he wasn’t exactly easy to miss in a crowd. 

He had noticed them come in and came over, evidently recognising Riza just as she had recognised him. 

“Miss Hawkeye.” He gave a respectful bow. “It’s good to see you well after all this time.”

“Likewise.” Riza found herself smiling, glad that she was not the only soldier looking for a new direction in life who had found their way to the Post Office with Hughes. 

“So, are you joining us here among the Auto-Memory Dolls?” Alex asked. “You’ll be a very welcome addition to our ranks, I assure you. We could always do with more wordsmiths; Gracia and I do our best but there are more people requiring our services every day.”

“Riza’s just getting a feel for the place at the moment,” Hughes said. “But she may well decide that this is where she wants to stay.”

“What do you actually do?” Riza asked, eyeing Gracia and her customer. The sides of the booth made it hard to hear what was being said between them, but Gracia appeared to be taking dictation.

“I suppose you could call us ghost writers,” Alex said. “We put down in words the things that other people can’t, for whatever reason - a lack of literacy, a lack of physical ability, or simply not being able to find the right words to show what they mean. That’s where the Dolls come in. It’s about more than just writing what people say as they say it - it’s about finding the deeper meaning, and writing what they truly want to say, even if they perhaps don’t know what it is themselves.”

“Well, that certainly sums it up much better and more eloquently than I can, which is why Alex is a Doll and I’m not.” Hughes laughed. “Like Rebecca said, you’ll find your niche soon. Everyone starts somewhere, and most people have ended up somewhere else. Alex began as a courier before we discovered his way with words.”

Alex coloured slightly and made his excuses, going back to his desk as Gracia finished with her customer and showed him  to the door, directing him down towards the main office where the finished letter could be posted. She came over to Hughes and Riza, and Riza couldn’t miss the look that Hughes gave her. It was nothing short of adoration, and she knew that Gracia would have to be blind not to have seen it too. Still, she made no indication of anything in front of Riza, who wasn’t exactly surprised. Hughes had always been the type to wear his heart on his sleeve, and in the end, she was glad that the war hadn’t changed that about him. 

“Welcome to the post office,” she said, shaking Riza’s hand warmly. “Maes has told me all about you. I hope that you’ll find your feet here. If you want to know more about what we do, then our door is always open.”

Hughes steered her out of the door then, possibly because he wanted to avoid making a fool of himself in front of Gracia, but Riza couldn’t help but be intrigued by what she had been told about the Auto-Memory Dolls, and her mind kept drifting back to Gracia, Alex and their joint mission throughout the rest of her first day at the post office.

X

Although she was not entirely sure what the best way of expressing it would be, because every time she tried, Hughes just waved it off, Riza was incredibly grateful for his patience with her. She was fairly certain that not everyone would be able to just try out all of the roles within the post office to find their best fit, but Hughes encouraged her to get a feel for the place in whatever way she wanted. She just wished that she had a better idea of what she wanted. She’d never had all that much of a choice in life before and seeing this vast vista of opportunity stretching out in front of her was somewhat terrifying.

It would have been so much easier if Hughes had just given her a job to do and she could have got on and done it, but she knew that he would never do that. He wanted her to make her own choices. He wanted her to be able to really live for herself, just like Roy had wanted her to do. 

She’d been out on mail rounds with the couriers; she’d spent some time at the front desk selling stamps and weighing parcels and sorting letters, although the sheer amount of people she’d had to deal with then had been overwhelming and she’d decided that probably wasn’t for her. At least, not yet, not until she was used to dealing with so many people in such a short space of time. She’d spent so long in the hospital with only doctors and nurses for company that being in the hustle and bustle of the post office’s main room almost felt like being back on the battlefield. 

She’d spent some time with Fuery in the telegram office, but the radio static reminded her of being up in the sniper tower in Ishval sometimes, and when the ticker got going it sounded just a little bit too much like the distant clatter of a machine gun for comfort. 

She’d met the quiet Sheska in the dead letter office, working tirelessly to get people’s undelivered letters to their recipients, and she’d spent days in the cool tranquillity of the Auto-Memory Doll office, sitting by and watching Gracia and Alex doing what they did best, taking their client’s halting words and turning them into beautiful missives, showing their recipients what they meant instead of what they said. 

It was here that Riza had felt the most at home, the most at peace, but as she stood outside Hughes’ office, steeling herself to knock, something was holding her back. 

Was this job really for her? She was a soldier, a sniper, what business did she have in trying to reunite people with their loved ones when she’d taken so many of those loved ones away for good?

Riza took a deep breath and knocked before she could second guess herself again. Hughes himself had said that this would be a good way of making amends for everything that they had done during the war, and it was certainly a more constructive method of repentance than feeling sorry for herself would be. 

“Come in.”

She peered around the door, finding Hughes sitting behind his desk with his brow furrowed as he looked down at the paperwork spread out in front of him. The frown vanished as he looked up and saw her, however.

“Hello Riza. What can I do for you?”

“I…” She paused. “Are you all right?”

Hughes shrugged. “Just trying to balance the books. It’ll be a bit precarious until we get more firmly established but nothing that we can’t handle.” He pushed the papers to one side and sat back. “Pull up a chair. How are you settling in here?”

Riza nodded. “I’m doing ok, I think. Everyone’s been very patient and welcoming to me even though I feel like I’m just getting in the way a lot of the time. It’s been…” She tailed off. She wanted to tell Hughes that it had been difficult to readjust to civilian life and she spent most of her time feeling completely overwhelmed, but she knew that there was nothing that he could do about that, however much he might have sympathised with her. The expression on his face made it clear that he knew what she was thinking, and she was grateful when he tactfully avoided the topic. 

“Have you given any thought to where you might like to settle?”

“Yes.” Riza took a deep breath. “I want to join the Auto-Memory Dolls.”

She didn’t think that she’d ever said anything so firmly in her life, never expressed anything with such a clear I want . She’d never really been allowed to want things before, back with her father. She got what she was given and that was that; wanting was foolish. Wanting had been foolish when she’d been in the military in the middle of a war as well. 

Hughes looked at her for a moment, almost as if he was as alarmed by her sudden decisiveness as she was. 

“I want to join the Auto-Memory Dolls,” Riza repeated. It felt easier to say it the second time around, her conviction definitely strengthened, and Hughes smiled, relaxing a little as she found her voice and continued to speak. “I know that I have practically no experience with a typewriter, and everything I’ve written for the last few years has just been military reports. I don’t know whether I’d be any good at expressing people’s innermost feelings on paper when they have trouble doing that themselves. But…”

She trailed off, and Hughes rescued the sentence for her.

“But it’s what you want to do,” he finished. “And if that’s what you want to do, then that’s what you can start to do. Gracia can set you up with typewriting exercises so that you get used to working with the machine, and you can continue to shadow her and Alex until you’re confident in your skills.” He smiled. “I’m glad that you’ve found something that you want to do.”

There was a lot more meaning in the words. I’m glad that you’ve found something that you want to do of your own accord, not because someone’s told you to do it or because you think you ought to do it. I’m glad you’re thinking for yourself and no longer just blindly following orders.

Riza nodded, and the two of them left the office to go and see Gracia and make it all official. Gracia was happy to accept her into their ranks and immediately went to find a practice typewriter, and Alex gave her a hug that almost crushed her bones. Riza immediately stiffened up, both unused to the affection and aware of how much the doctors had drilled into her that she shouldn’t put any undue strain on her spine. 

“Alex, she only just recovered from her back breaking the first time, don’t do it again,” Hughes said. Alex immediately released her with several apologies before giving her a much gentler hug. This one, Riza relaxed into a little. Life within the Auto-Memory Doll office, particularly life with Alex’s exuberance, was going to take a little bit of getting used to, but she was glad that he was there and that he knew firsthand what she had been through. He had gone through it himself, and they could make their way together. 

Although she was still very nervous about what was to come, and although she still wasn’t entirely sure if this was a place that she deserved to be in and be happy in, Riza was nonetheless looking forward to what might come next for her. 

It would be a learning curve, if nothing else.

Chapter Text

Hughes was always somewhat wary of going up into the attic when Gracia and Rebecca were up there on their lunch break. It was not that they weren’t both perfectly nice ladies when taken individually, but when they were together and hidden away from the rest of the  world, he did have to wonder what kind of plots they might be cooking up, especially as their murmured conversation stopped as soon as he poked his head up above the parapets, and both of them burst out laughing.

“I’ve decided that I probably don’t want to know, but nevertheless, I shall persevere.” Hughes climbed up into the attic properly. 

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Rebecca said. “You just looked a bit like a rabbit sticking its head out of its burrow like that.”

“Right…” Hughes wasn’t entirely convinced that was the reason for their laughter, but he knew that it would be infinitely safer for his sanity not to press the point. 

“Anyway, rabbits aside, what brings you up here, boss?” Rebecca asked. “It’s not like you to come up here and join us for lunch.”

“Well, you know, I like to take an active interest in what my employees are doing.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow and Hughes sighed. 

“Ok, fine. I wanted to talk to you about Riza. Do you think she’s getting on ok? She says that she’s fine every time I ask her, but I don’t know whether that’s because she’s actually fine or because she’s just spent so much time having to pretend that she’s fine that it’s become a habit.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Rebecca’s brow furrowed. “She’s not had the easiest of lives up until now.”

“She’s still feeling very lost,” Gracia said. “I think that the poor girl’s been feeling lost her entire life; it’s going to take time for her to find a place that she doesn’t feel lost in. She’s never had as much freedom as she has now, and she doesn’t know what to do with it all. It would be overwhelming for everyone.”

“I guess.” Hughes sighed. “I don’t want to just tell her what to do, though. She’s spent so long following orders and she doesn’t need to anymore, and I don’t want her to get back into the habit of just doing everything that she’s told with no thought for herself.”

“She’s not a robot, Hughes,” Gracia pointed out. “She does have independent thoughts and opinions.”

“I know. What I don’t know is whether she sees that she can act on them without repercussions now.”

“She’s already much better than she was when she first got here,” Rebecca said. “She’s much more talkative and she gets involved in conversations without having to be explicitly invited into them. She and Fuery were chattering on about dogs for a good half an hour yesterday; I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so animated.”

“She might benefit from a dog,” Gracia said. “It would be something to focus her attention on and it would love her unconditionally.”

Hughes thought about it. Riza had seen so much death; he knew that as a sniper she’d thought of herself as a tool for taking life, someone who was surrounded by death and did not deserve to be a preserver of life. It was the reason why she had been so hesitant to join the Auto-Memory Dolls despite her deep yearning to become one, because she felt that this was something for the living, and Riza had never had any business with the living. Having a dog would give her definite business with the living, although maybe it would be better to start her off with a pot plant as something that she could take care of first. 

“I mean, you know what Fuery’s like for finding stray dogs,” Gracia said. “One will turn up sooner or later.”

