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East City, 1914.
Al woke up to the sound of his brother rummaging through the room. Well, it might have been anyone, since as long as he wasn’t in contact with earth Al could only rely on his ears. He opened his eyes, which made no difference to the ever-present darkness that surrounded him, and he sat in his bed. It could have been anyone, maybe, but an intruder would have at least tried to keep quiet.
“Brother,” he said with a sigh. “What are you doing up in the middle of the night?”
“Can’t sleep,” came the mumbled reply. “Looking for that book I started yesterday. Did you move it?”
“I don’t touch your stuff. You do a wonderful job of losing it all by yourself. So, what—you couldn’t sleep and you decided I shouldn’t be able to sleep either?”
The shuffling noises stopped. “I don’t know how you can sleep with that ruckus.”
Al frowned. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I’m talking about the kid who’s been crying all night!”
Now Al was getting worried. He threw his legs out of the bed, and when his naked feet came into contact with the floor and the world opened up to him, he zoned in on his brother and on the vibrations from his heartbeats, as familiar as his own. It didn’t seem like Ed was particularly upset or unstable. Annoyed, probably, which was such a usual state of being for Ed that it didn’t ping Al’s radar.
“I can’t hear anything,” he said carefully.
“Well, they’re not crying now, but they’ve been bothering me for hours.” The noises resumed. Ed had now opened one of the drawers from the chest of drawers they shared, and he proceeded to look through it with little grunts of annoyance. “I don’t know how you could sleep through it.”
If the noise had been as bad as Ed made it out to be, then Al shouldn’t have been able to sleep through it. He’d always been the lighter sleeper of the two, and since he’d become blind his sensitivity to sounds had increased. If he couldn’t hear anything, then there was probably nothing to hear.
“Are you sure you weren’t dreaming? Maybe it was a stress-induced nightmare. Is the thought of Scar bothering you?”
Ed stopped bumping around the drawer. “I don’t know. I mean, I have no choice, right? If that guy’s the last airbender, then he’s the only person qualified to teach me. And I need to learn airbending before I can learn waterbending and find a way to heal you.”
He liked to reassure Al of his purpose from time to time, like he was afraid Al would think he’d given up on it. Al knew his brother too well for the thought to ever cross his mind; if there was a way, Ed would find it. He just worried sometimes that there was simply nothing even the Avatar himself could do to help him, and that he’d live in the dark for the rest of his life. He never shared these thoughts with his brother, because there was no point in adding to the weight of guilt that already burdened him.
“You’ll find a way,” he said to Ed, as much for himself as for his brother.
“’Course I will, even if I have to beat that guy to a pulp to convince him. But—” Ed’s voice lowered to the pitch reserved to midnight confessions. They’d always shared a room, and had always used the cover of night to whisper their secrets and doubts to each other, so Al knew that particular voice well. “What if we manage to capture him and he refuses anyway? What can I do then? I can’t very well kill him! But he’s spent the last few years killing firebenders, so why would he agree to help one now?”
“You’re not a firebender, though. You’re the Avatar.”
Ed scoffed. “I bend fire, so I don’t know if it’s going to make a big difference to that guy.”
“But if he’s an airbender then he’s a monk too, right? I thought the Ishvalan monks were non-violent.”
“Obviously this one has decided that non-violence was bullshit.”
Obviously. The tales of how the man Central HQ had nicknamed ‘Scar’ had taken down General Basque Grand in the middle of the street were downright chilling: Scar had created some sort of bubble around the general’s head that had sucked all the air out of his lungs in a matter of seconds. General Basque Grand had been an imposing man, a firebender known throughout the country for the destructive power of his blasts. To think that such a man could have been reduced to nothing in an instant made Al’s blood run cold. Colonel Mustang had told Ed not to get close to Scar, but Ed’s ability to follow orders was dubious on a good day.
“You won’t try to seek him out, right, brother?” Al said. It was chilly in the room, and he wrapped his arms around himself to keep warm. “It’s way too dangerous.”
“If Mustang can bring him to me on a silver plate, then I won’t have to do anything. I know he’s dangerous. I’ve heard the stories, and I don’t have a death wish.”
Al refrained from arguing that last point. “No ‘if’!” he said, waving a finger at his brother. “You don’t go looking for Scar and that’s it. You let the Colonel handle it.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re such a worrywart.” Ed sighed, the sound of it muffled like he had his face buried in his hands. “Right now all I want is to be able to get a good night’s sleep. Are you sure you couldn’t hear crying?”
“Yes, pretty sure.” But Ed’s story about a child crying non-stop sounded strangely familiar. “You know, I think I remember you talking about a child keeping you up, back when we were first in Central and you were learning firebending with the Colonel. Do you remember that?”
Ed hummed thoughtfully. “I think so? Now that you’re mentioning it, yeah, I think I remember that. And you also said you couldn’t hear anything, back then. It’s weird, right?”
“I’m sure it’s just a coincidence,” Al said.
“That, or I’m turning crazy,” Ed said, his flippant tone betraying an undercurrent of real worry. “Well, I can’t hear any child crying right now and I can’t find my freaking book, so I might as well try to get back to bed.”
“Good idea,” Al said, lying back down in his bed with a wide yawn; if Ed stayed up then Al wouldn’t be able to sleep either, and he was exhausted. He could feel his eyes fluttering shut. “Good night, brother.”
“G’night, Al.”
Al was asleep again as soon as his head touched the pillow. If Ed woke up again that night, then he was considerate enough to make no sound.
---
He’d been trying to find his way for hours in the storm, but he might as well admit it now: he was lost, and he didn’t have the slightest idea on how to get back. He couldn’t see anything because of the wind whipping at his face and the snow/sand obscuring his surroundings. He had his automail arm raised over his eyes but it didn’t give him much protection. Walking forward was a constant struggle, because the wind was so strong that pushing back against it was like trying to shove a boulder without the help of earthbending.
“Goddamn it,” he said, and felt grains of sand scrunch between his teeth. The cold burned his face and he shoved his flesh hand in his pocket to protect it.
