Work Text:
The steady pitter-patter of rain is what wakes him. It takes him a moment to realise he’s awake, awareness drifting somewhere to the left of himself, a step removed from his body.
When it finally settles, his limbs feel heavy. His automail aches in a slow, steady pulse, perfectly in tune with the weather outside, and Edward does nothing but lie still in the rumpled sheets. He wonders, briefly, what it would feel like to sink through the mattress—to slip somewhere dark and silent and painless. Far from his racing thoughts. Far from the scar tissue that stretches and stings, singing its familiar hymn of pain.
But the mattress remains stubbornly solid. Though the cushions dip beneath his weight, he never breaks the surface.
Suddenly, he’s grateful to be alone.
He wouldn’t know what to say if his brother were here, trying to fill the quiet while Edward feels like nothing more than a breathing corpse. He wouldn’t want to make him worry. Besides, Alphonse deserves the chance to be back home. Deserves the break.
Deserves—
Edward cuts the thought off with a sharp breath.
He doesn’t want to follow that road. Not today. Not when the date on the calendar still lingers fresh in his mind, even if he’d avoided looking at it all week.
Instead, he forces himself upright.
The world tilts dangerously, and he grips the edge of the mattress until it steadies. He takes two careful breaths. Then one more. The vertigo threatens to undo the effort, but he waits it out, jaw clenched.
Finally, once the vertigo has left and he’s able to actually function, he pushes to his feet and makes his way to the bathroom.
Any other day, he might have crawled back beneath the blankets and stayed there until nightfall. Especially today. But there’s paperwork waiting for him at the office—reports he’s been putting off for too long—and, quite frankly, he needs a break from the quiet of his room at the barracks. Maybe seeing the team will do him some good.
The shower water is hot enough to leave his skin flushed when he steps out, steam curling thick against the mirror. It’s almost scalding, but it chases away the damp chill he woke with, and he can’t find it in himself to care. His automail loosens under the heat, the ache dulling to something manageable, and he works through his morning stretches with mechanical precision.
At the sink, he scrubs at his face half-heartedly and decides it’s clean enough. He brushes his teeth just long enough to say he did if Alphonse calls to ask.
Combing his hair proves more difficult. Lifting his automail arm above his head sends a sharp spike of pain down his shoulder, and he hisses under his breath before abandoning the effort. Stupid arm.
In the end, he runs his flesh fingers through the golden strands instead. It’s uneven, but it’ll have to do. Tying it back is another issue entirely. Al isn’t here to help, and braiding it is out of the question.
He settles for a simple ponytail, tugging the tie tight.
It’s fine.
If anyone comments, he’ll bite their head off.
He brings an umbrella, but it doesn't do much to cover the lower half of his body. His pants and shoes are heavy with rain, and it sticks to his skin uncomfortably with every step he takes.
He should have brought a coat.
The problem is quickly solved once he's passed through the large gates of Eastern Command. He gives a quick nod to the guards on duty before making a beeline for the building, entering with a sigh of relief. Eastern Command is its usual mess of hurried soldiers—the busy pace of men with somewhere to be—the only difference today being the muddy boots and trails of water through every corridor.
He doesn't spare it much more than a glance. He folds his umbrella, places it neatly to the side, then claps his mismatched hands together and presses them to his soaked clothes. The water evaporates with a quick hiss of steam. He's humid from it for a moment before he waves the smoke away and starts toward the office, umbrella swinging at his side.
He's limping—his thigh sore from where flesh meets metal—but that's not why he uses the umbrella like a cane. It's more instinctual. A habit from somewhere he can't name, if he thought hard enough, though, he might have been able to recall the nights with Al and Winry. When they had stuffed pillows in their shirts and hunched forward, giving the illusion of a hunched back, and then would grab one of the many crutches from Granny’s clinic and mimic the elderly.
But Edward doesn’t think about that. Can’t think about it, otherwise the memories and the joy of that time will surely swallow him whole.