“That’s true.” What was also true was that Riza was still living at the post office and would be doing so for the foreseeable future, and Hughes wasn’t entirely sure he also wanted a dog living here.

“How is she settling into the Auto-Memory Doll office?” he asked Gracia. “She seemed to do ok on her typing course.”

“She’s getting there,” Gracia said. “I have no doubt that with a bit of practice we can train her up to be an expert Doll, but she’s very reluctant to start actually writing letters. Alex has been helping her a lot, giving her little practice scenarios so that she can work on her own letters instead of just shadowing the both of us all the time. I think she gets frustrated with her lack of vocabulary sometimes. It’s clear that she’s been very isolated throughout her life and she just doesn’t have the same breadth of experience that we do, not just life experience but the experience of meeting a lot of wildly differing people and getting inside their heads. I keep telling her that it’ll come with time and that we all had to start somewhere, but I’m not sure how much she believes me. Maybe once she takes her first client, she’ll see a breakthrough.”

“I’m sure that she will,” Rebecca said. “I suppose that the biggest issue that you have at the moment is getting her to a position where she feels comfortable taking her first client.”

“Yeah.” Gracia sighed. “There’s a part of me that thinks the next person who comes into the office, we should just direct them towards Riza and see how she does. I mean, Alex and I would be there, of course. I don’t want to give her too much of a baptism by fire but she has to go for it at some point. On the other hand, maybe it would be better if Alex and I weren’t there and she didn’t feel like she had the more experienced people breathing down her neck and judging her. Although to be honest I’m not sure that she sees it that way. She’s still an enigma; even though she’s opened up a lot there are some things that she still won’t be drawn on, and I don’t know if that’s due to deep-seated trauma, or stubbornness, or just because her life experiences have been so different to mine that her frame of reference is completely different.” 

In spite of her obvious frustration with not being able to relate to Riza’s situation, Gracia smiled. “But she’s doing so well, and I know that she’ll only continue to improve with all of the support that we can give her.”

Rebecca nodded her agreement, then presently looked at her watch and sprung to her feet. “Well, I’d better get back to work, or Miles will be wondering where I’ve got to. I’d hate for him to have to send out a search party for me.”

Maes knew full well that Rebecca still had plenty of time left on her lunch break and that this was just an excuse to leave him and Gracia alone together, and he couldn’t decide if he was grateful for her intervention or not. He had not got to the stage of actually admitting his burgeoning feelings for Gracia to anyone, but Rebecca had the uncanny ability of knowing these things without the need for words. There were some ways in which she would have been an excellent doll, with her ability to know what people were thinking even when they weren’t talking, but her slight lack of subtlety and definite lack of discretion meant that it would never be the job for her and he was quite glad that she had ended up in the translators’ office instead. 

Gracia smiled. “Riza will find her feet, Maes. I’m sure of it.”

Maes nodded. He would always be grateful for how easily Gracia had taken Riza under her wing and befriended her, and for how well the post office staff in general had accepted her into their midst, never questioning and just helping her acclimatise to the new world that she found herself in. Everyone had taken her in their stride, although he would admit that he had been worried about her being unable to fit in. In the end, though, they were all outcasts and oddballs in their own way, trying to find their way in the world and doing it through helping other people. Although his and Alex’s and Riza’s backgrounds were all very different, they had all come through the same war, and they were all atoning for the same atrocities that they had done throughout that war. It was a shared experience that none of them particularly wanted to have shared, but it was something that they understood about each other nonetheless, and it was something that everyone else understood about them even if they didn’t share that life that had come before. 

Gracia understood it; she always had done. She had been one of the first people who had come to work for the post office after Maes had first started to get it set up, offering her services as an experienced Auto-Memory Doll. Although she had not been on the front lines of the war like Maes and Alex and Riza had, she had seen more than enough of its effects in the letters that she had been involved in sending back and forth between the battlefield and the people back home. Maes remembered the odd occasions that he had seen Dolls in the combat zone, far from the safety that he usually associated with them. They weren’t supposed to be there, any superior officer could have told him that, but it was part of the motto that all Dolls across the entire continental mail network shared: If it is your wish, I will travel anywhere to meet your request. Sometimes that included warzones, he supposed. 

He glanced sideways at Gracia again, finding her watching him, and he was suddenly extremely glad that the war was over and infrastructure was beginning to be rebuilt in the ruins, because the thought of Gracia running off into an active combat zone with her typewriter to help deliver a dying soldier’s final message to his family filled Maes with an unspeakable dread. 

He pushed the thought far away to the back of his mind and forced himself to think of happier things instead, like now, this moment here just spending time with Gracia even if neither of them were saying anything. It was nice just to be with her, which was probably a sign that he was head over heels in love with her and definitely in denial about it. Still, there would be time to do something about it later, as right now Gracia was getting up to leave. 

“I should get back. But it’s always nice to talk to you, Maes. I know that Rebecca and I call this our secret little hideout but you’re always welcome.”

Maes smiled and watched her head down the ladder back towards the Dolls’ office, and he waited a moment in contemplation before making his way down himself. He might as well check in with everyone since he was on the move, and he ducked into the telegram office to chat with Fuery before going to see how Sheska was doing in dead letters. He was surprised to see Riza there too, sitting with Sheska at the table with a small pile of letters in front of her. 

Sheska looked up as Maes entered but Riza seemed completely oblivious to his presence. He was about to announce himself, but Sheska shook her head, pressing a finger to her lips, and she came over to him in the doorway. 

“They’re her letters,” she whispered, and Maes felt his heart leap up to his mouth and start beating painfully there. “Ones she sent whilst she was in the hospital. They never got to where they were supposed to go but I hadn’t got round to sorting them yet because there’s such a backlog to get through. They were on the table, she recognised the handwriting…” Sheska trailed off. “I didn’t know what to say, so I just left her to it.”

Maes nodded, unable to speak around the lump in his throat. Those letters had been sent to Roy, and it was no surprise that they had not found their recipient when no one knew where Roy was, or if he was even alive out there. He knew that Riza still held out hope that Roy could be found - he did as well - but finding her unread letters must have been a blow to her. 

“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “You head out for a lunch break.”

Sheska nodded, giving a final worried glance over towards Riza before she headed out of the door, closing it quietly behind her. Maes went over and took a seat beside Riza, but she still didn’t acknowledge his presence until he eventually spoke. 

“Hey.”

She looked up at him. She hadn’t been crying, but her eyes were red-rimmed, wide and utterly bleak. Then she shook her head, staring down at the letters again. 

“I knew that it was stupid, hoping,” she mumbled. “But I always thought that maybe he was still out there and he could have read them and he would know that I was ok, even if he couldn’t let us know that he was ok for whatever reason. But he never got the letters. He really is lost and beyond our reach.”

“Sheska will find him,” Maes said firmly. “It might take her months, but she won’t give up until every letter is delivered to its recipient or returned to its sender because the recipient can’t receive it.”

Riza snorted, indicating the letters. “These ones have been returned to sender.”

“But before Sheska’s had a chance to do her detective work,” Maes pointed out. “It’s not a lost cause yet. Never think that.”

“I know.” Riza sighed, pressing her hands over her face and rubbing her eyes, trying to stave off tears. “I know, and I’m so grateful for everything that you’re doing for me, but there’s a part of me that still doesn’t know what I’m doing with my life without Roy in it. When I’m alone, I keep on waiting for him to speak to me, because he was so often there during the long and boring nights up in the tower, keeping me company and just being there, being himself. I know it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid, Riza. You’re grieving, it’s natural.”

“I don’t want to grieve, though!” It was the most vehement that Maes had ever heard her, and although it startled him, he was glad to see the strong emotion on her and know that her experiences hadn’t deadened her inside like they had done to so many others who had been through similar trials. “Grieving means accepting that he’s gone, that he’s lost and I’ll never see him again, and I don’t want to accept defeat like that! I don’t want to let go of him and grieve him when there’s still a chance that he’s out there!”

She broke down into tears then, and Maes gently put an arm around her. When she didn’t shake him off, he pulled her in closer against his side, stroking her shoulder gently. 

“I know exactly how you feel.” He didn’t want to accept Roy’s loss any more than Riza did. He couldn’t and wouldn’t give up on finding him and making things right, if only to see Riza smile again, and give her some measure of peace in her life at last.

Chapter Text

In a way, Riza was quite glad that she was alone when she got her first Doll assignment. She was pretty sure that if Alex or Gracia had been there, then she would have found some excuse to pass the client on to one of them instead. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to begin her work as an Auto-Memory Doll in earnest, she just didn’t think that she was entirely good enough. 

As it was, Alex and Gracia were both out on assignments and Riza had been left alone in the office to deal with any walk-ins. She would only be on her own for a couple of hours and Gracia hadn’t exactly been expecting a run of custom, but at the same time, Riza was equal parts startled, nervous and excited when a young woman tentatively peered around the office door. 

“Are you an Auto-Memory Doll?” she asked. 

Riza nodded, shook her head and nodded again. The woman came into the room fully, her brow furrowed slightly.

“You don’t seem very sure.”

“I am. I’m just… very new.”

The woman shrugged. “That’s ok. Can you write a letter for me?”

“Yes.” Riza indicated her booth at the other end of the office, and they made their way over.

“Thank you.” The woman settled herself in the chair opposite the typewriter, staring at the blank page threaded into the machine for a long time. Riza realised that she probably ought to say something.

“I’m Riza.”

“Rose.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Rose. Shall we start with the recipient?”

Rose nodded. “His name is David.”

Dear David , Riza typed quickly. There was almost a little giddy thrill in her veins at the thought of beginning her first letter. 

“Who is David?” she asked. “What kind of letter would you like to write to him?”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

Riza’s heart shot up to her throat and started to beat painfully there. Of all of the letters that she could have been called upon to write as an Auto-Memory Doll, love letters were the ones that she had been dreading the most, and here was her very first letter, and it was supposed to be a love letter. 

Riza didn’t know the first thing about love. How on earth was she supposed to be able to convey Rose’s feelings adequately?

“Well, he was my boyfriend,” Rose clarified. Riza’s nerves calmed a little. Perhaps not a love letter after all then? Rose finally looked up from the paper and met RIza’s gaze, her eyes sad, lost and distant. “He died last year. And I… I just miss him. And I thought that maybe by writing him a letter, even though I know he’s not going to see it, maybe getting all my feelings down like this, maybe I wouldn’t miss him quite as much, and maybe I’d be able to move on at last.”

Roy . His image came to Riza’s mind unbidden, those final few moments in the sniper tower before everything had happened, his smile and his wishes for her to have a better life after the war. She thought of the letters that she had written to him whilst she had been in the hospital, and she thought of how much she missed him even now. There were times when she was able to push him to the back of her mind and focus on the present and the future rather than the past, and then there were times like now when he swam to the forefront of her mind and the pain of his absence ran through her afresh like a knife. It was never fully gone; even when she wasn’t thinking about him, she still felt that ache and longing. Although she had never expected to have anything in common with any of her clients, maybe she would not have as much of a problem with Rose’s letter as she thought. 