He didn’t even know where he was. All he could see was undulating expanses of white/dull brown. Suddenly, he heard it again: the wailings of a small child, the kind of desolate crying that a kid who’d lost sight of his parents might produce. He whipped his head around, trying to pinpoint the location of the noise, but it sounded like it came from everywhere at once, carried over by the unrelenting wind.
“Where are you?” he tried to yell, but the wind swallowed up his voice.
“Right here,” a voice said from behind him.
He whirled around. “Right here,” the voice said again, this time coming from somewhere on his left.
“This isn’t funny!” he shouted. “And tell that kid to shut up!”
“This isn’t her fault.”
Something about the wind had changed. It now swirled more purposefully around one specific spot, the snow flying quicker and quicker until it formed a shape, small and humanlike. The crying had been reduced to faint sniffing, and when the wind dropped, Ed could see a very small girl bundled up inside a colorful coat, fur hat tugged so low down her forehead that her eyes were barely visible. Only a few strands of jet-black hair escaped from it. She couldn’t have been older than two, and watching her stand in the snow and wipe her nose forlornly made the annoyance Ed had been feeling for days subside.
“Hey,” he said, stepping closer. “What’s your name, kid?”
“She’s Anastasia,” the voice from before said. “Nastya for short.”
When Ed turned around this time a young man stood against a backdrop of sandy dunes. He was obviously Ishvalan, brown-skinned and white-haired, his eyes gleaming red behind his glasses. He wore loose sand-colored robes, cinched at the waist by a striped piece of cloth. He addressed Ed a warm smile of recognition.
“Who are you?” Ed asked, immediately suspicious. “Who’s she?”
He glanced back to the little girl, who wasn’t paying any attention to them and was still crying softly. Dark, sharp-looking mountains were silhouetted behind her, and there was something strange about that but Ed’s head felt muddled and he didn’t have enough mind power to handle several different problems right now. The little girl was no threat, so he turned to the man again.
“So?” he said impatiently.
The man chuckled, a sound of fond familiarity that should’ve felt out of place in a stranger. “As I said, her name is Nastya. Mine is Khalid. As for who we are—well, Edward, we’re you.”
“What? That makes no sense. I’m the only me there is.”
“You’re right, this is too simplistic a way to put it. You are you, and I am me, and Nastya is Nastya, but we’re also the same. Let me try a metaphor: imagine a bracelet made of a thread and wooden beads. We are different beads, but we all belong to the same thread.”
This was starting to make Ed’s head hurt, and he pressed a fist against his temple. “I’m dreaming,” he said. Mountains on one side, sand dunes on the other—no way this wasn’t a dream. He only needed to find a way to wake up.
“You are, but this is no ordinary dream. We’re really here with you, if only because we don’t exist separate from you.”
Realization dawned on Ed and gave him vertigo. “You’re the previous Avatars,” he said in a breath.
Khalid smiled. “Exactly.”
“You could have started with that, instead of going on about beads and threads!”
“I just wanted to make you understand what we are.”
“Is Nastya the kid I keep hearing cry at night? Al said he couldn’t hear her.”
“She’s the Water Avatar who came right before you. As such, she should be the one talking to you right now and guiding you. Except—” Khalid’s placid face fell and his voice became so soft that Ed could barely hear him, even without the wind howling like a lost soul. “Except they didn’t let her live long enough to even learn how to speak.”
“What—”
He’d known that, he had, but it was one thing to know about it in the abstract, and another to see and hear the kid bawling her eyes out because she couldn’t find a way to talk to him. She’d been nipped into the bud, the path destiny had laid out for her all but snagged from under her feet. He glanced back to the kid, or tried to, because the wind picked up again, hurling sand mixed with snow to his face.
“Khalid!” he yelled, or tried to, and the next time he opened his eyes it was to the bland white wall of the room he shared with Al.
“Brother?” said Al, puzzlement mixed with worry in his voice.
Daylight filtered inside the room from the lone window cut out in the wall between the two beds, and Ed could see his brother sitting in his bed, scarred eyes wide open from alarm.
“I’m okay,” Ed said automatically. He looked around, almost expecting to see Natsya or Khalid standing in the room. They’d felt so real, and he’d been aware of them more acutely than he’d ever been of anyone before, even Al. “I had a weird dream. But—”
“You were yelling a name,” Al said. “Brother, who’s Khalid?”
---
Ed didn’t dream of Khalid or of Nastya crying over the next few days, and paradoxically it bothered him even more than the phantom crying had. They couldn’t be—gone, could they? They were supposed to be one, although Ed still couldn’t wrap his mind around what it meant and Khalid’s little bead metaphor didn’t really help. There was something deeply disturbing about the concept that he wasn’t alone in his mind, and yet the idea that he might find himself unable to talk to them again left him with an odd sense of loss.
“Khalid must have been the Air Avatar who died during the Ishval war,” Ed explained to Al as they were getting ready for the day in their room. “He looked Ishvalan, and Air comes before Water so he must have been the Avatar before Natsya. He wasn’t a kid, but he still looked young—way younger than the Colonel, at least.”
Khalid must have looked the age he was when he died, and it really put things in perspective for Ed: if his secret got out, then certain death—or maybe enslavement if Amestris felt like a change in policy—was what awaited him. Al wasn’t saying anything and the sunglasses he had on partly obscured his expression, but Ed was used to it and could still read him pretty well.
“What is it?” he asked, pausing in the process of brushing his hair. “If you have something to say, just say it.”
“What? I was just listening to you.” Al was sitting on his bed, his fingers following the hem of his shirt in a way that meant he was uneasy. “I mean, I don’t know what to say. You, talking to your previous incarnations—it’s just, it’s pretty weird, you know?”
Ed frowned. “You don’t believe me? You think I was dreaming?”
