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2nd November 1914
Baschool
The world is wiped away by white, as the snowstorm that has been threatening all day fully descends upon Baschool.
Glass panes rattle and ice starts to spread its long, thin fingers across them, temperature dropping ever lower, and the only indication that night has fallen is the brief glimpse of desaturated darkness in between the bursts of snowflakes that are blowing by, vicious and endless.
Solf has long since abandoned his vigil at the window – the weather won’t be changing anytime soon.
Major Miles has finally sat down too, though he’s at the other end of the room, near the curtained doorway that leads to an adjacent chamber where some of the men from Briggs are – as far away as possible, while still keeping him in his sights. Alphonse Elric is in there as well, sitting on the floor; the cold, presumably, does not affect him.
Everyone else is scattered around on chairs and boxes and crates, any surface as long as it’s elevated from the freezing concrete, using their current predicament as a chance to rest; half-dozing, with that alert idleness that anyone who has served in the military possesses. Even the rather murderous tension that has been directed towards him and his men from the northern contingent of their party has settled down to a simmer, and he has taken great care to encourage this by keeping his hands gloved. There’s no sound other than the howling of the wind and the stubborn durability of the building and the occasional shift of fabric or wood when someone readjusts themselves.
Still, they’re giving him a wide berth. There are only two tables in this room and the one he’s at is empty, save for himself and the sole person who has been the subject of his silent attention for the past ten minutes.
“What?” Edward Elric eventually demands, after an incredibly entertaining display of quietly mounting irritation. Just like his alchemy and his sense of style, the monosyllabic question is loud and flashy.
Solf blinks at him.
“I was just thinking that you surprised me, earlier,” he offers honestly, his own voice soft and level. “Given your determination to not kill, I had expected you to react a little differently to the deaths you caused – or does it only upset you when your participation is more direct?”
Predictably, and painfully so, this strikes a nerve with his grudging conversation partner. “How the hell was it my fault, when it was Scar who blew up the building?!”
Solf raises a finger to his lips and pointedly looks at the nearest sleepers, a pair of Briggs soldiers who are slumped against each other, rifles cradled and eyes closed: Do keep it down, Edward. Some people are trying to rest.
The boy scowls and drops back down into his seat, grumbling under his breath – colorful curses, no doubt – as he sullenly slides the chair back to where it had been before his outburst knocked it aside.
“Come now, Fullmetal, let’s not pretend,” he says, in as inoffensive and reasonable a tone as he can manage. A bit of strategic deception is one thing, but it’s a fine line between that and hypocrisy; and, while he’ll periodically engage in the former, he has absolutely no tolerance for the latter. “Scar taking Winry hostage is an awfully convenient way to get her away from me.”
“Have you lost your mind, Kimblee?” Fullmetal hisses, at least trying to temper his volume this time, though not relinquishing any of his anger. Anger at what, precisely, is unclear – at Solf? At Scar? At the situation in general, or at himself? All, to some degree, most likely. “How does this benefit me, exactly? She’s still a hostage! And, unlike before, now I don’t even know where she is!”
“And why would Scar take a hostage?” he replies smoothly. “That’s a rather drastic change from his mode of operation thus far, isn’t it?”
“Whatever,” Fullmetal snipes and sinks into his large red coat, crossing his legs at his ankles and his arms over his chest. “Shows what you know.”
Solf tries his best to suppress a smirk – for all that Edward Elric may be a state alchemist, and a genius of one at that, he is still just a child; and he is petulant and quick to accuse others of ignorance, as most teenagers are. He loses the fight, but as he is in no mood to come to blows with said child, he raises the thermos that Heinkel gave him, hiding his mouth behind its lip and savoring the trail of hot liquid that pours down his throat. (Where the man found rose-infused black tea in this abandoned building, he has no idea – chimeras can be wondrously useful creatures.)
“But you’re right,” Fullmetal continues, unexpectedly. “Up until recently – hell, even just last week – it would have been different.”
It’s a blatant attempt at misdirection, if Solf’s ever seen one – the verbal equivalent of throwing dirt in someone’s eyes. He is tempted, for a moment, to point it out and chide the lack of finesse that it’s done with, but he does confess curiosity. And he did ask, after all – it would be terribly rude of him not to hear the boy out. There will be time enough for Scar and for Fullmetal’s little games tomorrow, weather permitting, so he allows their talk to circle back to the beginning, undisturbed except for his delicate prodding of it.
“What changed?”
“A conversation I had with someone,” Fullmetal says. “She gave me some advice.”
“Oh?” he prompts, gently.