“I miss him so much, and I still love him so much, but at the same time, I’m angry with him sometimes. Does that make sense? We had our whole futures ahead of us and now he’s not around to have that future with. It’s not his fault that he died, obviously, I could never think that. But sometimes I just get mad that he left me alone with all these dreams that can never happen.”

A small part of Riza could understand how Rose felt. It was all very well Roy telling her to go and live a normal life after the war finished, but Riza had had very little idea of how to live a normal life. She had been relying on Roy to be able to guide her through a peacetime existence, but he was not here to do that. How was she supposed to live up to his last wishes when he wasn’t there to tell her how? It felt like she was foundering without him, but at the same time she knew that she was failing him if she didn’t get on with it. 

She drew her thoughts away from Roy as best she could, focussing on what Rose was saying and trying to work out the best way to parse Rose’s rambling thoughts into a letter. Gracia and Alex had both said that the key to being a successful doll was to watch and listen. People often used several sentences to try and explain something that a Doll could then put down into just a few succinct words, or their expressions betrayed something that was the opposite to what they were saying and gave an insight into their true feelings on the matter. 

“And sometimes, people just want someone to listen,” Gracia had said sagely. “Sometimes I think we’re more like psychologists than ghost-writers, but I guess the difference is that we’re not expected to provide solutions. Sometimes, I think that people don’t really need solutions. They can find their own solutions, they just need time to work through it and to know that they’re not alone. And we help with that. We provide that listening ear, and the letters we write help them to understand everything that’s going on in their own heads and move forward.”

Moving forward was what Rose wanted to do, and as much as she clung to Roy’s memory with tooth and claw, it was what Riza knew that she had to do as well. She wanted him to be proud of her, wherever he was. Maybe it was paradoxical to want him to be proud of her for moving on without him, but since he was not here and she couldn’t wait until he had been found to start living her life, especially as he might never be found, then she needed to find that strength from somewhere and start moving on. 

After Rose had talked through her complicated feelings towards David and his death, she fell silent, looking at the practically empty page that Riza had still not put any real words on. Riza nodded, placed her fingers over the keys and began to type quickly, feeling as if she had to do it quickly in order to stop herself having any time to second guess what she was doing, or she’d never get it done. 

Dear David

I know that you will never read this letter in the traditional sense, but there’s a part of me that hopes you will be able to know its contents nonetheless, wherever you might be right now. 

I miss you, and there will always be a part of me that will never not miss you. I love you, and you love me, and that’s not something that death can take away from us for as long as we live, but I have to stop being in love with your memory. I can’t keep living in the past and dreaming of what could have been, and thinking that nothing that will happen in the future can ever compare to the future that we should have had together. 

Because I have a future. I have a life that I have to keep living, whether I like it or not, I don’t have a choice in the matter, I have to keep living. I have to keep going and moving forward. The future that awaits me is not the future that we planned together, but I can’t go into it immediately thinking that it isn’t going to be any good. There are so many years ahead of me still, and it will be soul-destroying to spend all of those years wishing for something else, something better. I don’t want to be a sad, lonely, bitter old woman, and I fear that your memory will make me that, that the love I feel for you now will turn to anger and bitterness because you left me alone without that perfect future that we dreamed of.  I don’t want that to happen. I want the memories of you to remain perfect and beautiful, to leave what we had in the past and not carry it forward into the future. 

I will always love you, and I will keep on loving you, but the time has come to let go and move on, to stop being in love with you in order to keep loving you. To keep the past fresh and lovely and the future bright, instead of everything being tainted with the same grief as the present.

I know that you’ll understand, wherever you are.

Yours, 

Rose

For a little while after she had typed the last word, Riza could only stare at the paper for a while. Once she had got into her stride it had felt like the words were coming from somewhere else, not from her, and it took her a moment to realise that in reality, they were coming from Rose, she had just needed Riza to put them down on paper. Still, as she removed the sheet from the typewriter and scanned through it to make sure that there were no typos, she was a little bit unnerved, not only by the fact she’d just pulled that off, but by how much it made sense to her in light of her own situation.

She passed the sheet over to Rose, her heart beating in her mouth and unable to speak. Would it pass muster?

Rose was silent as she read the letter through once, twice, three times, and finally she looked up from the paper and smiled. 

“Thank you. That’s exactly what I wanted to say. You’ve put it so well.”

Riza felt relief flood through her entire frame, and she went through the formalities of the rest of the appointment almost automatically.  She didn’t realise that Gracia had come back into the office until she had seen Rose out of the door and down the stairs and turned back into the main office. Immediately she knew that the latter half of her conversation and appointment would have been overheard - not completely, the booths offered a great deal of privacy to their clients which was why they were installed in the first place, but she would have heard her small talk with Rose as she escorted her out. She immediately felt the colour rise in her cheeks, but she tried to push the feeling of embarrassment down. She was an Auto-Memory Doll and she had just completed her first successful assignment. That was something to be proud of.

“So, how was your first letter?” Gracia asked.

“I think it went well.” Although Gracia was a friend, Riza was still nervous about sharing her innermost thoughts and feelings with anyone, and she decided to keep them to herself for now. The catharsis that she had felt whilst writing Rose’s letter had been deep and personal, and she didn’t know if Gracia would really be able to fully understand it; if she had ever been close to someone in the way that Riza had been close to Roy and Rose had been close to David, and had lost them in the same way. In a way, as strange as it seemed, pouring out all of those emotions onto the page had been as much of a release for her as it was for Rose, as if she had been writing to Roy herself.

Gracia smiled. “Well, your client certainly seemed to be pleased. I’m glad you’ve found your feet with it at last. Now you’ve really arrived, I think. You’ll be an old hand before you know it.”

Riza gave a small smile and went back to her booth, looking down at the brief notes she had taken whilst writing Rose’s letter. The feelings of anger, the worry that deeper feelings of love would turn to bitterness if they were left to become stagnant rather than being allowed to move on. It all helped her to understand her own complicated feelings towards Roy. She hadn’t even realised that she had been in love with him at first, thinking that she felt this strange, worshipful adoration of him because he was the first person to think of her first and foremost as a person, rather than as something she could do. Now she understood the feelings for what they were, and she could recognise the danger of them turning sour just as Rose had recognised that danger in her own feelings. 

Their circumstances weren’t the same. David was gone, absolutely and definitively, but Roy wasn’t necessarily dead. He might still be out there, and although Riza knew that she had to move on from him, there was still a part of her that clung to the past, worried that he might come back at a moment’s notice and then everything would be wrong because everything would be different, and they could not go back to the relationship that they had shared before, whatever it had been. It had not really had chance to define itself beyond knowing that they had some kind of immutable feelings for each other. But if he never did come back, then waiting would have been for nothing and she would have wasted so much of her life. 

She would never stop loving Roy, and she would never stop hoping that she would see him again, but she knew that she could no longer hinge her entire life and future on waiting for him to return.

She thought back to the letter again. She could relate to so much of it, and it felt strange. Throughout the war and her recuperation from her injuries, she didn’t think that she would be able to relate to anyone. Well, to Hughes and Alex, perhaps, they had been there and seen the same things as she had, but even they didn’t have her background, raised to follow orders and do very little else. It was odd to think of herself as having anything in common with someone like Rose, and yet here she was. 

Perhaps there was a place for her in the wider world after all. 

Chapter Text

It was the end of the day when Hughes poked his head around the door of the Auto-Memory Dolls’ office, looking around furtively. Riza looked up from covering her typewriter and saw him hovering there.

“Can we help you, Hughes?”

“Has Gracia already left?”

“Yes, but you only just missed her. If you run you should be able to catch up to her.”

“No, no.” He inserted himself into the room fully. “No, I was waiting until she’d gone.”

“I see.” Riza looked over at Alex, who shrugged. Hughes just sighed.

“I need someone to write a letter for me,” he said. “And it’s a letter to Gracia so obviously I couldn’t get her to write it.”

Alex patted Hughes on the shoulder with a huge hand. “I’m glad that you’ve finally decided to act on your feelings, my friend.”

Riza couldn’t help but smile to herself at the thought of Hughes needing to get one of them to write a love letter to Gracia on his behalf. Over the past few months of working in the post office and spending so much time with Hughes and Gracia, both together and individually, it was painfully obvious that the feelings they held for each other were definitely more than just an employer and employee, and it was even more painfully obvious that neither of them were actually going to do anything about it. 

“Oh good, has he finally decided to do something?” Rebecca poked her head around the door and then came in, her eyes brightening and an almost wicked smile spreading over her face when she saw that Hughes was in the room and Alex was strongarming him into the seat opposite his typewriter. “I must say, I’ve been waiting for this moment for weeks now.”

“You know that there’s really no need for the entire post office to get involved,” Hughes protested. “I was hoping to just get through this with only Riza and Alex knowing what was going on.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “You’re kidding yourself if you think that the topic of you and Gracia and when you’re finally going to admit your feelings towards each other hasn’t been the only thing that any of us have been able to talk about since… forever. Sheska and Miles are still here, I need to tell them that there’s finally movement on the romance front.”

“You will do no such thing!” Hughes exclaimed before sighing. “I can’t believe that this has been a gossip topic for months.” 

“Yes you can.” Rebecca said, completely matter of fact. Hughes just buried his face in his hands. “You know me. In fact, you know all of us.”

“Unfortunately I do,” Hughes muttered, muffled by his palms. He groaned and finally looked up. “Well, since you’re all here, you might as well all help me write it and good grief Alex have you started already?!”

“I thought that ‘Dear Gracia’ would probably be an auspicious beginning that you wouldn’t have cause to regret.”

“I’m beginning to regret coming in here at all, but no, you’re right. That’s a good beginning.”

“All right. Where do you want to go from here?”

“I don’t know.” Hughes looked from Riza to Alex and back again. “You’re the ones who are good with words.”

“They need something to go on, boss,” Rebecca pointed out. “What are you trying to get out of this letter? Are you trying to confess your undying love, propose marriage and babies and happily ever after, or do you just want to ask her out on a date?”

“A date would probably be the best start before we get onto the undying love, marriage and babies.”

“Which implies to me that there will be undying love, marriage and babies in the future.”

“Well, maybe.” 

Rebecca just grinned, pulling up a chair next to Alex’s cubicle and settling in to watch the show. Riza didn’t think that she’d ever had so many people involved in the crafting of a letter before, but when it was the boss that was the client, perhaps the more second opinions there were, the better.

“Perhaps we should keep it simple to start with then,” she suggested. “Gracia always says that if there’s a question to be asked, it should be asked clearly, without any flowery language, so that the recipient can’t misunderstand. There are definitely times when directness is best.”

In a way, directness was sometimes what the Auto-Memory Dolls were all about. They were there to help people to get their feelings across, and letters were sometimes an easier way of being direct than speaking to someone in person and being completely unable to get the words out.