“No, of course not!” Al waved both hands in denial. “Ed, if you tell me you know you weren’t dreaming, then I believe you. I meant that it’s a lot to take in, that’s all. You’re my brother, you’ve been with me my whole life and I know you better than I know anyone else in the world. So the thought of you as all those other people, but also you actually talking to them in your mind… Obviously, I knew about the reincarnation stuff, but—”
It didn’t feel like Al was lying, and Ed relaxed. “I know exactly what you mean,” he said with a sigh, raking his fingers through his loose hair. “It’s really strange for me too. Before, it was all just stories. Now, this shit is actually real, and if I wasn’t living it I don’t know if I’d be able to believe it.” He smiled at his brother, who couldn’t see it. “Thanks for believing me, Al.”
Al smiled too, whether or not he was aware of Ed’s expression. “Of course I believe you, brother. I believe you, and I believe in you, always. No matter how weird it gets. Speaking of weird, though, don’t you think it’s a funny coincidence that right when Scar pops up in East City and you learn he’s an airbender, you start dreaming about the Air Avatar who died during the Ishval war?”
“Maybe the fact that I was thinking about Scar made it easier for Khalid to access my mind,” Ed hazarded, swiftly braiding his hair. “I wish I knew how Khalid died.”
“If you’re his reincarnation, shouldn’t you be able to access his memories?”
“I guess, maybe, but obviously it’s not as simple as trying to access my own memories, or I’d just need to think about it to remember.”
“Do you think Scar and Khalid knew each other?”
Ed sat on his own bed across his brother. They only had about ten minutes before Ed was supposed to meet with Mustang, but Ed hadn’t been in time for a meeting with the man since very early in their acquaintance, and he wasn’t about to start now. Besides, Al’s was an interesting question to ponder.
“It seems likely. Even the Avatar has to be taught bending, so he must have been in contact with airbender monks, and they probably all knew about him. He was their Avatar, after all.”
That night Ed didn’t dream of Natsya or Khalid, but he dreamed of warm, dry desert wind, of sand dunes and white buildings. The Ishval desert, where the most deadly conflict in his country’s short but bloody history had taken place. Ed knew many people who had been affected by it: Pinako, who had lost her eldest son there, many of the Rockbells’ customers, Mustang and Hawkeye and Hughes who had fought in the war. Now there was Scar, who had been turned into a serial killer by it but was Ed’s only hope at learning airbending, and Khalid—himself—who’d lost his life there. And yet he felt like he knew nothing about it for all of its comparative importance.
Al suggested he asked Mustang to tell him about the war. The Colonel had earned his nickname “Flame” in Ishval, and he must have his share of war stories. But the only time Ed seriously considered asking him, Mustang looked at him and said, “What is it, Elric? Something on your mind? If you want me to get something for you from the top shelf, all you have to do is ask.”
Yeah, that had killed right away any desire Ed might have had for a serious discussion with the asshole. Asking about Ishval made Ed feel like an ignorant child, and ignorant and childish were at the top of his list of things he really didn’t want to feel when talking to Mustang. He wasn’t even sure Mustang would be willing to talk about it.
Hughes was a chatterbox, but he was in Central, so that left him with only Hawkeye to ask about Ishval. He really liked the Lieutenant, maybe because she’d been so welcoming to Al when they’d first arrived from Resembool, but it was rare for them to interact without Mustang being present too. So when one day Mustang was called for an interview with the Fuhrer right during one of their appointments, therefore leaving Ed alone with Hawkeye in his office, Ed knew this was the right moment.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” he said, scrupulously examining a tear in his right glove. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course, Edward,” she said.
“It’s, um, it’s a little personal. You can refuse to answer, I’ll understand.”
This time there was a silence, and Ed risked a glance in Hawkeye’s direction. She’d paused in her steady rhythm of filling paperwork and looked up at him.
“I suggest you ask your question,” she said calmly. “Then I’ll be able to judge whether I want to answer it or not.”
“Yeah, right. I was just wondering… Would you tell me about Ishval?”
Hawkeye capped her pen and put it down. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you can tell me? Anything you’re willing to tell me. It was such a big deal and I feel so ignorant about it. And now with Scar showing up, and—the Avatar. He was me—or I was him, I guess—and the only thing I know is that he died during the war.”
“Well,” said Hawkeye, weaving her fingers together. “I can only tell you how things went on from my perspective.”
“Of course.”
“You know what started the war, right?”
“A soldier shot an Ishvalan child, or at least that was the excuse. I heard that the real goal of the war was to take down the Air Avatar.”
She shot him a sympathetic look, even though she was the one with the memories. “It was, of course, although it was never stated in so many words. Maybe you’re aware that since its integration to Amestris almost two decades prior the beginning of the war, Ishval had gotten something of a special treatment: as long as they didn’t leave Ishval, the airbenders were allowed to continue to exist.”
Ed remembered reading about it. “Because they were non-violent, right?”
“Their philosophy allowed them self-defense,” Hawkeye said. “But they were to avoid taking a life and they should never attack first. When I was in my last year at the Academy, along with the Colonel and Lieutenant Hughes, I was sent to Ishval. Our school was in the East and they needed all the soldiers they could get on the front. By that time the war had been going on for five years, and both sides were exhausted.”
She paused, and Ed didn’t dare breathe in case he interrupted her trail of thoughts. She wasn’t looking at him, her gaze lost to the mist of remembrance.
“The monks had stayed out of the war for the first few years,” she went on, her voice low and precise like she was giving a report. “The government had been smart enough never to attack them directly, but as they watched their people be decimated disagreement started to brew in their ranks. A faction of them wanted to forego their beliefs and start attacking, and eventually they won over the pacifists. When the airbenders started to fight, it was the perfect excuse for the Fuhrer to issue Order No 3066 and deploy his newly-minted firebender units in order to annihilate Ishval, and, by the same token, kill the Avatar.”
---
Ishval, 1896.
From her vantage point in the tower Riza could see the soft curves of the sand dunes on her left, and the blindingly white ruins of the city on her right. Burst of flames signaled the firebenders in action; sudden whirlwinds were the airbenders’ signature. Guns were shooting in the distance, cries of pain resounding in their trail, but the streets Riza had in sight were empty. Nothing she could do to help. Nothing but to wait, and wait, and wait until she had a clear shot. The Hawk’s Eye, they called her; she was but a pair of ever-watching eyes.