“‘Don’t avert your eyes from death and never forget the people you’ve killed, because they’ll never forget you,’” the boy recites, staring fiercely down at the grain of the wood of the table in front of him, fists – flesh and automail both – clenched. “I’ve never killed anyone myself, but there have been plenty of people who have died because they got mixed up with me. And I think that – ”
Fullmetal is still talking but Solf has stopped listening because, suddenly, the thermos of hot tea that he is holding is a tin cup of the world’s most tragic coffee, thin and lukewarm – dreadful at the time, perfect in his dreams – and the blizzard outside that is shaking the windows is a sandstorm tearing through the desert and beating at their tents, and, if he closes his eyes, he can practically taste the heat and the dry air, tinged with sun and blood and gunfire; smell the smoke, rising from the latest district to fall to his and the Flame Alchemist’s hands.
There’s only one place that Edward Elric could have heard those words – ‘she,’ he’d said – and the thought tickles him, thoroughly.
Did the Hawk’s Eye heed his words that much, that now she is passing them onto others? He’d thought that he’d seen something, hard and unyielding and glinting like gunmetal, behind those watery, wide brown eyes with their whites flashing, looking like they belonged on the wrong end of a firearm – but people disappoint all too often, so he hadn’t placed much hope in her learning from the experience.
Apparently, he’d been wrong.
Solf loves being wrong – in the right circumstances, of course. Because, in the right circumstances, it’s refreshing and fascinating, leading to new doors and new heights, new possibilities within the margins of this world. This instance in particular is so singularly delicious, that he completely forgets his earlier admonition to Fullmetal and, somewhat loudly, begins to laugh.
“What’s so funny, you bastard?”
“Oh, no, no,” he rushes to reassure him, breathlessly, “I’m not laughing at you or your friend, and certainly not at the sentiment – believe me.”
Fullmetal's frown deepens, obviously doing anything but.
Solf bites down on the mirth that seeks to overwhelm him, but, although he can rein in his laughter and steady his voice, he is helpless to do anything about the sharp grin that splits his face, its corners cutting high into his cheeks.
“I simply find myself amused at life,” he explains without explaining, cheerfully. “It really can be so peculiar, can’t it?”
1st April 1915
Central City
Riza hefts her grocery bags off of the register – one in each arm, brown paper rustling – and walks out into the twilight of Central.
Lights are blinking on, street lamps and headlights and windows, illuminating the city as the sun slides under the horizon and the sky starts to change from deep gold to dark blue. There’s still plenty of bustle, though, both from pedestrians and from cars; coworkers going out for drinks and families milling around after their dinners and vendors pushing their carts: this place never truly sleeps. It’s a baseline noise, a background sound against which every resident here lives their lives, ever-present, and it makes the thought that, three days from now, it might all stop existing even more jarring.
There’s not much time left until the Promised Day.
And, on top of the expected anxiety and last minute fine-tuning that come with a political takeover and with trying to avert the ending of the known world, the team is currently squabbling over Hayate: half of them want to bring him along, as his nose for homunculi is exceptional and he’s already proven that he can hold his own against them as well as anyone; the other half want him to stay behind, because it’s hard to imagine that this won’t turn into a full-scale assault, and a battlefield is no place for a small dog, Second Lieutenant or not.
Riza herself has no stake in the argument, but she privately suspects that it’s going to be near impossible to find someone to watch Hayate on this short of a notice – all of her regular go-tos are going to be busy overthrowing the government with her, after all. But, she’s dutifully gone and bought two weeks’ worth of provisions, both for Hayate and his imaginary dog-sitter, if only so that Fuery and Falman can have one less thing to stress about. On the bright side, at least she won’t have to go shopping when she comes back from this operation – if she comes back, that is, and this is a thought that she acknowledges with no more than a passing nod because, as likely a scenario as it is, nothing productive comes from dwelling on it; so, she doesn’t.
She does come to a stop, though, at the edge of a sidewalk, while waiting for cars to pass by.
Someone quietly steps up beside her.
She doesn’t think much of it, at first – it’s late in the evening, but not so late that she feels the need to walk around with one hand hovering over the holster on her hip. Besides, she’s all too aware that the most dangerous things in this city can’t be killed with bullets.
It’s not until the humming sinks into her ears, soft and silvery and terrifyingly familiar – even now that she’s hearing it issue from a human throat, the tune is lonely and metallic, drifting over sand dunes and desolate buildings, flowing from Captain Hughes’ lips by their campfire to ring out across the desert – that a chill runs, sharp and stinging and warning, down every single vertebrae of her spine.
“Good evening, miss.”
Riza doesn’t startle.
She doesn’t flinch or sharply draw breath or do anything that might give him the satisfaction of a reaction – and she’d take pride in that, if she didn’t know that it has less to do with her self-control and everything to do with the hand that life has dealt her lately. Because Selim Bradley is a homunculus and she’s literally being employed as a hostage and there is a nationwide transmutation circle, so why wouldn’t this man, who should be in prison, find her on the street? After learning that Amestris was founded as nothing more than glorified fodder, it’s going to take a bit more than Solf J. Kimblee to shake her composure; outwardly, at least.