“I agree,” Alex said, “but I also think that we don’t necessarily have to start directly with the asking out on a date part. There should be some wooing in there to start with. How about some poetry? Nothing too fancy, of course, just something to stir the emotions a little and make Gracia more amenable to the proposition at hand.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “I never had Gracia down as one who liked poetry. Nor do I have Hughes down as one who writes poetry. I know that your entire aim is to write things on other people’s behalf but you do still need to sound like it’s Hughes asking Gracia out on a date rather than you.”

“But the noble art of poetry composition has been passed down the Armstrong line for generations!” Alex looked a little bit put out at not being able to use his skills and Riza had to smile as Rebecca leaned across and patted his arm gently. 

“I know,” she said. “But maybe it would be best for you to keep your considerable poetical talents for when you’re writing love letters of your own. I’m sure that the right person is out there and I’m sure that they’ll appreciate your offerings.”

Alex sighed and turned to Hughes again, but before any further progress could be made on the letter, Miles and Sheska poked their heads around the door of the Doll office. 

“We wondered what was going on in here,” Miles said. “I always get suspicious when Rebecca vanishes for extended periods of time. Are you meddling again, Rebecca?”

“I am doing nothing of the sort! I am assisting our esteemed leader in matters of the heart! It’s a very delicate process. Pull up a chair, you can get in on the action as well. Hughes needs all the help he can get, seriously.”

Hughes had once more buried his face in his hands, and it looked like he wanted nothing more than for the ground to open up and swallow him whole. 

“I have a lot of regrets in my life, but I have never regretted anything as much as I regret coming in here.”

“What are you talking about? It’s going great! We’re off to a fantastic start, we just need to keep the momentum going.”

Considering that the letter currently consisted only of ‘Dear Gracia’, Riza wasn’t quite so confident of having a fantastic start, but given how close Hughes seemed to be to running screaming from the room and hiding in the telegraph office for the rest of days, she decided it would be more tactful to remain quiet.

“What would you say to her if she was here in the room?” she asked Hughes. 

“I don’t know!” Hughes exclaimed. “That’s why I’m doing this whilst she’s not in the room and I don’t have to worry about talking to her and my tongue turning into lead!”

“OK, what would you want to say to her, and since she’s not actually here, you know your tongue won’t turn into lead, and we can then just write it down for you.”

Hughes sighed. “I just want to ask her if she wants to go for a drink some time,” he said. “I don’t even know why I’m so nervous about it because we spend enough time together and we’re good friends. I just want to be sure that she feels the same way about me that I feel about her, and I don’t know if I never ask, but at the same time, I’m worried about what will happen if she doesn’t.”

“You’ve got to take the leap of faith at some point,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, we can start from there I think. Alex?”

Alex gave a decisive nod and started to type, and as he was working, Riza looked around the faces gathered in the room, all of them so earnestly interested and invested in Hughes and Gracia’s future happiness. 

She smiled. The group of post office workers had truly become like a family to each other, and she was a part of that family now too. She’d never felt such a sense of familial connection with anyone before, especially not her own blood relations. The only time that she had ever come close to it was when she had been with Roy, and all of a sudden, the warm happiness that she had felt on seeing the post office come together for Hughes and Gracia was gone, drowned out with the same overwhelming sadness that had begun to envelop her when she had first found out that Roy was missing. She had managed to keep that sadness at bay for a while, throwing herself into her work and her new life, and clinging on to the fierce, determined feeling that no matter what, Roy was out there somewhere and he would make his way back into her life when the time came. But now, suddenly, out of nowhere she felt his absence so acutely. She knew that he and Hughes had been close friends, and she knew that if Roy was here, he would have been a part of this little post office family and he’d be here with them now, ribbing Hughes with the best of them whilst cheering him on from the sidelines. He’d probably have been even more of a ringleader than Rebecca was. 

“Riza?” Hughes’s voice brought her out of her thoughts. “Are you all right?”

Everyone was looking at her; Alex had stopped typing. She tried to smile, but she knew that it would only look false and forced. 

“I’m fine,” she said. This moment was supposed to be about Hughes, not her. 

Hughes just raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? You can say what’s on your mind. You’re among friends here.”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “We’re all here to help.”

“Thank you. I don’t think that there’s anything you can help with. Besides, we’re supposed to be helping Hughes. He needs all the help he can get, doesn’t he?”

Rebecca laughed. “I’m so glad I taught you so well. But seriously, are you all right?”

Riza looked over at Hughes. Of all of them, he would understand what she was going through. 

“Yes. I’m ok.” The instinct to push it all down and wear a mask was strong. She’d been doing it all her life, wearing the mask of the perfect daughter, the perfect soldier, the perfect killing machine. She’d been a doll before she’d been a Doll, and she hadn’t even known it at the time. It was only now that she didn’t have to wear it anymore that she realised she had been. “I just… I just wish Roy was here.”

Hughes nodded. “Yeah. I do too. Although he’d probably be teasing me even worse than all of the rest of you combined.”

“Probably?” Alex gave a huff of laughter. “I’d have thought that was a certainty.”

“Don’t give up hope,” Hughes said. “I don’t want to say ‘I’m sure we’ll see him again’ or anything like that, because nothing is certain, but I don’t think we should give up hope just yet. It’s a big ask, I know. But having faith in the little things and hoping for the small things helps us to hope for the big things.” He paused, looking out of the window, and when he spoke again, he was talking to himself more than the rest of them. “I guess it’s like me and Gracia. My deepest wish, my biggest hope, is to have a family. People whom I love, and who love me, who’ll stay with me for the rest of my life and enrich it. And there’s a part of me that thinks that maybe I don’t deserve that after everything I’ve done in my life, but then there’s Gracia, and she gives me the hope that I do deserve it and that I’ll get to have it. And it’s the small things that build up to that. The hope that she’ll agree to go on a date with me for starters. The hope that she’ll feel the same way about me as I do about her. And even if it doesn’t go well, I’ll still have that bigger hope.”

The typewriter dinged loudly, breaking the spell that had fallen over the room. Riza hadn’t even realised that Alex had started to type again, but he was pulling a fully written sheet out of the typewriter.

“I don’t think that anything else needs to be said.” He handed it over to Hughes, who began to read through it. It felt like the entirety of the gathered office staff were holding their breath until he smiled and nodded. 

“Thank you, Alex. I knew I could trust you to put all my thoughts down on paper.” He paused. “And I suppose I should thank all of the rest of you as well. I know your intentions were well-meant even if your exuberance is worrying.”

“You can be worryingly exuberant yourself when the occasion calls for it,” Sheska pointed out. “Now, shall we get you an envelope and a courier for that letter so that it can get to Gracia without delay?”

“Yes. We’re on tenterhooks wondering what’s going to happen here, you need to put us out of our misery!” Rebecca leapt to her feet, trying to grab the sheet of paper out of Hughes’ hands, but he evaded her, sprinting out of the room and down the corridor towards the couriers’ office. 

Alex sighed and covered his typewriter. “Well, I hope that it all turns out for the best. Of course, that is dependent on the letter actually reaching its recipient which might be difficult.”

Rebecca came back into the room, panting. “Damn that man’s fast when he wants to be. I really wanted to see what was in the letter! Alex, can you  tell us what you put?”

Alex shook his head serenely. “It is part of the Doll code of conduct that we never tell others what we put in our letters. That is between the customer and the recipient. We are pillars of secrecy and discretion.”

Rebecca sighed. “I might have known that you’d say something like that. Never mind, I’m sure I can get it out of Gracia in the morning.” She came over and sat back down beside Riza. “I’m sorry about Roy. We’re all still keeping our eyes peeled for news of him, and we’ll let you know as soon as we find anything, good or bad. I think in this kind of situation, it’s the not knowing anything concrete that’s the worst part. There are so many people in the same boat, looking for their loved ones. That’s one of the reasons why we all do what we do. There are so many reunions to facilitate and we’re in a position to do that. So no matter what happens, remember that you’re not alone, Riza, and you don’t have to bear the burden of your feelings alone anymore.”

Riza smiled, despite Roy still feeling like a sudden ache in the pit of her stomach. “Thanks, Rebecca.”

Chapter Text

Resembool was a small place in the middle of nowhere, and as she sat on the back of the cart that was trundling her slowly but surely towards her final destination, Riza found that she liked it. It was a far cry from Eastern City; so far she’d seen ten times as many sheep as she’d seen people, but she didn’t mind. Time seemed to have stood still here, and despite it being so close to the Ishvalan border and the memories of the war, it was a peaceful place. 

She was glad that it was peaceful, because she was extremely nervous. This was her first travelling assignment. Most of those went to Gracia, the most well-known and most frequently requested Doll, and Riza stayed in the office to deal with the requests that came in person. This particular customer, however, could not travel to Eastern, and they had not requested a specific Doll, so Gracia and Alex had unanimously decided that Riza should be the one to handle it. On the one hand, she was grateful for the experience, and she knew that if she did a good job then her reputation would spread and she’d receive more commissions. On the other, this was the first time that she was out here on her own without Gracia and Alex for back-up, having to make all of the decisions by herself. She’d been confident in her scribing abilities for a long time now, but not having that safety net to fall back on if she needed it was a little unnerving. 

The cart dropped her off in front of a yellow painted building and set off back down the hill, and Riza read the sign. Rockbell Automail . The front door opened before she reached it, and a girl of about eleven or twelve years looked out, her eyes saucer-wide as she looked at Riza. 

“Wow, she really is just like a doll.” The girl disappeared into the house, calling to the other occupants. “Granny! Ed! Al! The Doll Lady is here!”

An older woman came to the door and smiled. 

“Welcome to Resembool.”

“Thank you. It’s nice to meet you.” Riza curtseyed as she’d seen Gracia do. “If it is your wish, I will travel anywhere to meet your request. Auto-Memory Doll Riza Hawkeye at your service.”

The old woman chuckled. “Oh, that’s very nice, my dear, but it’s not actually me who made the request, and you don’t need to travel much further. Come on in. I’m Pinako Rockbell. Would you like some tea?”

Riza nodded. “That would be nice, thank you.”

There had never been time for tea before. Back in her father’s house there had always been something that he needed her to do, and then there was never time for the luxuries of tea in the middle of a war. Riza wasn’t used to breathing space; she always needed something to do, and it had taken several hours and several patient pots of tea with Gracia, Alex, Hughes and Rebecca for her to finally appreciate time and leisure. 

They went into the kitchen; the girl who had opened the door was already in there getting tea things ready, alongside what appeared to be a man wearing a full suit of armour. 

Riza took a seat at the table, placing her typewriter case down on the floor beside her. A dog with an automail limb limped over and took a sniff before settling down next to the typewriter, paying its owner no mind. She decided that it would be more polite not to ask about the armour. Here in the east, so close to where the Ishvalan war had played out, there were so many people who had been caught in the crossfire and lost limbs if not their lives, ordinary citizens just going about their business who’d had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as the violence had spilled out of Ishval and started engulfing the surrounding area. Although peaceful and idyllic on the surface now, Resembool was obviously one of these places, the fact that this small automail outfit was doing such good trade was a grim reminder of how many people outside of the military had been affected by the long drawn-out war. 

