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In truth, Riza knew she should’ve noticed it all sooner. It had been a conglomeration of little things that she’d been able to brush off. In some deep part of her mind, she hadn’t wanted to notice this either. It was selfish, and while any help would be more than she received, she still knew she could’ve done more sooner.
The straw that broke the camel’s back came in the most mundane way.
They’d been working in their newly constructed office in Central, helping Grumman get everything squared away before they’d all head back to Eastern so that the newly appointed General Mustang could take Grumman’s former position. There was still too much rebuilding to do in Central before they could make their way back East, however. The city was still reeling from all the strife it had gone through, and with the complete upheaval for the head of command, it was too unstable for any of the heroes from the Promised Day to be away for too long.
Everything had been a blur from the start of that day until even then. Riza still could only work for a few hours at a time before her mind and body wouldn’t allow her to do much more. The blood loss and injuries she had meant that she was hardly even suitable for paperwork, but everyone was doing what they could manage. Even Havoc was rolling around the office—his legs healed but muscles too atrophied to stand on them. Physical therapy was better in Central than it was in the East. Havoc would work on gaining strength while the rest of the team rested and Mustang helped Grumman rebuild.
It was nice having the entire team together again. It also helped that for the first time since they’d been in Central, they weren’t under any immediate threats. The homunculi had been destroyed, high command was dead or behind bars, and Riza felt fairly confident that any threat they faced would die when shot now. She hadn’t realized how much that had affected her. She hadn’t enjoyed being helpless—it reminded her of every time in her life before she’d learned how to be strong, how to stand up against the darkness. The darkness she’d faced over the last few months hadn’t been something she could fight, she just had to weather the storm.
But she hadn’t been the only one fighting throughout the winter.
Unsurprisingly, Havoc and Breda immediately fell into the camaraderie they’d had since they first came onto the team. In a wheelchair, Havoc fit his name even more so. Apparently, he had been very sedentary while working in his parents’ shop, and now that he wasn’t worried about breaking merchandise, he was all speed and sharp turns. He’d upended himself more than once, and everyone knew to watch their feet when he seemed especially antsy.
That afternoon there wasn’t much for them to be doing, which meant Riza had paperwork, Fuery was working on tuning their radio, Mustang was in a meeting with Grumman—likely sneaking in a game of chess, Falman was off somewhere helping General Armstrong get her own affairs in order, and the deranged duo were goofing off just enough to avoid incurring a scolding from Riza. They still felt guilty the last time it happened as her voice had cracked as her throat twinged. The rush of apologies was on a level Riza hadn’t seen from them before.
Riza didn’t see how it happened. All she knew was that one moment there were squeaking wheels, and the next there was a great crash as Breda and his chair both went down. Before she could form the reprimand in her mind, a different movement caught her eye. Fuery’s head darted around the room, eyes too sharp and yet unfocused. She watched as sweat broke out across his forehead and his breathing became shallow.
“Havoc, Breda—Out!” she commanded. Both men knew the tone well enough not to argue, practically dashing from the room. She hadn’t even had to threaten using them as target practice.
She turned to Fuery, watching as he quickly swallowed multiple times, as if he was trying to choke down the emotions that had overcome him. She remembered those days, the exhaustion that came from the mundane suddenly turning into enemies.
“Second Lieutenant,” she called. He didn’t respond, still trapped wherever his mind dragged him. She could see him trembling, the screwdriver in his hand rattling against the desk. “Kain.”
His head snapped up. “O-oh, Captain. S-sorry about that. I, uh, I was just…”
“You don’t need an excuse, Fuery. I understand.”
He blinked. “You…understand?”
Riza offered him a sad smile. “I served in Ishval; I know what coming back is like.”
Kain looked down at his desk, setting down his tools. He tried to put his hands in his lap to hide the shaking, but she knew what fear looked like. She knew what it felt like, too, especially the kind where it felt completely irrational to feel that way when it was so clear you were safe now, but the fear persisted.
She’d been younger than Fuery when she was sent to the front. She’d still been younger than him when she returned. War didn’t care about age, however. It haunted whoever had been sent to face it.
“Ishval was really bad, though—wasn’t it? So many people left the military from that, and an entire race of people was almost wiped out,” Fuery tried to argue.
Riza shook her head. “War is war. If we sat around comparing who had it worse, we’d all be miserable. The impact is the same anyways.”
He nodded. “What…what did you deal with?”
She considered it for a moment. “Loud noises were hard—obviously. I don’t think that anyone who’s seen battle would argue with that one. It’s the one I’ve heard the most. Then, sometimes there would be smells or textures that’d take me right back there. I’d think it was the rations they handed out at camp, or there was a moment where Rebecca had me try oysters for the first time. That grittiness…it reminded me of the desert. I lost it, and I didn’t know how to explain it to her.”
“But, you’ve always seemed so put together. It’s like you’ve just been able to move on with your life, and that doesn’t feel possible. I just keep going there over and over again. I-I see the blood. There’s walls of dirt. Bombs come from the sky or sometimes it’s bullets. I promise myself I’ll make it, but then I just watch my cohort die. Again. And again. And again.”
Riza remembered the realness that came from flashbacks when she’d first returned from the front. She remembered throwing out all her red pens after just having bought them—the red ink had been too jarring. The first time her period came back and she’d held the bloody paper in her hands, her mind had forced her back to when her hands were coated with the blood of a dying soldier she couldn’t save but had tried her damnedest to. Her own body, showing that it could function once more, still betrayed her with reminders of the war. Everything had reminded her of fighting and survival and death.
Kain swallowed thickly. “It’s like my panic’s at the ceiling, but I’m face down on the carpet. I can’t put the two together.”
“You don’t have to right now,” Riza said, placing a hand on his shoulder. His quivering lessened. “You didn’t know me when I first got back from Ishval. You didn’t know the Colonel either. We…we didn’t know what was happening. The people who would’ve talked us through these struggles, they were the ones who’d left the military. The best we could do was just keep each other alive despite our best efforts otherwise.”
His eyes widened behind his glasses. “Keep each other alive?”
Riza sighed. “It was a bad time. I refused to sleep until I collapsed, working until I was too sick to be coherent. I passed out several times from this. Then, there’s a reason the Col– General is only allowed to have three liquor drinks or five beers when we’re out. He’d come to work still drunk from the night before. We didn’t know how to get better.”
“What did you find eventually?”
“Truthfully, time. The memories weren’t as sharp and recurring as often. There were other memories to be made and work to be done. We’re not better, Fuery. I need to make sure that’s clear. I still have nightmares, and we’re haunted by the things we saw, the things we did.”
Fuery closed his eyes, looking dejected but resigned to his fate.
Riza couldn’t allow him to wallow in that hopelessness for too long. “But, we’re not going to let you suffer like we did. We’re older now, and we know what it looks like more than we did when we were practically kids. You’re not going to be alone in this, Kain.”
He removed his glasses wiping at his eyes. “Sorry, I know this isn’t very professional.”
“I don’t care about professional with something like this. Remember? I put up with Mustang being drunk on the clock. If crying means you live, then I encourage it. I’ll encourage anything that means you grow to be a very, very old man,” Riza told him, the truth of the words weighing as heavy as the subject that brought this conversation to fruition.
“Thank you, Captain,” he whispered.
“No need to thank me, we do what we can to keep each other alive. It’s what you do when you care about someone.”
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