Of course, observant menace that he is, he notices, and is probably satisfied anyway.
“Oh?” he inquires politely. He’s always, always so infuriatingly polite; so civil, even when he’s being lifted by his collar in anger; well-mannered, even when he’s killing people. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”
She hasn’t looked at him, yet. And she continues to not look at him as the traffic clears and she crosses the street, aiming for an unhurried, unbothered pace that they both know is a lie. From the sound of it, he’s following right on her heels; naturally.
Riza sighs internally. She should say something.
“I’d heard you’d been released, sir.”
To her great dismay, and his apparent delight, the old familiar form of address slips out before she can catch it and let it suffocate, suddenly and decisively, behind her teeth.
“Please, no need for that; they didn’t reinstate my rank,” he happily dismisses, the glee that he was so well-known for, among the people who saw him out in the field, licking at his voice. “But, you – Lieutenant Hawkeye, now, right? A well-deserved promotion! Congratulations.”
Riza glances at him, now, forced slightly into his space as she is to avoid an oncoming crowd, and is briefly caught off-guard – she supposes that, in her mind’s eye, he was still sporting the uniform, in one of the numerous variations of his casual disregard for military regulation that he displayed on any given day during the war.
She’s never seen him in a suit.
He’s wearing one now – clean and crisp and white – along with a gentle smile, and that she has seen before: he wore it every time she felt like she was going to vomit but held it down and when her hands on her gun were steady despite everything else about her wavering and after she managed a difficult shot that saved his life, finding her later that night to thank her. His praise has always been as honest, as heavy, as unwanted as his criticism, and – here and now, just as then and there – she has no doubt that he means it.
“Thanks.”
His smile grows wider, sharper, into something the rest of the world is more accustomed to.
“You look good, despite your current circumstances,” he offers, hands in his pockets; carefree, as if it’s a comment on the weather and not an open admission that he knows.
Which she already knows, of course, through Ed – but communication with both Ed and Al has been extremely limited, constrained to coded words exchanged in mysterious attacks on northern outposts and long-distance flirty phone calls and scraps of paper shoved into dog collars; meaning, bare bones only. She has no idea what the extent of Kimblee’s participation or knowledge is, or – she realizes with an unpleasant start – how far back it goes. Did he know, seven years ago? Did he know, in Ishval?
The thought makes her steps a little tenser and her back a little straighter, a little more rigid, until her bones are drawn taut and her soul is stretched thin over them; until it’s almost painful. “Is that why you’re here? Did they send you?”
“No, no; no such thing,” he chuckles. “I’m here on my own. This really is nothing more than a personal call; and long overdue, at that, for which you have my apologies.” His smile goes shy and sheepish, before she blinks and it’s twisting in feral amusement again. “You see, a little bird told me that you’ve been sharing some old wartime wisdom, and I am flattered! I had no idea I’d affected you so, you really took my words to heart!”
Damn it, Riza thinks.
Ed must have said something – passingly mentioned not looking away or made some remark about not forgetting, not realizing where that advice of hers came from. It’s not his fault; he couldn’t have known, and she should have told him. Even now, she’s not certain why she didn’t. It’s too late for regrets, though.
It’s always been too late for regrets.
Kimblee continues chatting – small, harmless words about the relief of being able to use proper shampoo again instead of bar soap and what a shame it is that the little bistro on the corner shut down while he was in prison (‘they had the best butter croissants’) – and she continues listening with minimal input, down this street and the next one and the one after that, and it is so composed that anyone who sees them and doesn’t know them would think that they are old friends, catching up.
They approach her apartment and, a childhood of paranoid secrecy and an adulthood of military training kicking in, she briefly considers if she should lose him – but no, she decides. If he’s working for Bradley, then he almost certainly has complete access to all of their personnel files; he probably already knows where she lives – though he’s too good of a player and too much of a gentleman to let that show as they’re walking – along with a number of other things that she’d rather he didn’t.
(The only consolation – and she’s unspeakably grateful for it – is that, despite the close quarters and the injuries and the illnesses, all of those needlessly near-intimate moments in Ishval, he’s never had occasion to glimpse even a sliver of her back.)
She goes up to the door of her building and he trails behind her on the front steps, standing an appropriate distance off to the side as she tries and fails to fish out her keys from her coat pocket – defeated handily, by her armful of grocery bags.
There’s an abrupt movement out of the corner of her eye, and she looks over her shoulder to see Kimblee loosely holding out his hands, tattooed palms up and safely spaced away from each other: a silent offer to take one.
She hesitates for a moment but, practical woman that she is, she accepts.
“I meant it, before,” he says, with a tenderness that he really should not be allowed to have. “You look good. I’m glad.”