For a moment, as she sat their sipping her tea whilst Pinako and the others - her granddaughter introduced as Winry, and the boy in the armour introduced as Alphonse - made small talk, Riza felt the same pang of guilt in her gut that had plagued her ever since she had first made the decision to become a doll, the feeling that she didn’t deserve to be doing this after all of the pain that she had caused. Every time she saw something that reminded her of just how many innocent lives had been torn apart through her actions and the actions of others. 

She tried to push it down. She was making up for it now, by being here and helping these people as much as she could.

“I’ll go and see if Ed has woken up,” Pinako said. “I’m sure that he’ll want to get started once he knows that you’re here.”

Riza just nodded. She didn’t ask for any details about Ed; she would find them out when she met him. So far she had always met her clients face to face in the office, so this was the first time she was meeting someone’s friends and family before she met them personally.

“I wonder why Ed would hire an Auto-Memory Doll in the first place?” Winry mused. “I mean, he knows that we can write things for him if he wants us to. And who would he be writing to? We’re all right here. Not that we’re not glad to have you here,” she added quickly to Riza, and Riza could tell that the sentiment was genuine and not veiled platitude at potentially having caused offence. 

Inside the armour, Alphonse shrugged. “I don’t know.” He turned to Riza. “Do you know why Brother called you here?”

“No.” Riza paused. She’d never had much experience of interacting with children. No, rephrase that, she had no experience of interacting with children, even when she’d been a child herself, her upbringing had been so isolated that she’d never interacted with other children much. Winry looked pensive, lost in thought, and although she couldn’t see Alphonse’s face behind the armour, she thought that his voice sounded much the same. She wanted to reassure them in the face of Ed’s secrecy, even though she still didn’t know precisely why she was here or what she was supposed to be doing now that she was here. “No, I don’t know why Ed has hired me. But I do know that sometimes, the people closest to us are the hardest to talk to.” She thought of Hughes and Gracia, and the effort it had taken to get Hughes to make that first move. “Sometimes it’s easier for people to put their thoughts into writing, and sometimes it’s easier to get someone else to help with translating those thoughts. Someone who’s on the outside has a different perspective of these things.”

“I guess.” Winry didn’t look entirely convinced, but Riza was saved from any further awkward explanations by Pinako entering the room again. 

“Ed is awake, and he’s ready to meet you,” she said. “I’ll take you through now.”

Riza followed Pinako through into the clinic area of the building, into a neat, clean hospital room. A boy about the same age as Winry was sitting up in bed, and the missing right arm that made writing impossible for him was painfully clear to see, as was the left leg gone from above the knee. A chair and small table were set up next to the bed, and Riza set up her typewriter before curtsying again. 

“Auto-Memory Doll Riza Hawkeye at your service. If it is your wish, I will travel anywhere in the world to meet your request.”

Ed nodded. “Thanks for coming all the way out here to see me. I’m Edward Elric.”

Riza took a seat, feeding a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter before stopping with her fingers paused over the keys, ready. “It’s nice to meet you, Edward. What can I help you with today?”

“I…” Ed began, but he tailed off, staring down into his lap with a stern, focussed expression. “I want to write a letter to my brother, Al. You would have seen him when you came in. The one in the armour.”

Riza nodded. “Yes, I met him.”

“I know it’s stupid because we’re in the same house, I should just be able to talk to him, but this thing… I just can’t talk to him about it. It’s too big, and I’m too scared to talk about it. So I thought that maybe if I wrote it down, then it would be easier.” He sighed. “I guess I’m not making much sense.”

“It’s ok. Take all the time you need.”

“You keep secrets, don’t you? I mean, you must write so many letters full of people’s deepest, darkest secrets.”

Riza nodded. “Yes. Whatever you share with me will go no further than the person to whom this letter is addressed.”

“It’s just that I did something really bad… And I don’t want Al to get into trouble with anyone in Eastern City if it gets out.”

“Whatever you say will stay between us,” Riza reassured him. “And I can understand not being able to express yourself in the way you want. It’s ok to be scared.” That was something she had struggled with at the beginning, after she had come out of the hospital. The world had been so different, although she had only spent a comparatively short amount of time away from it. Her world had been so small before, just the trappings of her father’s regime and then her training and then the war itself with nothing outside of it. Now it was so much bigger, and admitting her fear of it had been hard. 

“It’s ok to be scared,” Hughes had said. “God knows, I was terrified every moment I was in Ishval. Change is always scary, but it’s worth it in the end.”

Ed nodded, and finally he looked up at her. 

“Tomorrow I’m having my surgery to graft on my automail.” He indicated his arm and leg. “It’s going to be a long and painful recovery, but I’m prepared for that. I’ll be back on my feet within a year, I’ve made that promise. But there’s a part of me, just a really tiny part, that’s scared that something’s going to go wrong, and if it does, then I might never know… I just need to ask Al but I’m not ready to yet, and I need to know that I can ask him even if something does go terribly wrong tomorrow. So if I write a letter, then it’s done, and it’s asked. And if everything is all right, then hopefully Al won’t ever need to read it because hopefully one day I’ll have enough courage to talk to him about it face to face. But I want to know that it’s done.”

Riza nodded, and as she typed the first words Dear Al , she felt a lump come to her throat. Ed could only have been ten or eleven years old and he was so calmly accepting of his own mortality. He was scared of it, and rightly so, but he was accepting of it nonetheless. She didn’t know that she would have had so much mental fortitude at his age, even with her strange upbringing. 

“I…” Ed sighed, then took a deep breath, as if he was physically steeling himself for what he was about to say. “I need to know if Al blames me for getting him stuck inside the armour. I need to know, but at the same time, I’m afraid of what his answer will be.”

Riza didn’t ask how Ed had got Al stuck in the armour, or what exactly constituted being stuck in the armour.

“I mean, at the time I did what I had to do, it was the only way to get him back, but it’s not much of a life, really, is it? A soul bonded to a suit of armour, all because I was too stupid and prideful to see that it’s forbidden for a reason; we thought we could do something no one else has ever been able to do. I thought that I was better than everyone else.”

Riza made a couple of notes, parsing through Ed’s words as he talked out the complexity of his feelings into something that could be put down into a simple letter. The more that he spoke, the more a picture of what had happened to the two brothers began to form in Riza’s mind. They had attempted a forbidden form of alchemy, trying to bring their mother back to life using taboo human transmutation, and they had paid a hefty price with their body parts, Edward sacrificing his arm in order to retrieve Al’s soul and bind it into the suit of armour she had met before. 

Finally, Ed seemed to reach the end of his tale. “I’m just too scared to ask him outright,” he finished, giving another sigh and looking down at the blankets again, a flush of shame highlighting his cheekbones. 

Riza nodded. “It’s ok. I understand.”

“You do?”

Riza nodded. “I’ve done a lot of things I’m ashamed of. And everything that you did, you did out of love, for your mother and your brother. I don’t have that excuse. I was a soldier, a sniper. My hands have taken so many lives, but you were trying to preserve life. I don’t claim to know how Alphonse feels about this. It’s not my place to. But I can understand the way you’re feeling right now.” She repositioned her fingers on the keys. “I’ll try to put your thoughts on paper.”

It took her a while to start, the enormity of everything that Ed and Al had suffered in their short lives still swirling through her brain, but in the end, she felt that simplicity was the best option. It was a simple question that needed to be answered, after all, and in the end, it would be a simple answer, whatever answer Al gave when the time came. She wouldn’t put those words in his mouth, that was a conversation that would have to be between the two brothers. She could only facilitate it. 

She pulled the sheet out of the typewriter and placed it on the bed in front of Ed. 

“Here we are. Do you think that will be all right? Does it say what you want to say?”

Ed read the letter twice through, then gave a decisive nod.

“That’s just what I want to say. Thank you. Can you put it in an envelope? I’ll give it to Granny for safekeeping. Maybe it will never be needed. I kind of hope it won’t, although I feel bad that your work will have been for nothing.” 

Riza slipped the sheet into an envelope and tucked it under the pillow beside Ed. “I hope that it’s not needed as well. I’m glad that I’ve been able to help you.”

Ed smiled for the first time since she entered the room, just a weak ghost of a smile, but a smile nonetheless, and Riza returned it. 

“Thank you, Miss Riza.”

“You’re welcome.” 

She left the room, and Pinako showed her out of the house after sorting out her payment. Winry and Al waved to her as she made her way down the path towards the train station, and Riza found herself thinking. She didn’t mind if her work never saw the light of day. The Auto-Memory Doll was just an extension of someone else’s mind in that sense, rather than a composer and artist in their own right, and Riza was perfectly at peace with that. It wasn’t her penmanship on display in that letter, it was Ed’s thoughts, and if he found a better way to express them in person, then she would be very happy for him. 

Chapter Text

“Every time I come to Central, I can never get over how big it is.” Gracia stepped off the train and looked around the main station concourse. On the face of it, it was really no different to the station concourse in Eastern City, apart from the fact it was about four times bigger. Of course it was four times bigger, Central was the capital city and it served as a focus point for all of the other regions. Still, for Gracia, who had grown up in the middle of nowhere in the countryside, Eastern had been a big enough city to get to grips with. She wasn’t scared in Central, not anymore. The first couple of times that she had come here, she’d been absolutely terrified of taking a wrong turning and getting murdered in an alleyway, but now she had enough life experience under her belt not to be quite as concerned about such things. She had a job to do, and she was going to do it. 

“Yeah.” Maes came up beside her, looking around too. He had far more experience of the city thanks to his military service here, but she knew that he had not been sorry to leave it behind when he had been demobbed. She knew that he would never be a country boy; she’d never get him out on her grandparents’ farm, but when it came to cities, Central was an entirely different beast to any other conurbation. 

They made their way through the crowds of people towards the exit, stepping out into a street that was just as busy and bustling as the station itself had been, and Maes pulled out a map.

“So, where are you headed?”

Gracia pulled the request form out of her pocket and looked at it. 

“The request came from a Madam Christmas, and the address is a bar.”

Maes looked up sharply. “Madam Christmas’s?”

“Yes.”

“I used to go there all the time with Roy when we were stationed here. Come on, I can show you the way.”

Although Gracia was grateful for the offer of a guide, she gave Maes a pointed look. “Don’t you have to get to the record office for your appointment?”

“Well, yes, but this is more important. It’s not in the most salubrious of areas, I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”

“Maes, you know full-well that out of the two of us, the person who’s more likely to get into trouble here is you. Besides.” Gracia hefted up the heavy case containing her typewriter. “If I encounter any trouble I’ll just throw this at them.”