It was cool enough behind the thick stonewalls, but she could feel the unrelenting heat of the sun radiate from the small opening she shot through. She’d never realized what a force the sun was until she’d come to the desert. Here, it could knock you down as easily as a blow to the head.
The sounds of a scuffle were approaching, and Riza got herself ready. There, a couple of blue-clad figures backing down in the face of an enemy’s assault. A handful of seconds later, a group of brown-skinned men and women turned around the corner—carrying guns, which meant that they were non-benders. Riza aimed, and fired. One, two, three fell down—The Amestris soldiers took care of the other two, and one of them waved at Riza in thanks. She was their salvation from the sky, always watching out for them.
Once the city was secured, hours later, she was able to get down from her tower. After being alone for so long it was always difficult for her to get used to other people’s company again. She could see a group of Amestrian soldiers crouched around a fire, but she didn’t rush to join them, preferring to keep an ambling pace to give herself time to prepare. She crossed paths with Major Armstrong, who seemed to be going in the opposite direction from her.
“Hello, Major,” she said. “Aren’t you going to join the others?”
Major Armstrong was a gentle giant of a man, and always so expressive that you never had to guess at his feelings but rather found yourself punched in the face with them. Right now his face was like a mask of pale wax, and the look he gave her was haunted.
“Hello, cadet. I needed to—to step away from the fire for a moment.” He tried to smile. “You can have my spot.”
Riza nodded slowly. It wasn’t rare for non-bender soldiers, like her or the major, to develop an aversion to fire after watching firebenders in action. She was lucky that she was too high up most of the time to get more than echoes.
“Thank you,” she said, and went on her way.
“Hey, Riza!” one of soldiers by the fire exclaimed once she was within earthot. “Come sit here with us.”
It was Rebecca Catalina, another cadet from the Academy who Riza hadn’t really known back at school, but who’d latched on to her as soon as they’d arrived in Ishval. She was outgoing and friendly in a way Riza knew she wasn’t, but Rebecca seemed to always know when to back off so they got along well. Due to her position Riza didn’t have a lot of opportunities to bond with her fellow soldiers, and it was nice to have someone who cared about her beyond the protection her bullets offered.
Rebecca patted a stone next to the one she sat on. “Come, come.” She handed Riza out a mug of tea that must have been heated on the fire. “How are things up in the sky?”
Riza shrugged, not knowing how to answer that. “About as well as on the ground, I guess. More lonely.”
“Thanks, by the way,” said the man sitting on the opposite side of the fire from her.
He was about her age, wore rectangular glasses and had his hair slicked back. He looked vaguely familiar, so she must have seen him around at the Academy. She nodded politely in acknowledgement, guessing that her sniping must have saved him at some point.
“I was with the group you saved earlier,” he said, confirming her thoughts. “Name’s Maes Hughes.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m Riza Hawkeye.”
His eyes widened a bit. “For real?”
Rebecca muffled her giggle behind her hand, and Riza sighed. “Yes, for real,” she said for what felt like the hundredth time.
To his credit, Hughes let it go immediately and started chatting about his girlfriend, Gracia, who he’d just received a letter from. Rebecca recounted a funny anecdote involving a general, a couple of Ishvalan spies, and some really unfortunate translation mistakes. Riza didn’t say much and let their chatter wash over her in a soothing cascade of words. She drank her tea, which was too hot and bitter, and enjoyed the warm caress of the desert wind. The sun was lowering in the sky and the temperature dropping quickly—from experience, Riza knew that once it had disappeared behind the dunes, it would get as cold as it was hot during the day.
“I still think that’s weird,” the man who sat next to Hughes was saying. He was a mousy blond man Riza had never seen before, too old to have been in the Academy with her. “I know the Ishvalans rebelled, but HQ throwing everything they have at that barren stretch of desert feels like they’re going overboard. I don’t think they’re telling us everything.”
The declaration cooled every bit of warmth that had been brought by the previous light-hearted topics.
“What do you think they’re hiding?” Rebecca asked, turning her tin mug in her hands nervously. “I mean, with the airbenders involved we have to use everything we’ve got. Have you seen men get caught into a whirlwind? I have and it’s not pretty. There’s nothing guns can do against someone who controls the wind. If we didn’t have the firebenders—”
“Why not try to negotiate, then? Until recently, the airbenders were pacifists. They’d probably jump at a chance for peace. I think—” The man leaned forward, lowering his voice a murmur. “I think our government’s only goal in this bloody war is the Avatar.”
“Do we know for sure the Avatar has been reborn in Ishval? Has anyone seen them?” Riza said.
“Yeah, exactly,” Rebecca said. “I’m not even sure I believe in the Avatar. The stories sound too much like fairy tales to me.”
“I guess you’re all too young to remember the heyday of the Fire Avatar, but I’ve seen her bend all four elements. The Avatar is real, believe me. And they were supposed to be born again as an airbender, so where else could they be but in Ishval?”
Riza knew all this, of course. She may have been too young to remember the Fire Avatar, but her father was a firebender and she’d heard many a story from him: stories of the Fire Avatar’s feats in battle, but also of how she had turned against her country in the end. As much as Riza didn’t like the crazy conspirationalist light burning in the eyes of the blond man, she found herself believing him. What were they doing here? The longer she spent in Ishval, the less she was convinced that the war made any sense. How many people was she going to have to kill before they let her go home?
“What do you think, Hughes?” the blond man was saying. “It makes sense, right?”
“I think,” Hughes said slowly, in a low voice that commanded attention, “that you should be careful where you’re discussing your theories. Without missing a beat, he turned and called out, “Hey, Roy! Come and have a cup of tea with us!”
Two men were coming their way, one short and dark-haired, and the other lean with his hair in a ponytail and a manic grin on his face. They wore the Amestrian uniform with a small flame pinned on their chests that identified them as firebenders. Rebecca and the blond man immediately tensed at their approach, and Rebecca told Hughes in a low hiss, “Why did you ask them to come?”