Instead, he focuses on an old general passing. Edward salutes easily, if only to avoid the lecture, and gets an "at ease" in return, before he watches the man move on—back curved, fingers curled over the hilt of his cane. Edward stares for a moment. The memory he refuses to recall surfacing, before snickering to himself and hunching forward, lifting one hand behind his back, and stomping forward in exaggerated mimicry. It lasts three steps before he grows bored and breaks into a run.
A nearby officer barks, "No running in the halls!" at his back, but Edward has already passed him and is approaching the office doors.
He gives himself a moment to catch his breath, gulping air before straightening. His leg twinges sharply in protest, and he grimaces. Stupid. He rubs at the flesh, then raises it to slam the door open with a bang.
No one in the office jumps. They're used to it.
But that's not what takes his attention. Havoc is standing at his own desk with a medical kit open in front of him, sorting through its contents with practised efficiency. Mustang stands beside him, expression schooled into something carefully neutral, but the concern underneath it sits wrong on his face. Edward finds it confusing for half a second—before his eyes move across the room and land on Lieutenant Hawkeye's desk. Empty and untouched.
"Fullmetal—?" Mustang begins. A question in his voice. He probably wasn’t expecting Edward to come in, what with the rain and all. But Edward cuts him off, his brain circling.
"Where's Hawkeye?"
Mustang opens his mouth. But Edward's gaze snags on the medical kit, and the anxiety that flares in his chest is sudden and unreasonable and very, very familiar.
"Where's Hawkeye?" he repeats, frantic.
"Relax," Mustang says. "She has a fever. She’s been home—she's fine."
Fever. Edward registers the word. Registers the date, too, the way it sits at the back of his mind like something with weight. He doesn't feel relieved.
"I'm sending Havoc to check on—"
"I'll go."
The words leave before he's finished deciding them. They don’t quite land, though, his voice soft with something he can't name, and Edward straightens his spine, widens his stance, and says it again with the certainty he means.
"I'll go instead."
Mustang looks at him. It's not the impatient look Edward is so used to, or the condescending one that Edward hates. No. It's the look that takes Edward apart piece by piece, slow and methodical, searching for the shape of something he doesn't have a name for yet.
Edward grits his teeth and holds the stare. It prickles at his skin, but he doesn't look away. Doesn't let anything through.
But apparently, he fails. And he can do nothing but watch when the recognition finally crosses Mustang's face. The way his eyes widen, just barely. The parting of his lips. And Edward goes very still, because he can see it landing—the thing he hadn't meant to show.
He can see Mustang realising that his mother was a woman who had been sick for most of the years her sons were old enough to remember. The kind of sick that doesn't heal, that only gets managed. That needs someone to track the medicine, the meals, whether she'd slept, whether she'd eaten, whether today was worse than yesterday.
And that Edward had been the oldest.
He waits for the teasing. Or the flat refusal. Or anything that gives him something to push back against.
Instead, Mustang sighs—quiet, through his nose—and turns toward Havoc.
“Second Lieutenant Havoc, sorry to ask this of you, but you wouldn’t mind dropping Fullmetal off at the Lieutenant’s, would you?”
Edward scowls immediately, ignoring the relief that swims in his chest. “I can walk—”
“Don’t think I didn’t see you limping, Fullmetal. Besides, there’s no reason for you to show up like a wet dog to Hawkeye’s apartment.”
Edward scoffs. “Please, the only wet dog here is you, you useless Colonel.”
But Mustang waves him off. “I’m trusting you to look after her, Fullmetal.”
Edward blinks at the sudden seriousness in his voice. But the date flashes through his mind—and the sickly pallor of his mother’s smile does too—and he understands completely.
“Yeah,” he says. He swallows the rest.
Havoc begins to walk past him. He places a hand on Edward’s shoulder when they meet, and Edward turns to walk beside him, when Mustang’s voice again calls for him.
“And Fullmetal,” Edward looks back. “She’ll want tea.” Edward blinks. A soft look. “She won’t ask for it.”