“You’d better not break post office property,” Maes remarked. “If that typewriter gets damaged in the fight for your honour, it’s coming out of your wages.”

Gracia just laughed, she knew he didn’t mean it, and he pointed out the bar’s location on the map before the two of them went their separate ways. 

She really hoped that Maes would find what he was looking for at the record office. Even after months had passed, he and Riza had never given up the hope that they would find Roy, and now that he’d uncovered this lead, Gracia didn’t want all of his hopes to be dashed at the last minute. Still, she supposed that even if the news was bad and Roy was dead, at least the two of them would have some closure instead of agonising over what might have happened to him. Not knowing was infinitely worse than knowing and being able to move on from whatever had happened. Riza especially needed to know. It was one thing to have a comrade missing in action, but it must have been even worse for Riza, knowing that she had been by his side up until the moment he went missing, always wondering if perhaps there was something she could have done differently to save his life. 

In a way, though, despite Riza’s desperate need for answers and closure, Gracia was glad that Maes had decided against bringing her along on the trip; he had not even told her the reason for his coming to Central other than to keep Gracia company. The thought of Roy being alive had been the only thing that had kept Riza going through her darkest moments, and if it turned out to be bad news, then breaking it to Riza would have to be handled delicately, and would be better done back at the post office with all her friends around to help her bear the weight of her grief. 

At length she rounded the corner onto the street where Madam Christmas’s bar could be found, still lost in thoughts of what Maes might find. She could see what he meant about it being insalubrious and she had to wonder just what he and Roy had got up to in there, but nevertheless, she was on a commission and she was not about to turn tail now. 

It was the middle of the day so the bar was not open, but Gracia stepped up to the door and knocked smartly anyway. Hopefully whoever had made the request would accept that an open bar was not the most conducive environment to writing letters of a no doubt delicate nature. She heard footsteps inside, and a moment later a young woman opened the door a fraction and peered out, looking Gracia up and down and taking in her appearance and the heavy case by her side. Suddenly, her wary expression changed and broke into a grin, opening the door wide.

“You must be the Doll. I’m so happy you’ve arrived, you’ve got no idea what it’s been like these last few days. Maybe you can finally put a stop to all the arguments.”

Although Dolls had been called upon to do several tasks in their time, Gracia was pretty sure that argument mediation was not something that really fell under her remit, unless she was going to be writing notes to be passed between the two feuding parties. She had to say, that seemed a bit pointless if they were all living under the same roof.

“I’m Vanessa.” The woman let her into the bar and re-locked the door behind her. “Come on through, Madam’s been expecting you.”

Gracia followed Vanessa into the bar proper; there were a couple of other girls hanging around in the booths, and a forbidding woman who could only have been the madam herself organising bottles of spirits behind the bar. 

“Madam Christmas?” Vanessa called. “The Auto-Memory Doll is here.”

Madam Christmas looked over at them, giving Gracia an appraising look for a long time and then a nod of satisfied approval. Gracia set down her suitcase and gave a little curtsey.

“If it is your wish I will travel anywhere to meet your request. Auto-Memory Doll Gracia Moran at your service.”

Madam nodded again and gestured off to the doorway behind the bar. “Thank you for coming. Step into my office and I’ll explain your assignment.”

Gracia followed her through, still trying to get a feel of the place and more than marginally terrified of her contractor. Madam led the way into a cramped office and took a seat behind the desk, offering an overstuffed and moth-eaten armchair for Gracia. 

“What is the nature of the letter that you would like me to write?” she asked. 

Madam gave a tiny grimace. “It’s not actually my letter. Well, at least not yet. It’s kind of a long story. I actually hired you on behalf of my nephew, because he’s a stubborn pain in the arse who was never going to do it himself.”

Gracia was trying very hard to keep her face a mask of calm professionalism as Madam continued. 

“Anyway, if he still refuses to get his act together now that you’ve come all the way here to help him, then I’ll get you to write the damn thing on my behalf instead. Something’s got to be done, I can’t stand seeing him like this much longer.”

Gracia nodded her understanding. “I see. May I ask why your nephew was so reluctant to commission a Doll in the first place?”

“I think it’s somewhere between stubbornness and pride.” Madam sighed. “He was a soldier in the war, a military alchemist to be precise. The nature of the injuries he received makes it difficult for him to write himself, but there are people he needs to write to. At least, there are people that I think he needs to write to and he’s not quite so convinced. I suggested commissioning a Doll to help him, not just with the physical act of writing the letter but with the composition and contents, as I know he’s struggling with that as much as his physical disabilities. He wasn’t having any of it. Vanessa will tell you about the arguments we’ve had, back and forth and over and over. Stupid boy thinks he’s got the entire world figured out and knows everyone else’s minds better than they do themselves.”

This time Gracia could not suppress a smile as Madam snorted. “In the end, I decided I’d just do it myself and get one of you out here. Maybe now he’ll see sense.”

Gracia wasn’t entirely as convinced, it could be hard to get people to change their minds, especially if you went behind their backs to do it, but she always liked to look on the optimistic side of life. “What’s the nature of the letter?”

“It’s been over a year since the war ended and the majority of folks still don’t know if he’s even alive or not. Whatever he might be feeling about himself, there are people who deserve to know that he’s alive rather than being in the dark.”

Gracia’s heart skipped a beat. It was the exact situation that Maes and Riza were in with Roy, and for a few brief seconds, she allowed herself to hope that perhaps she had found the key to it all entirely by accident, by simple dint of being in the right place at the right time in order to receive the right commission. She set it aside; there were still hundreds of people missing after the war, this man could have been any of them. All the same, the knowledge that this was a place where Roy and Maes had used to come - it was too much of a coincidence.

“I think it would be best if we spoke to your nephew now,” she said, hoping that her voice was still calm and level and wasn’t betraying her tumultuous inner thoughts. 

Madam nodded, leading her out of the office and through the back rooms of the bar until she reached a small bedroom. It was pretty sparsely furnished, just a bed and a desk in there, but it was clear that someone had tried to add a few homely touches for its occupant, who was sitting on the bed staring out of the window. 

“Roy, I have a visitor for you. She’s from the post office.”

Roy sighed. “We’ve talked about this.”

“I know, but I think you ought to at least try. Even if nothing comes of it, at least you’ll know that you tried.”

Gracia, for her part, said nothing, just staring at Roy Mustang. She’d never met him in the flesh before, for obvious reasons, but Riza and Maes both had photographs of him. He looked older now, thinner, tired and broken down just like everyone else who had come back from the war and left a piece of themselves behind out there in the bloody fields of Ishval. Madam caught her gawping expression and raised an eyebrow. 

“Do you two know each other?”

“No…” Gracia shook her head. “No, not directly. But my boss who owns the post office…” (She was still reluctant to call Maes her boyfriend in a professional setting like this, however true it might have been.) “I work for Maes Hughes.”

Roy looked over at her sharply on hearing Maes’s name, and as she took in his face fully, Gracia could see why Roy would have trouble with writing. His pupils were milky grey, and Gracia knew with a lump in her throat that even though he was looking straight at her, he couldn’t see her.

“Hughes?”

“Yes.” Gracia took a deep breath to steady herself; she’d barely dared to hope that her client might be Roy and here he was, in the flesh, alive despite all the odds, with Maes just a few streets away desperately looking for him through the military record office. “He’s here in Central right now looking for you, Roy. He’s been looking for you ever since the end of the war.”

“What?” Roy’s voice was harsh and choked.

“It’s the entire reason he started with the post office,” Gracia continued. God, she wanted to cry, she wanted to burst into floods of tears of relief that all Maes and Riza’s hopes had not been for nothing. “He figured that the broken lines of communication from the war were the reason why he hadn’t heard anything about you, and he wanted to change that. He wanted to find you.”

Madam, who had been standing in the doorway watching the interaction in silence, now strode into the room, clasping an iron fist down on Roy’s shoulder.

“Did you hear that?” she asked, her voice low and shaking with something that Gracia realised, startlingly, as barely suppressed rage. “Hughes has been looking for you. All the while you’ve been holed up in here hiding from the world, Hughes has been out there looking for you. So don’t you dare tell me that no one would care to know if you were dead or alive.”

Roy was speechless, that much was evident. What little colour he’d had before had drained out of his face; he looked ill and ashen. 

“I can go and get him,” Gracia said. “He’s at the record office, it shouldn’t take too long to bring him back here.”

“No!” Roy barked. “No. Don’t bring him back here. I don’t want to see him.”

“Really?” Madam raised an eyebrow. “He’s come all the way to Central to find you, he got an entire postal service working again in order to find you, and you’re not going to give him the courtesy of actually finding you?”

Roy sighed, turning his face away. “It’s not like that,” he muttered.

“You really don’t want to see one of your oldest friends after everything that you went through in Ishval together? After all the plans you made for the end of the war? You can still go ahead with those plans, Roy.”

“It’s not like that!” Roy snapped. “I can’t face him like this! I don’t want him to see me like this! I don’t want him to see me so helpless!” He smacked his fist down against the mattress he was sitting on. “And after what happened to Riza… I can’t face him after that.”

“What do you mean, what happened to Riza?” Gracia asked quietly. 

“I could have saved her. I should have saved her. And now she’s dead and it’s all my fault.”

Gracia shook her head. “Riza’s not dead. She’s at the post office with me and Maes. She’s been looking for you too.”

Roy rounded on her, furious. “You’re lying,” he hissed. 

“I’m not. Riza’s fine. She’s alive and well and desperate to know where you are.”

“No. She’s not. I know she’s not because I saw her die! ”

[to be continued!]

Chapter Text

There was silence in the room for a long time after Roy’s anguished confession, and Gracia was glad of the quiet in which to get her thoughts together. 

There were two options. Either the Riza Hawkeye who worked in the post office was a clever imposter, even cleverer considering she looked like the same Riza Hawkeye in all of Hughes’ photographs of the three of them from the battlefield. Or, as was far more likely, Roy had been mistaken in what he had seen. 

“Roy,” she began, “I don’t know what you thought you saw, but Riza is alive.”

“I don’t think I saw anything,” Roy said coldly. “I saw her fall five storeys through a burning building. There’s no way that anyone could have survived that.”

“Well, Riza did,” Gracia said simply.

“No. She didn’t. I don’t know whether you’re saying that to try and make me feel better, but it’s not working.”

Gracia couldn’t keep up her calm any longer in the face of Roy’s obstinate disbelief and she rubbed her eyes as she felt the tears come. 

Madam shook her head and looked over at Gracia, leaving Roy to his own thoughts. “Come on. We’re going to get Hughes. I’ll drive you to the record office myself. I think that’s the only way we’re going to get this blockhead to believe us. Come with me.”

Gracia left her case in Roy’s room. There was a small part of her that wasn’t entirely convinced that what was happening wasn’t a dream, and that if she left now she would not be able to come back. If she had to return for her case, then at least she knew that there was some degree of reality to it. Madam led her back through the bar and out into the alleyway behind where a car was parked up under a tarpaulin.