There was no time for Hughes to formulate an answer, because the two men were already close enough to hear. Firebenders tended to band together, but Riza actually recognized the younger one. His name was Roy Mustang, but he’d been her father’s favorite trainee and had been invited for dinner a few times at her home. He’d seemed to her like a serious yet passionate young man, but the person she could see now looked weary beyond words.
Even though the two firebenders had come together, they settled around the fire as far from each other as possible. Mustang sat besides Hughes, while the other one ended up next to Riza. They’d brought with them the scent of burning flesh that always clung to firebenders’ clothing, and Riza saw Rebecca scrunch her nose.
“Hello there,” said the ponytailed firebender. “My name’s Kimblee. What’s yours?”
“She’s Master Hawkeye’s daughter, Kimblee,” Mustang said before Riza could reply. “I doubt she’ll be much impressed with you.”
Kimblee shot Mustang a look, and for a moment the air seemed to sizzle between the two. It might have been her imagination, but Riza could have sworn that the fire burned brighter for a few seconds too. Then Kimblee smiled and shrugged, palms open to the sky.
“Her loss, then,” he said.
Hughes flung an arm around Mustang’s shoulders, genial smile back on his face. “This guy saved my life not once, but twice. Who would’ve guessed I would make friends with a firebender—but then war makes for strange bedfellows.”
“Anytime us firebenders burn down one of those wind-hopping devils, we’re actively saving all of your hides,” Kimblee commented. “Where are my thanks?”
He held his palms close to the fire, ostensibly to warm his hands, but Riza noticed that the flames had started dancing in an unnatural way. She kept a wary eye on him, hand close to her rifle, as she listened to the rest of the conversation.
“Maybe if you didn’t look like you enjoyed it so much,” Rebecca shot back.
All of her cheerfulness from before had disappeared, and she looked at Kimblee with more animosity in her eyes than when she looked at their enemies. Kimblee either didn’t notice the hostility, or it didn’t bother him at all.
“You’re all a bunch of hypocrites,” he said. “Why do you think we came here for? What did you think being a soldier meant? You, dear Rebecca, had a choice in the matter that neither me or Mustang got. What shame is there in appreciating a job well done? Miss Hawkeye, don’t you agree with me?”
Riza pinched her lips. “I don’t enjoy killing.”
“But can you say that you’ve never felt at least a flicker of satisfaction when you managed to hit your target?”
Riza couldn’t answer that, and Kimblee’s lips stretched into a satisfied smile, like he could guess what she was thinking. Rebecca had turned red, seemingly stung by the jab on her choosing to be a soldier. Riza knew that she’d made that choice because the army offered her more opportunities to provide for her family than other jobs did, but it was hard to deny that it was more of a choice than the firebenders were given. Would her father have been supportive of Riza’s decision to join the army? Deep down, she knew the answer to that question.
She shared a look with Mustang over the fire, and to see his lined, tired her face reminded her of the first time she’d seen him, and how earnestly he’d explained that he wanted his flames to serve his country and protect as many people as he could. Where was that boy, now? She looked down at her hands, at the calluses left by her rifle on her palms: what had she done with the choice that was presented to her?
“Now, now, everyone,” Hughes said, probably sensing the tension in the air. “We’re all on the same side here, and whatever the path that led us to it, we’re doing the same job. Who wants more tea? It is lukewarm and has steeped too long—you won’t find anything better this side of the desert!”
“I wouldn’t mind—” Mustang started, but suddenly the wind that had whipped at their faces and made the flames sway became a whirlwind that snuffed the fire and flew all of them apart.
“We’re under attack!”
Riza had managed to grab her rifle, and she ran for the closest hiding place without looking for the others. Her job was to give them cover; as long as she wasn’t in the right position, she couldn’t help them. She found a crumbled section of wall with the remnants of a window, and she skidded to a stop behind it. She inserted her rifle through the opening and risked a glance to assess the situation.
There were two airbenders: one was a slim young woman and the other was an older man, and their monk robes were both tattered and dirty. Riza couldn’t see Rebecca, Hughes or the blond man anywhere, so they must have had the same idea as Riza and found cover. Only Mustang and Kimblee remained in the open, hands and feet positioned into familiar firebending postures. Fire and wind whirled together, and it was difficult for Riza to keep herself from being immersed into the spectacle. She knew more about firebending than most, and she could tell that Mustang and Kimblee were both very good at it. They were quick and light on their feet, but powerful at the same time, and she could feel the heat of their blasts from where she was hiding. But being good didn’t mean they couldn’t use her help, so she focused on the airbenders and waited for the right opportunity to shoot.
The firebenders attacked relentlessly but the airbenders evaded their attacks in a maddening dance, as was the airbender way. The younger one showed signs of fatigue and Riza focused on her, especially since the fight was bringing her closer to where Riza was hiding. Come closer—a little closer. She had to take into account the force and direction of the wind and how it might disturb the course of her bullet. It wasn’t the first time she had to shoot into what amounted to a small tempest, and she usually had to do it from a much greater distance. The young woman was now in her line of fire, so Riza took aim and shot. She missed, but between the roar of the fire blasts and the wind, she didn’t think her targets had noticed. She shot again and caught the woman in the head. The airbender crumpled, and her partner shouted in horror, “Zeinab!” His distraction cost him dearly, because the next moment he was engulfed in Kimblee’s fire blast. The man’s screaming was cut short by another of Riza’s bullets.
She waited a little until she was sure that the airbenders had been the only two assailants, and then she came out from behind her wall. Mustang was harping on at the others, who were emerging from various hiding places.
“Were you going to do anything? You left us deal with them on our own!”
“Hey, we’re not equipped to deal with benders,” Hughes said, seemingly unfazed. He brushed the sand off his uniform. “That kind of freakish fight is not for me. Give me a guy with a gun or a knife and I know what to do, but I prefer to leave bending to the benders.”
“That didn’t stop Hawkeye from helping!” Mustang protested, waving in Riza’s direction. “Thanks for the hand, Hawkeye.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You didn’t have to shoot him, though,” Kimblee, looking mournfully at the charred body of the older airbender. “He was dying anyway.”
Riza looked at him, overcome by a powerful sense of repulsion. “The fact that he was dying anyway is exactly why I shot him. Why let him suffer unnecessarily?”