The drive with Havoc is silent except for the rain striking the car in uneven bursts. Edward leans against the passenger window, chin barely clearing the glass.
The medical bag sits heavy in his lap, bunched between mismatched fingers.
Havoc had tried to explain the equipment, like he had when Edward had first been tasked to learn emergency first aid. And Edward cuts him off quickly.
“I already know how to use all this, you know. You were the one to teach me how. You must be getting old if you can’t remember.”
“I taught you how to use this in an emergency.” Havoc replies as his brow twitches at the last jab, “I had skipped over the more mundane parts since you were so impatient to be done with it.”
“Can you blame me?”
“—Which is why I wanted to go through these with you.”
They approach a red light. Havoc eases to a careful stop before reaching over Edward and unzipping one of the kit’s bags with practised familiarity. He gestures over syringes, vomit bags, weighted blankets—explaining each in that steady, patient tone that used to bore Edward to sleep. Now, Edward hears nothing but static as his eyes roam the familiar equipment, and he feels his chest ache as something bubbles dangerously past his defences. He pushes Havoc’s gesturing hand back, closing the kit with a desperation that leaves his automail rattling and barks, “I said I know how to use them already.”
Havoc flinches back, confused. And then Edward can again do nothing but watch as the moment clicked for him too—the same recognition Mustang had worn minutes earlier.
Havoc falls silent then. He doesn’t try to explain again.
Edward can only be grateful for that. Even while his face burns with shame.
Rain follows them all the way to the curb.
Havoc kills the engine but doesn't reach for the door. The wipers drag once more across the windshield before settling, and then there's only the sound of rain on the roof—steady, indifferent—and the particular kind of silence that happens when two people have run out of things to say but aren't ready to say nothing yet.
"She keeps a spare key under the third brick to the left of the steps," Havoc says finally. "In case Mustang forgets his again."
Edward nods. He already knows.
Havoc hesitates. The kind of hesitation that has weight to it, that means he's turning something over. "You're mother—"
"Thanks for the ride, Havoc." Edward cuts him off before he can finish.
A beat.
Havoc studies him in the way that the Colonel had earlier—like he’s checking something beneath the surface, measuring for cracks. Edward has learned to sit still under it. He doesn't always manage. But tonight the rain is loud enough to cover whatever his face does.
Havoc gives a short nod and reaches across to unlock Edward's door. Then, before Edward can move, he claps him once on the shoulder. Firm. Grounding.
Edward pretends not to lean into it.
He gets out. The rain soaks him in seconds. He doesn't look back, but he can feel the car idling at the curb behind him long after he reaches the steps—Havoc watching to make sure he gets inside, not leaving until he does. Edward doesn't acknowledge it. He's not sure he could without something shifting in his chest that he doesn't have room for right now.
He enters the apartment building without waving goodbye. He doesn’t wait to see if Havoc has left, instead making his way up the flight of stairs and to where he knows Hawkeye’s apartment is. His automail spikes with every stair he climbs, but he grits his teeth. Endures.
When he finally reaches the apartment, he finds the key under the third brick. It fits the lock with a soft, familiar click.
Hayate starts barking before the door is even open.
"Yeah, yeah," Edward mutters, shouldering inside. "It's me."
The dog hits him like a small warm freight train.
Edward goes down, sprawling back against the entryway rug with a quiet “oof!” and the medical bag skidding off his shoulder as Hayate climbs onto his chest like he’s a great big mountain and searching for treasure. The treasure turns out to be Edward's face. The tongue is immediate. Soft and pink and absolutely yucky.
"Hayate—" He turns his face away, laughing, and it's genuine, startled out of him. "That's—okay—that is disgusting, stop, that went in my mouth—"
Hayate does not stop.
For a moment, Edward just lets it happen, laughing in the dim entryway of Hawkeye's apartment with rain dripping from his hair and a dog sitting on his sternum, and something in him unknots just slightly—some tension he'd been carrying in the car without realising.
Then the sound of a cough reaches his ears.