“I’m sorry about that scene,” she said once they were seated in the car and creeping along the alley out towards the main streets. “Once Roy gets an idea into his head, he’s like a dog with a bone, and ever since he lost his sight, he’s been more adamant than ever about remembering the things he’s seen with his own two eyes as the absolute truth. It was Hughes that I wanted you to write to, but if Riza is still alive - and I believe you that she is - then I think he needs to write to her as well.”

“We can get her into Central by tomorrow afternoon.” Gracia hated how small her voice sounded, but after the rollercoaster of emotions that she had just experienced, she could barely string a sentence together. “He can talk to her in person, he doesn’t need to send a letter. God knows Riza would drop everything to come and see him. She’s never admitted it, but I can tell how much she loves him just from the way she talks about him.”

Madam nodded. “Yes, I know that feeling.”

Within a few minutes they had pulled up outside the record office, and Gracia leapt out of the car, dashing up the steps and into the foyer, looking around completely lost for a moment until the receptionist looked up at her. 

“Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Maes Hughes. He had an appointment here, well, now.”

The receptionist leafed through the appointments book. “Yes, he’s speaking to General Raven at the moment. They asked not to be disturbed, but I suppose I can interrupt them if it’s urgent.”

“Yes. Yes, it’s very, very urgent.”

“OK.” The receptionist picked up the phone. “What’s your name and what’s happening?”

“I’m Gracia Moran, and it’s about Roy Mustang and -”

“Gracia?” Hughes was coming through the turnstile, coat over his arm and a sheaf of paperwork in his hands. “What are you doing here?”

The receptionist dropped the phone back onto the cradle and returned to what she had been doing before Gracia had burst in. 

“I found Roy,” Gracia said. 

Maes stopped in his tracks. “What?”

“I found Roy. My client, Madam Christmas, who commissioned me to write a letter? She’s Roy’s aunt, and she commissioned me on his behalf, and the letter was to you to tell you that he’s alive.” She grabbed Maes’s hand, dragging him out of the building and down the steps to where the car was still idling outside, Madam giving evil looks to all the parking wardens who were attempting to approach and tell her that she couldn’t wait there. She shoved Maes into the back, clambering in after him, and Madam wasted no time in screeching away, careening around the complex one-way system.

“Good to see you in one piece, Hughes,” she said, glancing at him in the rearview as they swerved around another corner into the alleys. Gracia didn’t like to dwell on how long they might still be in one piece for. 

“You too, Madam. How come you never told me that you were Roy’s aunt? How come Roy never told me that you were his aunt?”

“A woman’s got to have some secrets, Hughes.” She winked in the mirror. “Anyway, we’ve reached a crisis with Roy and I think the only way I’m going to get him to see sense is if the two of you speak face to face.”

Maes shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe it. He’s alive, after all that. He’s alive and he’s been holed up here in Central all this time. Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he get in touch with the military, if nothing else?”

“Because he’s an idiot !” Madam Christmas smacked the steering wheel in frustration. “I’ve tried to reason with him, I’ve tried to give him the space he needs to recover and get his head screwed on straight again, but I can’t deal with him being an idiot any longer so I took matters into my own hands.”

They reached the alley at the back of the bar again, and Madam let them into the building before going back to adjust the tarpaulin. Gracia led Maes through the rabbit warren of back rooms until they reached Roy’s door. Hughes raised his hand to knock, then let it drop back to his side again. 

“How is he?” he asked Gracia quietly. “I just want to be prepared.”

Gracia took a deep breath. “He’s blind. I don’t know if he sustained any other injuries, that didn’t come up. But he can’t see, Maes.” She sighed. “He didn’t want you to see him like this, so I’d probably expect resistance if I were you.”

Maes nodded. He took a deep breath, then took three more when his courage failed him the first time round. Finally, he faced the door, squared his shoulders and knocked loudly before calling through the wood.

“Roy, are you naked in there?”

Roy’s reply was instantaneous and as confused as Gracia felt. 

“What?”

“I thought that would get your attention better than simply announcing myself. Still, if you’re not naked, I’m coming in. If you are naked, I’m coming in anyway.”

Gracia groaned. “Maes…”

“You’ll have a job, the door’s locked.”

“I’ve got brute strength enough for both of us, you’ve always known that.”

Gracia tugged on his sleeve to pull him back. “Maes, you can’t just barge into someone’s private space.”

“I can when my best friend is being a stubborn-ass moron!”

“Maes…” Still, she couldn’t knock his tactics as she heard footsteps and the tap of a cane cross the room, and Roy finally opened the door. 

“Hughes, I…” 

He was cut off by Maes throwing his arms around him. 

“You idiot ,” he said fondly, and Gracia could hear that he was fighting back tears. “You complete and utter idiot .”

Roy had stiffened when Hughes had touched him, and Gracia would need to have a word with him about sudden invasions of personal space especially when the recipient couldn’t see it coming, but then he relaxed, almost like a surrender. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

Madam arrived then, and she smiled at the sight, gently taking Gracia’s elbow and leading her back into the bar.

“I think we deserve a drink after that,” she said, taking down a glass and pouring a generous measure of Drachman vodka into it. “What can I get you?”

“Technically I’m working,” Gracia said. “I can’t drink on the job.”

Madam Christmas shook her head. “I don’t think that any letters are going to be written today.” She topped the vodka off with fruit juice and pushed it across the bar. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Gracia accepted the cocktail gratefully, needing something to relax her down from the tightly-wound state that she’d been in for the last couple of hours, and Madam poured herself one. The two of them continued to drink in silence for a while, every so often glancing over to the doorway that led to the back rooms. There had not been any shouts or sounds of broken furniture, so Gracia was taking that as a good sign, but considering how stubborn Roy had been at first, and how stubborn he had continued to be on the topic of Riza, she knew that it would only be a matter of time before the two of them were butting heads. 

Eventually, Madam nodded, and Gracia slipped off her bar stool, making her way back towards Roy’s room. The door was still open, Maes and Roy were sitting on the bed talking quietly,  but she knocked on the frame anyway.

“Who is it?”

“Gracia.”

“Come in.” 

She entered, taking the seat at the desk quietly. 

“Roy was just telling me how he survived,” Maes said. 

“I think I need a break from telling the story,” Roy mumbled. “Why don’t you describe Gracia to me instead?”

Maes looked at her and grinned. “Oh, I can certainly do that.”

“I thought you might be able to from the way you’ve been talking about her. You’re not fooling anyone that she’s just an employee.”

“No, she’s not. Gracia is my girlfriend, and she’s the best woman I know.”

“I don’t doubt it if she puts up with you.”

“Hey!”

“At any rate, Hughes, what does she look like?”

“She’s about medium height and build, and today she’s wearing a light turquoise dress and coat. She has short hair in a bob over her ears; it’s a light brown, sandy colour. She has large round eyes, the brightest green you’ve ever known. And, of course, she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Roy smiled. “Of course she is.”

They continued to talk about the everyday and the post office and the work of the Auto-Memory Dolls until Roy was ready to recommence his tale.

“The Ishvalans found me,” he said. “I didn’t have my tags but obviously I had my uniform, they could tell I was an Amestrian State Alchemist. They bandaged me up and took me to the peace corps hospital. Once I’d recovered from everything except this,” he indicated his eyes, “I hitched a lift with them back to Central. By that time the war was over. I didn’t think about reporting in. I just wanted to lay low and lick my wounds. I knew I’d never get my sight back, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of point trying to do anything after that. And…” He sighed, staring at the floor. “And I’d lost Riza.”

“Maes, can you tell him that Riza’s still alive?” Gracia asked. “He doesn’t believe me, maybe he’ll believe you.”

“I saw her fall, Hughes. I saw it happen. It was the last thing I ever saw and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. There’s no way…” Roy shook his head. “I want it not to be true. I want her to have survived. I just know that it’s pointless to hope.”

Hughes looked from Roy to Gracia and back again with incredulity. 

“Riza is alive. I’m not sure what more we can do to convince you, but Riza is most definitely alive. If you really want her to have survived, why on earth are you refusing to believe that she has?”

“Because…”

“Roy, you know me. You know that I would never deliberately deceive you, not about something as important as this. You know that I would never give you that pain of false hope. I might be annoying but I’m not cruel.”

“I just don’t see how it would have been possible for her to survive.”

“If you don’t think that Riza Hawkeye could have survived what happened to her, then you do her the great disservice of vastly underestimating her. I thought you were better than that, Roy. You know how determined Riza is, how she’s always been. The doctors said it was a miracle she was breathing, let alone that they could get her moving again, let alone get her walking again. But she’s alive, whether you want to believe it or not.”

Roy was silent, still taking it all in. Finally, he nodded. 

“OK. I think I believe you.”

“Good.”

Roy pressed his hands over his face, his entire body shaking with silent sobs. 

“Roy? We can telegram to her; she can be here tomorrow.”

Roy shook his head. “No. No, she won’t want to see me.”

“No, you don’t get to decide that,” Hughes said firmly. “You don’t get to decide what Riza does and doesn’t want, that’s for her to decide. And I know she does. Riza wants to see you, Roy. She’s been searching for you just the same as I have, and it’s not so that she can shout at you for not saving her life when you both know full well that there’s nothing either of you could have done. She still wears your dogtags, Roy, she never takes them off in the hope that one day she can give them back to you in person! After all that, do you still think she won’t want to see you? If you don’t want to see her, that’s different. But Riza wants nothing more than to see you again, Roy.”

Roy was silent.

X

Riza was doodling on her notepad when she heard the ticker start up in the telegram office, the rattling signalling an incoming message. She didn’t pay it much mind, it was a sound she’d heard so often now that it no longer startled her, and she similarly didn’t pay any mind to Fuery leaving the office at a run. The message must have been urgent and now he was on his way to find a courier. 

Except he didn’t go to the courier’s room. Instead, he burst through the Doll office door, holding out the telegram slip to her. 

“Riza?”

She grabbed the paper, and her heart stopped as she read it.

FROM: G MORAN

TO: R HAWKEYE

COME TO CENTRAL ASAP ROY IS ALIVE

Chapter Text

Riza didn’t know what to think as she stepped off the train in Central City. There was a part of her that was just outright refusing to believe it. After all this time, after so much hoping and wishing and trying to come to terms with the fact that she might never know, Roy was alive. Hughes and Gracia had found him. She would finally get to see him again. 

Although she was looking forward to it, there was definitely something that kept her hanging back, and she didn’t know what it was. It was a year since the war had ended, and Roy had never known her in her civilian life. She had gone straight from being a kid under her father’s roof to being a soldier, and those were the only two roles that Roy had ever known her to fill. Now that peace had come to the country, and now that she had found a certain degree of personal peace within herself through her role at the post office, she knew that she was not the same person she had been when Roy had known her. 