Kimblee gazed at her, smiling at whatever expression he could see painted on her face. “Because the sound of their screams is always the best part.”
---
Weeks and months blurred into each other in an endless stretch of desert, sun, wind and death. They were taking back city after city, often destroying them completely in the process, leaving only blackened ruins behind them. Rebecca got injured and sent back home. Major Armstrong suffered a nervous breakdown, and was sent back too. The blond man with the conspiracy theories—who Riza learned later was called Martin—got killed by an airbender. Riza spent more and more time with Mustang and Hughes, and the topic of the Air Avatar came up often in their conversations, although never when anyone else was around.
“I heard his name is Khalid,” Hughes told them. Whenever Hughes said “I hear that…” it was never idle rumor, so Riza took this piece of information as fact. “He’s 23. Poor kid,” he added sadly, even though none of them had even celebrated their twentieth birthday.
“Why are we wasting our resources on chasing the Avatar?” Mustang said, gripping his kneecaps with painfully restrained anger. “Why are we destroying an entire civilization for this? The Avatar will only get reborn!”
“In a couple of cycles, the Avatar will be born to Fire again. I guess the government is hoping that an Avatar from their own board will be easier to manipulate and turn into a weapon.”
“I didn’t work so well last time,” Riza said quietly.
She had sand in one of her boots and she took it off to get rid of it. Her sock was worn thin, holed in a few spots, and it didn’t do a very good job of keeping her foot warm from the icy nights.
“The law is a lot stricter on firebenders now,” Hughes said, sneaking a glance at Mustang, who ignored him. “The last Fire Avatar wasn’t torn from her family and indoctrinated at a young age the way the next one will probably be.”
“This isn’t what the Avatar is supposed to be about,” Mustang murmured. “This is—”
A series of shouts had all of them jump to their feet and reach for their weapons—except for Mustang, of course, who fell into a firebending stance. Several soldiers were running in a common direction, but not with the urgency an attack would have caused.
“Hey!” Riza called to one of them, a woman a few years older than her whose name she thought might be Jones. “What’s going on?”
The woman stopped and turned. “The Air Avatar!” she exclaimed, her voice shaking with excitement. “The Avatar is surrendering to the Fuhrer!”
The news made Riza, Hughes and Mustang break into a run too, rushing deep into the camp to get to the Fuhrer’s tent that stood at the center of it. They had to elbow themselves a path into the crowd, but Hughes was excellent at crowd handling, and Mustang’s status as a firebender inspired enough awe mixed with fear that people started to get out of their way on their own once they saw him.
In front of the entrance to his tent stood the Fuhrer, who was holding his sword like a cane, tip to the ground. With his lone dark eye he contemplated the man before him, a young Ishvalan with glasses and an earnest face. He didn’t look more than a few years over twenty. He was flanked by two airbenders, a young man and an older, bald one, who both kept shooting paranoid glances at the gathering crowd of Amestris soldiers.
“So you’re giving yourself up, and in exchange you want us to stop the annihilation campaign. Am I understanding you right?”
“Yes,” the Avatar said.
The Furher let a minute pass without saying anything, his face as unreadable as carved marble. The airbenders accompanying—or guarding—the Avatar were getting progressively antsier, especially the younger one, who leaned toward the Avatar and hissed, “Brother! This was a bad idea. We should—”
“Shush, Feisal. We’ve had that conversation already. I will do what I must.”
Contrary to his companions the Avatar didn’t betray any nervousness, although he had his back on Riza and she couldn’t see his face. His body language was one of calm, both of his feet planted on the ground without shifting his weight from one to the other, and his hands not twitching or tapping against his thigh, but simply hanging by his sides. Riza couldn’t help but admire his courage, because he had to know that he’d lost his leverage as soon as he’d let himself be surrounded by enemies. For all intent and purposes, he was theirs now. The only question was whether the Fuhrer would be willing to have mercy on the Ishvalan people.
“You’re very arrogant,” Fuhrer Bradley said evenly. “To think that your life is worth all of your people’s on its own.”
“What? But—” Now the Avatar sounded confused. “But it’s me that you want, isn’t it? If you have me, why does it matter if you leave the rest of my people alone?”
“Oh, but this is all so much bigger than you. You are only a symptom.”
Moving so fast that he became a blur, the Fuhrer unsheathed his sword and stabbed it right into the Avatar’s heart. Riza gasped, instinctively lurching forward, but a hand clamped on her arm and stopped her from moving further. The young man collapsed without even a sound of pain, and the air vibrated with a cry of raw grief. “Brother!”
“Take them,” the Fuhrer said as he wiped the blood off his blade on his sleeve. “Maybe they can tell us about what’s left of the airbenders.”
Kimblee, Basque Grand, and a few other firebenders stepped over the Avatar’s body and took hold of the two airbenders. Both struggled, but the younger one—the Avatar’s brother, apparently, unless ‘brother’ was an honorific title that all the airbenders used with each other—was especially hard to tackle. He was tall and broad, and fought like a lion, fury and grief lending him the strength of ten men.
“Brother!” he was yelling, calling to the dead body as though it could still hear him. “Brother! Let me go! Brother! Let me go, I will kill you! I will kill you! I will kill all of you!”
It took other soldiers coming to the firebenders’ help to subdue him. They shoved him to the ground, the side of his face pressed to the dust, and for a moment Riza, who had stood paralyzed through the whole scene, met his eyes and the sizzling hatred burning in them. It felt like a punch, like the look was aimed at her specifically even though there was no reason for him to pick her out in the crowd of blue-clad soldiers. Then both airbenders were ushered away by the firebenders and the Avatar’s body was taken care of by a few other soldiers. The Fuhrer went back into his tent, looking unperturbed by what he’d done.
The crowd scattered with subdued whispers, and only Riza, Mustang, and Hughes were left on the scene. There were but a few drops of blood on the ground to betray that a man had just died there—not been killed in the heat of battle, but murdered in cold blood. Riza looked at Hughes, whose face reflected the shock she felt, and at Mustang, who was the one holding her arm. He was staring at the entrance of the Furher’s tent, where the man had been standing a few minutes before, and Riza was taken aback by the intense look in his eyes.