It's wet. Deep. From somewhere down the hall.
The laughter dies in Edward's throat. He goes very still. Hayate goes still, too—like a switch being clicked—the pink tongue disappearing, ears swivelling. The dog holds for half a second more, then climbs off Edward's chest with a quiet sort of purpose, padding down the hallway and nosing through the small gap left in the bedroom door.
Edward sits up slowly.
He wipes a hand across his face. Picks up the medical bag. Stands.
He locks the door behind him.
The smell registers before anything else.
He knows Hawkeye's apartment well enough to know what it usually smells like—gun oil, and something warm beneath it, faintly sweet, probably the tea she drinks in the evenings. It's a small apartment. It holds onto things.
Tonight it holds onto something else. Something thicker, sour-sweet in the wrong way that’s he’s awfully familiar with—the particular smell of a fever that's been running long enough to get into the air. For a moment, he’s not in Hawkeye’s apartment at all. He’s back in a house that’s long been burned to ashes and with a mother who’s six feet deep. But then he blinks, and the flash is gone. Edward clicks his tongue against his teeth and makes a note to crack a window once she's stable. Fresh air won't hurt.
He knocks on the bedroom door. Waits.
Nothing.
He knocks again, louder, and then counts to five and pushes it open.
She's on top of the sheets.
That's the first thing he registers, clinical and quick—on top of, not under, which means she got cold and went for the blankets at some point without the coordination to get beneath them properly, or she got too hot and kicked them off and then didn't have the strength to fully separate from them. Either way, they're twisted around her legs like something she's been struggling against in her sleep. Her hair—usually so precisely pinned—is loose across the pillow, strands plastered to her forehead, her cheek. Her skin shines faintly with sweat.
Her breathing is uneven.
Hayate is curled on the floor by her bedside, chin resting on the edge of the mattress. He doesn't look up when Edward enters, just watches her with quiet, heavy eyes.
Edward moves carefully. He's aware—acutely, always—that Hawkeye will have a gun within reach even now. She would probably say, especially now, when she's vulnerable. It's the same logic he uses himself; you don't stop guarding just because you're compromised. You guard harder.
So he steps without sound. He reaches her bedside without incident.
He presses the backs of his fingers to her forehead.
It's warm. Overly so—it radiates into his hand and sits there. He holds his palm there for a long moment, then slides it to her temple, her cheek, down to the side of her neck where her pulse runs fast and thin beneath his fingers.
The movement is instinctual. Exactly how he had done it before.
He sucks in a sharp breath at the reminder. Shakes his head. Goes to the kitchen to find a basin.
He fills it with cool water at the sink, leaning against the counter while it runs, and in the brief quiet of the kitchen, he lets himself breathe. Just once, properly. He thinks about what Granny had once said—that fevers like these can spike—and doesn't think about the version of tonight where it already has by the time he got here. That version isn't useful.
He finds a towel in the second drawer, not the first. Takes the basin back down the hall.
He sets it on the floor beside the bed and crouches down. Dips the towel. Wrings it. Studies the way her hair has stuck to her skin in clumps and thinks about the best way to move it without startling her.
He reaches out slowly.
Touches the edge of her hairline.
She flinches.
It's subtle at first—a tightening, the almost imperceptible pulling-away of someone braced against contact. Then sharper. Her breath snags. Her face screws tight.
Edward draws back immediately, eyes dropping to her hands, her sides—cataloguing, already half-braced for the shape of a weapon.
But what Hawkeye does instead is worse.
She makes a sound. Small and broken, dragged up from somewhere that sounds nothing like her—and Edward has heard her voice carry across the sound of firing gunshots and alchemic flames, has heard her go clipped and flat in the kind of situations that make other people's voices shake. He has never heard her sound like this. Like something cornered in the dark.
"Hawkeye." He keeps his voice low. "Lieutenant, you awake?"
She shakes her head against the pillow. Once, twice. Her lips move but no words speak.
"Hawkeye?"