Unlocking the door and returning the key to her pocket, Riza doesn’t acknowledge this statement.
Instead, she swiftly liberates the bag from his grasp and steps over the threshold, as though the worn, wooden frame will keep him out. “You won’t mind if I don’t invite you in for a cup of tea.”
“Of course,” he replies, understandingly. “Besides, I’ve got some work I need to get back to.” The warm, yellow glow from the lamp on the wall bathes his face and thaws the sharpness that she knows lives in his eyes, when he looks at her. “If we see each other again, it won’t be quiet and courteous like this.”
“No, it probably won’t,” she agrees, as though any of their interactions have been courteous. Polite, yes; respectful, eventually, once they both learned a healthy recognition for the other’s skills. But being civil and being considerate are not the same thing.
“Well, then – goodnight, Miss Sniper,” he says, tipping his hat and turning around to walk back out into the night, that has well-settled on the city by now. “Give Mustang my regards, won’t you?”
She doesn’t reply.
She keeps it together until the front door is firmly shut and locked and she goes upstairs and reaches her apartment and enters and closes the door behind her.
And then she’s dropping all the groceries, and running past Hayate, and picking up the phone, and starting to turn the dial to call the colonel and –
And what? Tell him that she saw Kimblee? ‘Hello, Colonel? I just ran into Kimblee on the street. Yes, sir, he proceeded to flay me emotionally and then assisted with the groceries. He says ‘hello.’’
She slowly puts the receiver back down.
No, this is her own personal hell to deal with. The colonel may have heard the same words on the same day, but, after chewing on them for a bit, he had spat them back out, while she went and created an entire identity out of them.
Could Kimblee tell?
Could he see that she took the crumbs that he’d thrown her in the shadow of ruined buildings and clung onto them, curled around them, preserved them, in waking and in sleep, until they furrowed deep within her, fossilized in her body and fused to her soul?
Most likely; he’s perceptive like that.
She hasn’t thought about it for years. She hasn’t thought about it outside of its unfortunate, undeniable merit – clinically, abstractedly, with the kind of distant regard that you develop for anything that you partake in long enough – but, here she is, once again vaguely ill at the thought that what gets her through her days, what she’s built her life on, what she actually lives by, is a handful of words once spoken in chastisement, against a backdrop of calculated slaughter, by the Mad Bomber of Ishval himself.
Riza slumps to the floor, and finally pays attention to the canine concern that’s been sniffing at her ankles. She wraps her arms around Hayate’s shoulders and buries her face in the warm fur of his neck as he nudges her back with his snout, trying his best to bestow comfort through pressure.
The forecast had predicted clear skies for today, but here, in this specific seven-hundred-and-eighty-one square foot space in Central City, it starts to rain.
2nd April 1915
Central City – Central Command
“Is this seat taken?”
Riza looks up from her fork to see Roy Mustang, holding a lunch tray of his own and hovering next to the chair across from her. He barely waits for the shake of her head before he sits down.
Her eyes are dry and her hands are as steady as ever as she cuts her food into small, neat pieces, meat and potatoes and cheese tidily stacked all around her plate, but, not for a single minute, has she been able to stop thinking about former-Major Solf J. Kimblee.
It’s just like him, she thinks. To catch people at unawares, to exploit the opening that their unpreparedness grants him and throw them off-balance; talk and talk and talk, spinning reason and facts and logical words until they are rattled right down to their souls, until they can’t tell which way is up or recognize their own beliefs anymore. It’s just like she’s nineteen again, covered in the dust and the sun of the Gunja district and his entire attention is on her, oppressive and piercing, asking her things she doesn’t dare ask herself and getting inside her head and she can’t get him out and –
“Is something wrong?” Roy’s voice shatters her thoughts, and they clatter like a broken mirror – the abruptness of his question makes her think that he has probably been talking to her this whole time.
She hasn’t heard any of it – all she can think about is the pale sand of Ishval and the snow up at Briggs, embroidered gloves and desert cloaks and soft, uncalloused hands, all soiled; spotless sleeveless shirts and pristine pressed suits, gleaming blindingly in the light of day.
Kimblee was right. She does look good, in the way that hardened, confident, capable people do; the way that the cadet that she’d been seven years ago could have never imagined. There’s no doubt that she’s come a long way. And yet, despite that, despite her rise in the ranks and his tenure in prison, despite everything, standing next to him once again made her feel slow and messy, like she’s still some green recruit drowning in muck and in shame.
“It’s nothing, sir,” she replies, and raises her eyes to Roy in time to see him scowl at a drop of sauce that has flung itself from his spoon to land on the cuff of his undershirt. “I was just thinking about how easily white stains.”
She watches him dab it with a napkin but the color has already soaked into the fabric, spreading darkly, like so many other things less innocuous than a topping.
“And wondering how some people manage to always keep so clean.”