“You can let go of my arm,” she told him gently.
He startled, like he hadn’t realized that he was still holding her. He released her arm, blinking a few times. “I felt it,” he said.
“What did you feel?” she asked.
“The death of the Avatar.”
“I didn’t feel anything,” Hughes said. “You?” he asked Riza, who shook her head. “Must be a bender thing. But at least we know he’s being reborn as a waterbender right now.”
Hughes probably meant it as comforting, but Riza found the idea of this endless circle rather depressing, and apparently so did Mustang. “The government knows that too, and they’re going to hunt him down. Maybe we’re just facing the prospect of another war with Drachma, and then with the Earth Kingdom. Where will we stop? There’s nothing we can do about this, you and me. We’re just soldiers. The only way to stop this is…”
He looked back at the tent, fixing it as though he could burn it through will power alone. There was no one close enough from them to overhear their conversation, and yet Riza wanted to smack a hand over Mustang’s mouth to prevent him from finishing his sentence: “…is to sit at the top.”
---
They wiped out the airbenders. The Avatar hadn’t managed to even accomplish that much with his sacrifice. In a couple of months it was done, and they were all able to go back home. Hughes got married to his girlfriend, and the wedding was a small but happy event. After the war, Riza tried working as a flower girl, and then as a waitress in a restaurant. She was a hard worker and applied herself very seriously to anything she did, which meant none of her bosses had any room for complaint, and she should have been happy to do something that didn’t involve killing people. And yet she felt like she was waiting, counting the days and passing time until something came up.
She knew the day had come when Mustang entered the small family restaurant she was working at. She hadn’t seen him since Hughes’ wedding, where he’d officiated as best man, but he looked just the same, down to the blue uniform—there was no change of career for firebenders.
“I’ll do this one,” she told Maria, the other waitress.
Maria glanced at the table Riza had pointed. “He’s cute,” she approved, and then winked.
Riza blushed. “It’s not like that. I know him, that’s all.”
“Uh huh. Have fun!”
Mustang watched her approach with a slight smile. “It’s strange to see you out of your uniform,” he said, and swept a quick, appreciative look over her bare legs. “You look nice in a skirt.”
“It’s good to see you too, Major,” she said, casting him an acidic look. “Have you made your choice? The pot roast is excellent.”
“Then I’ll bow to your judgment and take that.”
“Very well. Anything to drink?”
“A glass of wine, please.” She was scribbling his order on her notepad, but stopped when she saw the intent way he looked at her. “I was hoping to see you, Hawkeye. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
She capped her pen and put it away in her breast pocket. She had a feeling she knew what he wanted to tell her, but she needed to hear him say it before she could tell how she felt about it.
“You have a few minutes before my boss comes and tell me to hurry,” she said.
It wasn’t true; Ernie was the most mellow kind of boss there was, to the point it was sometimes frustrating to Riza, who could see how some of his employees took advantage of his kindness. But she wanted Mustang to be quick about it, and to avoid him thinking that it was the right time and place for sharing war stories.
“I’m going to climb to the top,” he said in a voice so low she could almost think she was imagining the words. “But I know I can’t do this alone, and I’m going to need people to watch my back. To watch me, and make sure I don’t stray off the path.” His dark eyes burned as bright as any of his flames, and she couldn’t look away even if she’d wanted to. “It means that you can shoot me in the back if you feel I’m doing wrong. Firebenders are a force of destruction when they’re out of control. Whatever you decide, I will bow to your judgment.”
Her heart was pounding hard in her chest. Could she go back to the army? Could she make that choice all over again and live with the consequences? She wasn’t a firebender, like Mustang or her father. She wasn’t the Avatar, trapped by destiny in an endless circle of birth and death. She was free to choose, and was given the occasion to exert that freedom right now.
“When my father died,” she said. “His last words to me were that he was glad that I wasn’t born a firebender. He said that firebenders were fit for nothing but destruction.” Mustang flinched, and she smiled at him to soften the blow of her words. “I don’t want to believe he’s right, Major. I want to live long enough to see a flame change this country for the better.”
“Will you be alright with being a killer again?”
“I’m already a killer. There’s no changing that. At least maybe I’ll be able to do some good with my blood-stained hands.”
She’d never left the battlefield, not really. She’d known that as soon as she’d seen Mustang in his uniform and felt at home for the first time since the war. Civilian life wasn’t for her—the realization gave her a pang of loss, but it was also liberating, in a way, to finally know what she had to do.
“Pot roast and a glass of wine,” she said in a louder voice. “Right away.”
“Hawkeye,” Mustang said. He reached out for her, but she gently pushed back his hand.
“I’ll be back with your order, sir.”
On her way to the kitchen she met with Maria, who now looked worried rather than teasing.
“Was he bothering you?” she asked in a whisper. “I was joking earlier, because I’ve never seen you flirt with a patron before. I could ask Ernie to throw him out, if you want.”
No one at the restaurant knew that Riza had been in the army, and was perfectly capable of fending off any unwanted attention on her own. She liked it that way.
“It’s fine,” she said with a reassuring smile to Maria. “I told you that I knew him. I used to work with him.”
She finished her shift, and then told Ernie that she was quitting. He didn’t seem surprised, like he’d known that Riza wouldn’t stay long when she hadn’t been aware of it herself. Years later, when she would look back to that day and wonder what would’ve happen if she’d made another decision, she could never get a clear picture of what her life would have been like. After a while, she simply stopped wondering.
---
East City, 1914.
“Edward? Edward, are you alright?”
The sound of Hawkeye’s voice made Ed jump. He wiped his cheeks hurriedly, startled to realize that he’d been crying like a little kid in front of a superior officer.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You have nothing to apologize for. This was a fairly upsetting story.”
“But I didn’t live it! I don’t understand why—”
He felt another wave of sorrow and revolt threaten to overwhelm him and he shoved down the emotions before he could choke on them. It was the weirdest thing, because he could tell that the sorrow was Khalid’s, and the revolt was his, but none of those feelings felt foreign. Two beads following the same thread, huh.