Her eyes open. A sliver of amber, glassy and unfocused, the sharp intelligence usually behind them smudged into something dim and unreachable. She looks at him without seeming to see him clearly. Then her eyes widen, and it isn't relief that crosses her face.
It's fear.
"What are you—" she starts, and her voice is barely there. A husk of it. Then something shifts behind her eyes—something Edward can't name—and the fear doesn't fade. It sharpens into something worse. Something like self-loathing.
"I'm sorry," she breathes.
He frowns. "Hawkeye—"
"I'm sorry." Her voice cracks on it. Wet. Her eyes are filling, the tears tracking silent and sideways into her hair, and her hands have come up to press flat against her sternum like she's trying to hold something in. "I'm so sorry."
"For what?" He doesn't mean to ask. It comes out anyway.
She squeezes her eyes shut, a sob swallowed before it escapes. Her breathing has gone ragged. "For killing you," she gasps. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I—" A sharp inhale, like she's bracing. "Penance," she says, to no one. "Penance, I know. I know."
And she keeps saying it—I'm sorry, I'm sorry—over and over with the helpless rhythm of something she's said to herself before, in the dark, without an audience. Like a prayer with no destination. Like a wound she's kept pressing just to prove it's still there.
Edward sits back on his heels, confused and concerned. He wonders what demons Hawkeye might carry in her closet. And then it clicks.
He thinks about what he knows. The sparse, careful things Mustang and Hawkeye have let fall in unguarded moments—not confessions, never confessions, but the shape of what they carry. The way their faces go when Ishval comes up, that particular kind of hollow that isn't emptiness but the opposite of it. It wasn't a war, Mustang had said once, very quietly. It was a massacre.
Edward looks at his hands, where they rest on his knees. He thinks about what it is to have done something with your hands that you cannot take back.
He thinks he understands, actually, quite a lot.
Penance. He wonders. And then decides he doesn’t want Hawkeye to undergo it. It might be selfish. Especially because he himself understands. He thinks of his mother. Of the date today sits on. And the countless times he, too, has whispered desperate apologies to a woman who can no longer accept them. And knows what he must say.
He reaches out again. More slowly this time. He finds her hands pressed to her chest and gently interlaces his fingers with hers. Her hands are warm—he holds them anyway, steadying her.
"I forgive you," he says.
He doesn't know if he has the right. He doesn't know if he means it the way she needs it to be meant, doesn't know if forgiveness from someone who wasn't there counts for anything. But he knows—with a clarity that sits in his chest like something swallowed—what it is to need to hear it. What it is to reach for something in the dark and find nothing and keep reaching anyway.
So he says it. He means it as much as he can.
Hawkeye's face does something complicated. Her jaw tightens, then releases. Her eyes, still shut, push out one more tear. She exhales—long and slow—and then her fingers tighten around his for just a moment.
Then she lets go.
"You shouldn't," she says, barely audible. And then her breathing evens, deepens, and she's asleep.
Edward doesn't move for a while.
He sits on his heels with his hand hovering in the space where hers was, and he looks at her hand where it lies now against the sheets. He thinks, with a strange ache he can’t name, that it looks lonely. He folds it gently across her chest. Then he goes back to work.
He's methodical about it; he falls into the system he once did years ago when he was much smaller, younger than he is now. He measures her temperature. Places the cool cloth against her forehead. Adjust it when it dries. Checks her pulse again, counting under his breath, pressing his fingers to the side of her throat until the number settles into something he can accept.
He straightens the blankets. Tucks them securely around her and lets her rest.
He moves through the apartment methodically—kitchen first, then the sitting room, then the narrow hallway—testing each window frame, reading the angle of the rain. The ones that shelter under the overhang, he opens fully, letting the cool air drag through. The ones that don't, he leaves alone; Hawkeye's floors have enough to deal with. It's a small nuisance, working around the weather, but Edward has done harder things with less light than this. He shoves the kitchen window up as far as it'll go and stands there for a moment with his hands braced on the sill.