She knew that there would be no way that Roy would be the same either. War changed people, that was well-known and inevitable, but what few people outside of the military realised was that peace changed people as well. Could it be that she and Roy were too different now and that they would not recognise themselves and each other? She had spent so long hoping to be reunited with Roy, but maybe she had been better off not knowing, staying true to the memory of him rather than knowing the reality and knowing that he was different now, that he no longer saw her in the same way as he had always done. The last thing she wanted was for him to be disappointed in her, having spent so long apart. She was not the Riza he remembered, and he would not be the Roy she remembered. She had accepted that, but at the same time, it still worried her. 

Gracia was waiting on the platform for her, and she opened her arms as Riza came over to her, holding her tightly. 

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Gracia said. “I don’t think that Roy’s going to accept that you’re alive until he meets you in the flesh.”

“Roy thought that I was dead?” She’d spent all this time thinking that he might be dead, and he had been thinking the same thing about her. That didn’t make much sense, though. Riza’s details were all down on file; everyone in the military knew which hospital she had been sent to after she had been dragged out of the wreckage of her tower. Everyone knew where she was; she was not listed among the fallen or the missing. Why would he think that she was dead?

Gracia nodded.

“The stubborn man didn’t even think to ask about the lists of dead or missing,” she said with a sigh of good-natured exasperation. “He saw you fall, he immediately assumed that you could never have survived it and he’s been labouring under that impression ever since.”

“I see.” That sounded a lot like Roy, to be fair, and it would certainly explain why he never contacted her. “Why didn’t he contact Hughes then?”

Gracia heaved another sigh, this one not quite as good-natured. “Because he’s stubborn and proud and didn’t want Hughes to see him injured. Also he thought that Hughes would never forgive him for letting you die.”

“But I didn’t die.”

“Exactly, but Roy didn’t know that.”

Riza circled back to the first half of Gracia’s statement. “Was he hurt badly? Did he get the right treatment; who’s taking care of him?” She paused. “How did he even get back to Central when I had his tags?”

Gracia told her the full story as they made their way through Central’s streets; Riza hoped that she wouldn’t be called upon to navigate them back to the station as she was paying no attention to her surroundings whatsoever, engrossed in Gracia’s tale. It hurt her heart to think of all the time that Roy had spent alone and isolated, convinced that she was dead and that Hughes wouldn’t want anything to do with him, that he was better off with everyone thinking he was already gone. 

Eventually they made it to the somewhat seedy looking bar where Roy had been hiding out all this time since the end of the war. Riza vaguely remembered Roy talking about the place when they had been spending those long hours in the sniper tower together, but it hadn’t registered before now that this might be a place he would have come to in order to try and put himself back together. She supposed it was because she hadn’t thought that he would hide away in the first place; she had thought that if he was alive, he would have made it known to Hughes at least, even if he thought that she was dead. 

In any other situation, it would have been a comedy of errors, the way that they had all kept missing each other and making assumptions and generalisations about each other’s state of life and death. Roy had steadfastly believed that Riza was dead and would not fully believe it until he had the physical proof there in front of him, whereas Riza had never stopped believing that Roy was alive, no matter the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that had presented itself to her over time. As it was, there was no comedy in it, just the tragedy of two people kept apart far longer than they should have been by war and self-loathing and the mire of red tape and bureaucracy, 

“Are you ready?” Gracia asked. 

Riza didn’t reply straight away. Was she ready? The answer should have been immediate, she thought. After so long praying for Roy’s deliverance, after so long firmly believing that he was alive and out there somewhere, surely she would want to see him straight away, but something held her back. Gracia took her hand and squeezed. 

“It’s ok if you don’t quite know how to feel right now,” she said. “This is something new for all of us. There’s no guidebook for how to go about it. I think we’re all just going to have to take each moment as it comes, and see what happens. Whatever does happen, though, we’re all here for you. For both of you. But you deserve to have this moment. You deserve closure, if nothing else.”

Riza squeezed Gracia’s hand back, and together they entered the bar. 

There was a middle-aged woman standing behind the bar, pouring out drinks, and although Riza would have found her utterly terrifying in another life, she smiled when they came in.

“You must be Riza,” she said. “Roy’s talked so much about you. I’m glad that you’ve come. I think he needs you to be here in the flesh. He’s just about accepted that you’re alive, but I don’t think that he’ll fully come to terms with it until he can talk to you properly.”

Riza nodded, and Gracia guided her through the bar to the back rooms, one of which had been set up as a little bedroom. The door was open and Roy was sitting on the bed next to Hughes.

Roy. It felt like forever since she had last seen him and yet, apart from the milkiness in his eyes betraying his blindness, he looked just the same as he had done before. A little bit healthier perhaps, now that he was no longer in the middle of a war and living off military rations. The dark circles under his eyes had faded, but the haunted look that he had always carried about him was still there. 

Hughes looked up as he saw her enter the room, and he smiled, giving Roy’s shoulder a squeeze and standing up.

“I’m glad you came.”

Riza just nodded. There was a lump in her throat that she couldn’t talk around, and she wasn’t sure what she was going to say now that Hughes and Gracia had left them alone.

Roy was looking over at her, although she knew that he couldn’t see her, he obviously knew that someone had come into the room. Finally, she managed to find her voice. 

“Roy?”

“Riza? Is that really you?”

“Yes. It’s me. I’m really here. I’m really alive.” She crossed the room, carefully sitting down on the bed in the spot that Hughes had just vacated. 

“I can’t see you.”

“I know. Gracia explained everything. But I can promise you that it’s really me.” Riza knew that she was going to have to take the lead. She had spent so long wishing for a reunion between her and Roy, but she had never given any thought to the details of how it would come about, or what they would say to each other after spending so long apart and living under such uncertainty. She had nearly been broken by that uncertainty, but she had never given up hope. Roy had, and as such, she was going to have to help him rebuild it in whatever way she could.

She reached across and took his hands, placing them against her face. With that invitation given, Roy carefully moved his fingertips over her skin, delicately tracing her bone structure, seeing her with his hands. When he finally spoke again, his voice was barely more than a reverent breath.

“Oh, Riza .”

He crumpled against her, shuddering in her arms as she caught him. In all of their time together during the war, even during the very hardest of times, Riza had never seen Roy cry. They were soldiers. They didn’t have the luxury of weeping for their fallen comrades or for the terrible circumstances that they found themselves in, or for the horrors that they had witnessed and perpetrated. It was strange to see him so vulnerable now, but Riza didn’t mind. They were only human after all, and they had been through so much. Everyone had a breaking point, as much as they might not like to show it. 

Eventually, he quietened, wiping his eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I just can’t believe it. All this time, and you’re all right. You’re alive, and you’re out there living a life like I told you to.”

“It was the last order that you gave me.” In spite of herself, Riza had to smile. “I could hardly go against it under the circumstances, could I?”

Roy just sighed, shaking his head. “I suppose not. I’m so glad that you’re alive.”

“And I am very glad that you’re alive, Roy. I never gave up hope that you were out there somewhere, even when everything else seemed lost. I don’t think that I could have borne it if I lost you completely.” 

Riza took a deep breath, because she needed to say it and she knew that this was the only moment, and that these were the only words. If there was one thing that being an Auto-Memory Doll had taught her over the past few months, it was that there were so many different ways to say what she was about to say. She had written it so many times in so many different guises, but sometimes, when there wasn’t a typewriter in the way and when there were just two people who needed to be clear with each other, there were only three very specific words that would suffice.

“I love you,” she said. “I think I always have, but I don’t think I knew how to express it until recently. I love you, Roy, and I will never give up on you, even when you want to give up on yourself.”

For a moment, Roy remained silent. She wished that he would say something, anything, otherwise she would feel compelled to fill the silence with self-justification, and she knew that there was no justification needed. She’d said what she needed to say, and she had to trust in her words and leave Roy to make the next move. 

“I love you too, Riza.”

His hand found her cheek again, thumb running over her lips, and when he leaned in to kiss her, Riza was only too happy to meet and guide him. For so long this had seemed impossible, but now that they were here, it had all become extremely simple.

Roy sighed as they eventually broke apart, but it was a soft sigh of contentment rather than anything else.

“So what happens now?” Roy asked. “Where do we go from here?”

Riza squeezed his hand. “Well, I’ve found this great job working for the postal service in Eastern City, you know. Maybe you could come back with us and give it a try as well.”

Roy looked at her, incredulous. “Riza, I can’t see . What earthly use would a post office have for me?”

“I think that you’d fit in perfectly. I’ll show you.” She got up, taking her typewriter out of her case and setting it on the desk before taking Roy’s hand and leading him over. Once he was seated, she took his hands and carefully pressed his fingers to the keys. 

“I’ll teach you where all the letters are, and you can type through touch. In fact, I think Hughes said something about typewriters with the letters raised on the keys so that you would be able to feel them.”

Roy gave a soft huff of laughter. “You two are very determined on the Auto-Memory Doll service as a career for me,” he said. 

“Well, maybe it will work out, maybe it won’t. But you won’t know until you try, and I really do think that you’d get on with it. I was sceptical at first too, but it’s helped me so much. I think I’m finally at peace with everything now, with myself and with everything that happened to me and everything that I’ve done. Maybe you can find that peace too.”

“I would like that.” 

“You still seem hesitant about it though.” Riza took Roy’s hand in hers, squeezing tightly, and with her other, she turned his face towards hers so that she could press her lips softly against his. “What’s holding you back?”

“Peace does sound wonderful,” Roy admitted. “But after everything that we’ve done,  do we even deserve such peace?”

Riza sighed. “Maybe we don’t. But at least this way, we’re working towards deserving it. There’s nothing to be gained from doing nothing. There’s no peace to be gained from it, but there’s no redemption either. At least if we’re working towards something better and we’re working towards making amends, then we’re also working towards being worthy of that peace that it can bring us. Believe me, I know how you feel. I know it’s going to be a hard road to walk down because I’ve been walking down it ever since I got out of the hospital. Hughes has been as well, so has Alex. We’ve all found something better to do and a better future to work towards. And Roy, after everything that we’ve been through, both with and without each other, I think we deserve a better future, rather than spending all of our time dwelling on the past.”

There was silence for a moment, but then Roy smiled, leaning into her hand on his cheek. “You know, I think that’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make on the topic of the future. It wasn’t so very long ago that you didn’t think you had one, that the present and the war were all you were ever going to be good for, and that there was no place for people like you in peacetime.”

“And it’s thanks to you and your influence that I’ve been able to move past that,” Riza said. “Can’t you return the favour for me and follow your own advice?”

“I suppose it would be hypocritical of me not to.”

“Precisely. Now, let’s go home.”

Roy nodded, rising from the chair, and Riza guided him towards the door, taking his arm once they were out into the corridor as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Hughes, Gracia and Madam Christmas were all in the bar waiting for them, and it was almost as if a collective sigh of relief went around the room. 

The shadows of the past could finally start to fade, and they could all look forward to a brighter and more peaceful future, reunited at long last.