Hawkeye was looking at him strangely. “You know, Edward, I don’t think I’ve ever fully grasped that the young man I watched die was… You’re here again. This is—” She smiled suddenly, a wide, blinding grin that struck Ed as very un-Hawkeye-like. “This is actually quite amazing.”
After having been told about his previous incarnation’s death in graphic details, Ed wasn’t sure how amazing he found the concept, but there was something infectious about Hawkeye’s smile, so he couldn’t help but smile back.
“Amazing, right. Thanks, Lieutenant. For, uh, for telling me all this. It can’t have been easy.”
“You’re welcome. I don’t have a lot of occasions to tell those stories, and it was cathartic. So thank you too, Edward.”
Mustang came back soon after, and on a tacit agreement Ed and Riza didn’t breathe a word to him on the topic they’d been discussing. When Ed met with Al later in the day, he told his brother the whole story. Al cried too, which both alarmed and puzzled Ed.
“Oh, wow, what’s wrong?”
Al took off his sunglasses, revealing his horrifying scars, to be able to dry his eyes.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but it’s just so sad. He—you—”
“Al, hey.” Ed reached out to cup his brother’s shoulder. “It wasn’t me.”
Al opened his unseeing eyes, making it impossible for Ed to escape the sight of the damage there: the milky veil dulling the golden color of the irises, the red spots that made it look like the eyes were permanently bleeding. Ed still couldn’t see this and not feel an awful stab of guilt, and only the thought that he was working toward fixing it made it bearable for him.
“But it was you, brother,” Al said, his voice breaking. “Sort of. And from what Lieutenant Hawkeye said, he had a brother and his brother watched him die, and I can’t—”
“I’m not going to die!” Al raised an eyebrow, and Ed amended, “Okay, I’m going to die, everyone dies, but I’m not going to get myself killed stupidly.”
“Oh, really?” Al said, and Ed bristled at the note of sarcasm in his voice.
“Hey, no need to get nasty. Listen, this reincarnation stuff is messed up, but look at it this way: it means that if—okay, when—I die, I’ll be reborn immediately. I won’t be truly gone.”
He wasn’t sure how comforting this was for Al to hear—wasn’t sure how comforting he found it, as the thought of becoming a whole other person was quite off-putting—but after a few seconds Al smiled.
“You’re right,” he said. “You’ll always survive somehow.” He laughed. “That is so you.”
Ed was glad he’d managed to find the right words to make Al feel better, but he found that he was still unsettled by what he’d learned from Hawkeye. That night he dreamed of the desert again, but this time there were also multiple faces, most of them Ishvalan. The one that came up the most was the face of a tall, well-built young man who wore airbender’s robes and called him ‘brother’. Then he dreamed of the Fuhrer’s impassive expression as he said ‘You are only a symptom.’ Pain bloomed at the center of his chest and when he looked down he could see the sword poking out from between his ribs. It had happened so fast that he could only puzzle at the sight, his mind too slow to catch on what it meant yet.
Ed gasped, clutching at his chest in a panic. It’s a dream, it’s just a dream, wake up!
“It’s a memory,” Khalid said.
They were standing in the middle of a ruined village, with stone buildings streaked black from fire blasts, and Ed knew without having to ask that it was Khalid’s birthplace. Khalid looked the same as last time, although his expression was sad, and Nastya was nowhere to be seen.
“It was your memory,” Ed said, patting his chest in a daze to reassure himself that he hadn’t been stabbed for real. “The memory of your death.”
“It’s our memory. I didn’t give it to you; it was always there at the back of your mind. It’s just that you couldn’t access it before. You have died hundreds of times, and the memories are lurking right beneath the surface.”
“Yeah, no, I don’t need to think about all the times I’ve died before, thank you. It’s enough that the story of your death made my little brother cry.”
“Oh.” Khalid’s face darkened, and Ed remembered too late that his brother had been there at the moment of his death, watching the whole thing without being able to do anything about it. “I’m sorry, Edward.”
“Not your fault.” Ed sat down on the rocky ground, crossing his legs. The metal of his automail glinted in the sun, but it didn’t feel like it was overheating the way it should in high temperatures. “It doesn’t make sense to me. How can you and I be here—wherever here is—talking to each other, and be the same person. You don’t look like me—I mean, not just physically, but you don’t behave like me.”
“We have different personalities, that much is true. It’s just that our core is the same. Just like beads on a—”
“Ugh, stop it with the beads. It really doesn’t clarify things for me. I’d like to understand it in a more scientific manner.”
Khalid tilted his head. “I was taught by the monks that this was more about faith than about science.”
“I’m not great at faith. But—” He put his hand palm flat on the ground, but he couldn’t feel the earth react to him. It really was a dream, and yet it wasn’t at the same time. “Some people theorize that a human being is made of three components: body, mind, and soul. I think the ‘mind’ is what connects the ‘body’ and the ‘soul’. If that’s true, then maybe we have the same soul, but different bodies, and different minds connecting soul and body together. It would explain why we can share memories, but have different personalities.” He grinned, feeling better about this whole reincarnation business now that he had a theory to go with it. “Yeah, I like that idea.”
“It does make sense,” Khalid admitted.
“I know, right?” Ed looked up at Khalid. “You know, if the Avatar gets reincarnated, do you think it could mean that other people are reincarnated too? Like, you had a brother, I have a brother—it sounds crazy, but could they be the same person?”
Khalid blinked, and then closed his eyes, his lips curving into a wistful smile. “No, that’s impossible. My brother is still alive.”
“Oh. But I thought all the airbenders were—” All but one. No, this can’t be.
“It’s your turn, Edward.” The wind was rising, carrying with it clouds of sand that blurred the image of Khalid. “Your turn on the stage. You carry on your shoulders the weight of all of our memories, our struggles, our hopes. You have to—”
A gust of wind drowned Khalid’s last words, but when Ed woke up, echoes of the wind still howling in his ears, the rest of the sentence was etched in his mind.
Restore balance in the world.