The rain has softened. He breathes it in. Damp concrete and wet earth. The particular smell of a city that doesn't know it's being washed.
Hayate leans into his calf, tail limp as concern shines in his intelligent eyes.
"She's not dying," Edward tells him, unprompted.
Hayate doesn't move.
"She's not." He exhales through his nose and pushes off the sill. "Come on."
He stands in the kitchen for a moment longer than he needs to, watching the sour-sweet edge of the air slowly pull apart and dissipate. Then he opens a cabinet. Then another. He's looking for the pots—he knows where she keeps most things, has absorbed the layout of this apartment the way he absorbs anything he's been in enough times—and finds it on the third try, tucked behind a dutch oven with a chipped lid.
He grabs it. Fills it. Sets it to boil.
While he waits, he takes stock of the pantry. Onion. Garlic. Potatoes. Rice and lentils. The perfect ingredients that won't fight a sensitive stomach. He finds stock at the back of a shelf, and dried herbs, and a heel of bread that's not yet past useful.
Hayate sits at his feet and watches him work with an expression of serious supervision.
"Granny taught me this one," Edward says, more to fill the silence than anything else. He's dicing the onion, quick and neat. "Said it was the only thing worth making when someone's sick. Said anything else was just wasting good food on someone who can't keep it down properly." He drops the onion into the oil and listens to it hiss. "She wasn't very sentimental about it."
The smell changes almost immediately—onion softening, going sweet and warm. It's such a particular smell, so thoroughly domestic, that Edward finds himself standing still in the middle of it for a moment. He had not realised how hungry he was until the kitchen stopped smelling like illness.
He adds the garlic. The vegetables. The stock.
The rice and lentils become mushy in the broth. An experimental taste, and the foods melt on his tongue without needing to chew.
He drizzles the medication Havoc had passed him last, stirring until it dissolves completely into the broth. No taste to speak of. She won't know it's there, and if she does, she's too far under to argue.
He ladles a bowl. Pours a cup of water.
Edward then picks them both up and goes back to the bedroom.
She hasn't moved.
That's the first thing he checks, stepping back through the bedroom door—the rise and fall of her chest, the position of her hands. Hayate trails ahead, settling back into his spot at the bedside without being told, curling tight and setting his chin on the mattress edge with a long exhale, like a soldier returning to post.
Edward sets the water on the nightstand. Then carefully lowers himself onto the edge of the mattress beside her.
"Hey." He pitches his voice low. Not a whisper, but close. "You need to eat something."
She doesn't wake. He doesn't need her to.
He slips his arm behind her shoulders and eases her upright. She’s heavier than she looks—not from weight, but from the surrendered limpness of real fever-sleep. He props her against his shoulder, but her head droops far below what can be comfortable, and he has to stretch just to keep her steady. His arms shake a little under her weight, and for a fleeting moment, he wishes he were taller—not for himself, but so her neck wouldn’t bend so uncomfortably. The wish dies quietly. With a small grunt, he rises to his knees, adjusting so she rests more naturally. One arm supports her; the other lifts the cup.
Granny had told him this as well—years ago, when his mother hadn’t the energy nor the appetite to eat for herself. She had said that even if only semi-conscious, they'll usually swallow if you put it to their lips. Instinct. The body wants to survive even when the brain's clocked out.
He touches the rim of the cup to her lower lip.
She drinks. Slow, reflexive pulls. He waits between each one, patient in a way he rarely is with much of anything, watching the column of her throat move. The cup empties by half before her mouth stops cooperating. He sets it down and picks up the bowl.
The soup is harder—she has to swallow around the chunks of food, and she only half-manages it, and twice he has to tip the spoon back because she's slipped further under and he won't risk it. But he's not in a hurry. He waits. He tries again. Small bites of the soft vegetables, broth when the solids won't work, back and forth with more patience than he usually credits himself with having.
Eventually, the bowl empties.
He lowers her back down. Resettles the blanket. She makes a small sound, and Edward pauses, but then her breathing evens again, deeper than before, and some of the tight lines around her mouth have softened.
He breathes a sigh of relief.
Then he gets up and washes the bowl.
He finishes cleaning as fast as he can, then drifts to where he knows she keeps her little book collection. None of it is alchemy-related, and though he expected it, he can’t help the tiny sting of disappointment. Instead, he finds a stack of romance novels with frilly covers and titles that sound like someone sneezed words onto a page. He whispers a title name under his breath, “Twisted Love...?” and suppresses a laugh at the thought of reading any of it seriously. He grabs one anyway—just to keep from dying of boredom—and drags the small wooden chair over to her bed. Plopping down, he leans his elbows on his knees and holds the book tightly in mismatched hands.
For a long moment, he’s silent. And then he begins to speak.
"Colonel said you'd want tea when you woke up," he says quietly. "He said you wouldn't ask for it."
Her breathing doesn't change.
"So I'll make some. Later." He pauses. "When you're not dying."
He's quiet for a while after that. Hayate shifts at the foot of the bed, resettles. The rain comes and goes against the window.
"It's mum's birthday today."
He doesn’t know why he says it. Doesn't know why he's talking when he's got a frilly romance book to make fun of. But the words slip out and settle in the quiet before he can catch them. He stares at the book.
"Back then, the illness hadn’t reached its worst yet. But she was still sick. Me n’ Al tried bakin’ her a cake. Wanted to do somethin’ special." A faint huff of breath. "She was so happy at first. Smilin’ through the fever. Ate a whole slice."
His mouth twitches—not quite a smile.
"Couple hours later, when we had gone to sleep, I heard her gettin’ sick. Real sick. Wouldn’t stop." His fingers curl slightly. "I thought she was throwin’ her guts up. So I called Granny. N' she was so upset with us. Said sugar was the worst thing we could’ve given her. And we’d left the kitchen a disaster on top of it."
A pause.
"That’s how I learned to make the soup." Quieter now. "After Granny made sure Mum was alright, she kept me up and showed me. Al was still asleep. She taught me how to clean as I went, too."
He finally looks at Hawkeye.
"Did you like it?" he asks, almost offhand. "It’s been a while since I made it. Not since—" He swallows. "Not since she died."
He clears his throat.
"But yeah. That’s why Al ain’t here. He went home." A small shrug. "He does that. More than me."
Silence stretches.
"He’s good at it. Showin’ up. Stayin’." His gaze drops again. "I tell myself I’m too busy to join him.” A beat. "That’s what I say, anyway."
He turns the thought over.
"It's actually ’cause I’m a coward. I look at home and I can't… I can't figure out what I'm owed there. Whether I get to walk in the front door like someone who hasn’t—" He stops. Starts again, quieter. "Al lost years. Years, inside that armour, cold and dark and has no sense of touch, no sense of taste, just—waitin’. Because I made a choice for the both of us and I didn’t give him an option. And now I’m tryin’ to fix it. But you can’t just—" He presses his thumbnail into his palm. "You can’t just fix it and call it even. That ain’t how it works."
Hawkeye's chest rises. Falls.
"Penance," he says. The word sits differently now than it did in her mouth. "Yeah. I know what that is."
He watches her for a moment longer.
"But here's the thing." He leans forward slightly. "You want to make it right—what happened. All of it. It's why you're sticking to Mustang's plan, right? All those people—you want to give them somethin’ back. And you can't do that from here." He gestures, vaguely, at the room, the fever, all of it. "And you can't do it without bein’ well enough to stand next to him and keep him honest. So." He settles back in the chair. "Get better. Don’t be like mum."
It isn't eloquent. He's not Mustang; he doesn't have the words for things like this. But he means it, which is the part that matters.
He rests his chin in his hand and keeps watch.
Hayate's tail thumps once against the mattress, slow and drowsy.
The rain goes on.
Riza Hawkeye wakes to warmth.
Not the fever-warmth—that sweat-soaked, suffocating thing that had pressed down on her for days. This is different. A hand resting over hers on the sheets, and the sound of breathing that isn't her own, laboured pull of air, or Hayate's familiar heavy pants.
She lies still for a moment. Takes stock.
Her head aches, but distantly—the dull, receding echo of something that has already done its worst. Her throat is tight but no longer raw. She swallows carefully, and it hurts less than she expected.
She turns her head.
Gold.
Edward is folded half onto the mattress, his feet spilling onto the floor, the mattress tipping slightly under his weight. His hair has come loose from its braid—a curtain of gold falling across his face and shoulders, catching what little moonlight slips through the curtains. An open book lies beside his head, and a closer glance reveals the cheesy romance novels Mustang buddy-reads with her. She can’t help laughing quietly, silently hoping he hasn’t gotten to the… more intense parts. He looks younger like this—he always does, whenever he isn’t bracing himself against the world.
His hand is over hers.
She isn’t surprised to see him, though. She’d heard him. Heard him as she’d drifted up through the fever into the sound of his voice and then back under again, and his words had followed her down—the call of his mother, the word penance said like he'd been carrying it in his mouth for years and finally put it somewhere.
She thinks about that now. Turns it over slowly, the way you handle something fragile.
She understands penance. She has lived inside it long enough to know its particular shape—the way it looks like discipline from the outside, like precision and duty and never a hair out of place. The way it feels, from the inside, like standing at attention in front of something that will never dismiss you. She had believed for a long time that this was what she deserved. That the only honest response to what she had done was to make herself useful until usefulness was the only thing left.
But she thinks, watching the slow rise and fall of Edward's shoulders—
She thinks about what it actually takes. Not to perform contrition, but to come through it. She has seen soldiers who never did. Men who swallowed their shame so fast it curdled into something else entirely, something armoured and bitter that wore guilt's face but felt nothing beneath it. That version was easy, in its way. A clean substitution. You could live inside it forever and call it accountability.
The real thing was worse. The real thing meant feeling it without flinching—the full weight of what you were, what you'd done, what could never be undone. Not guilt, which asks what will this cost me, but shame, which says I know what I am. Hatred turned inward. The ugliest version of yourself, held up and not looked away from.
She has stood in that fire. She is standing in it still.
But she thinks—for the first time, tentatively, like pressing on a bruise to see if it's healing—that the fire is not where you stay. That enduring it is not the same as being defined by it. That there is something on the other side of having felt the full, unsubstituted truth of your own wrongdoing, and she does not have a name for it yet, but she thinks it might be the beginning of something that looks, eventually, like living.
Not forgiveness. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.
But the door.
She looks at Edward. At the boy who had said penance with understanding in his eyes, who had said I forgive you with a wobble in his voice and no certainty that he had the right. He doesn't know it yet—what waits on the other side of the fire. She's not sure she does either.
But she hopes they might offer themselves, someday, what they so instinctively offer each other.
The tears that slip from the corners of her eyes are quiet and entirely without warning. She lets them go.
She hopes she'll see the day when he finds it—that far shore. She hopes she'll be standing close enough to say congratulations and mean every syllable, and that he'll understand what she means.
But that is a long way off.
For now, she reaches up and brushes a strand of hair from his face, smoothing it gently aside. The care in her movements is something she rarely allows herself in daylight, when he was awake to see it. His breathing doesn't change.
Tomorrow she'll make tea. She'll set the table, and they'll eat together, and Hayate will beg shamelessly at their feet, and she'll thank Edward for staying, and he'll turn pink and insist it was nothing. And she'll let him have that—she won't push, won't name what it cost him to be here, the particular ache of nursing someone else back to health when he never got to do it for the person who needed him most. She'll see it in him, and she'll let it be.
And he'll smile and say I'm glad you're okay, and she'll believe him.
But that's tomorrow.
Tonight, Hayate breathes at the foot of the bed. Edward's hand rests over hers. The rain has finally, quietly, stopped.
Riza Hawkeye closes her eyes and sleeps.