Author's Note: Story written for the Secret Coconut, a fic exchange promoted by the community Saint Seiya Super Fics Journal.
I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.
Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye held her pistol out in front of her, one knee on the ground while the other foot kept her braced against the ground.
Her eyes were clear and focused as she aimed for the shooting range's target.
In her mind's eye, she could see the bullet leave the barrel of her gun, could watch as wind and weight pulled it off course.
Fifty meters.
She adjusted her aim up slightly.
The imaginary bullet flew along the arc she'd assigned to it, but not quite to the center.
Cross-breeze two meters per second from the northeast.
She moved a hair to the left, aiming ever so slightly into the wind.
Her finger tensed on the trigger as she let the mental image complete itself.
There.
Her hand stilled completely, and only a single finger moved as she pulled the trigger.
The bullet jumped forward like a freed animal, pulled into the path she wanted by the same forces that should have made her miss her aim.
It was a perfect shot, but the instant Hawkeye pulled the trigger, she stopped seeing it.
Instead, her vivid mental eye was filled with a completely different scene.
Heat. Blood. Screams. Her pistol in front of her…her target, not a dummy, but an old man with dark skin and white hair, his strange red eyes widened in shock and terror as her bullet ripped through him—
Bullseye.
Hawkeye pulled the handgun back and surveyed the target.
She let out a breath and re-aimed.
Fifty meters….wind from the northeast…
She let her mind focus on the simple tasks of determining velocity and distortion, and ignored the next Ishvalan face that burned its way into her mind's eye.
The shooting range wasn't the only place the Ishvalan ghosts followed her.
There were countless things that could invoke them—a single word, a simple action, a slight similarity that really shouldn't have caused the chain reaction in her mind that drew everything back to the Ishvalan War.
But they did, and every time, she hardened her face and ignored the twisting void in the pit of her stomach until it faded away again.
Weapon.
That was one word that could do it.
She was a weapon. She was just as much a weapon as the pistols and rifles she favored, as much as the explosives and canons and guns that had mowed down Amestris' Ishvalan citizens. As much as the military's famed "human weapons" of the state alchemists.
She was a weapon.
The sharp snap of the trigger as she pulled it back and let the hammer fall.
That was an easy one. That was what she had done, again and again, sending her faithful bullets flying through human flesh and bone, even long after she had started wondering if anything she was doing was justified.
Again and again, she pulled the trigger.
Again and again.
She killed.
Again.
And.
Again.
Fire.
Anything.
The word.
The sight, the sound, the smell.
The idea.
The faces.
Her own. Her father's. Roy's.
As much as she had been a not-so-unwitting pawn of a government whose priorities she abhorred, she was still not an alchemist. She could only kill one person at a time.
Or two.
Her indelible memory would not allow her that inaccuracy.
A single bullet, ripping through both the woman she'd targeted and the man she'd been trying to shield with her own body…who were they? Friends? Family? Lovers? She would never know…
She was a weapon. But she was only a small weapon, only of use to the military en mass.
He was weapon, too.
But they only needed one of him.
Fire.
Gallons of fire, rivers of fire, oceans and seas and impossible depths of raging burning hungry fire…
He was a weapon, a powerful, terrible, insatiable weapon.
And she had made him that way.
Because of her, he had been ensnared by the same bonds of duty that had made her a murderer, and they had made him a mass murderer, a killer of hundreds—most of them, at least in retrospect, innocent.
And she had made him that way.
Every life he had taken was on her hands.
Her hands.
She stared down at them.
So much blood on her hands. It seemed almost obscene that she could not see it, could not feel it.
Warm water from the shower cascaded down her arms, down her hands, filling her palms with the mocking, body-temperature liquid.
She wished, as she had wished so many times before, that the water would simply wash her away from everything.
But it did not.
It poured down her, making her hair drip into her face, poured down her back, tempting her to just give up and let everything go, to let the darkness she deserved swallow her up…
Her back.
No.
Riza inhaled the steamy air.
No.
The water poured also down the scarred and puckered skin of her back, and she remembered again why she still stood on her own two feet.
Why her own bullets had not long since carved a perfect path through her skull.
The Ishvalan War was over.
Finally, finally over.
In a way, it was certainly a relief. It should be a relief.
But in another way, it was anything but.
As the months had stretched out in front of her, Riza Hawkeye had allowed duty to be her only guiding force. Any doubts and misgivings had been put off, so as not to interfere with her sacred duty.
But now it was over.
And now her own personal day of reckoning, so long delayed, could be put off no longer.
Without the immediacy of the war pushing everything off to the side, the terrible dissonance between what she was doing and what she thought she was doing flared to the surface, and she knew, with terrible, irrefutable certainty exactly what she had done.
What she had done, what she had allowed to happen, and what she had enabled.
What she had let herself become.
Quietly.
It was so quiet.
In retrospect, everything was so clear, how she had been led, how she had allowed herself to believe what she was told. It was easier that way, easier to believe that the terrible things she'd witnessed, the terrible things she'd done, had a higher purpose, that somehow it would all work out for the best in the end. It had been easier to ignore things that way.
It would still be easier, but it was too late.
She could not unsee what she had seen in her own soul, or in that empty place where she'd once had a soul.
She had done too much.
Fire.
Her father's fire.
Her fire.
She had not been born with her father's ability to manipulate the elements by touch, inheriting instead her mother's eye and aim, but her father's fire had still been passed along to her.
It should not have been.
He should never have trusted her with it. Probably should never have trusted anyone with it.
But she had begged him to let her be the keeper of the secrets he had not trusted with even his prized apprentice. She had had his dearly-bought formula tattooed on her back, a permanent record of the achievements that her father had most wished never to have made.
And now she saw why.
Now, and only now, did she see what he had finally realized: fire was too dangerous, too terrible, too unspeakably destructive to ever trust to any one person.
But it was too late.
She had already entrusted the secret to the one person she thought could safely wield it, the one person in the world she would trust with her life.
She still trusted him with her life, but that wasn't enough. She could, perhaps, trust him never to reveal the secret to anyone else, but that wasn't enough either.
Her own body might betray her.
The terrible secrets of flame alchemy were marked indelibly on her very skin, ready to tell the horrible truth to anyone with the necessary skills who saw it.
That must not happen.
That would never happen.
The secrets of total destruction were encoded in her own body, but therein lay her chance for redemption.
"Roy."
She never called him that. It was always "Lieutenant Colonel Mustang", or "Colonel" or simply "Mustang" for short. This was the life she had chosen, and she would live by it.
His face showed the difference. He looked up, eyes widening and then narrowing in confusion, and his lips parted slightly as he tried to determine an appropriate response.
She saved him the effort.
"I have…a personal request to make."
He crossed his hand in front of him, still the picture of professionalism.
"What is it…Riza?"
Riza stared at a point past his head. She could not meet his eyes.
"There must never be another Flame Alchemist. Please promise me that."
Roy's eyebrows drew together.
"What are you asking for?"
She took a deep breath.
"I am not asking you to give up that title. But please…never teach anyone the secret. Never tell anyone how to do it." She finally, briefly, met his eyes before looking down.
"And please destroy all documentation that could allow someone to recreate my father's work."
His sharp, choked intake of breath was all the confirmation she needed that he understood.
"All of it?"
She met his eyes, her lips hardening into a painfully tight line.
"All of it."
It had to be him. She did not wish to make him do it, but it had to be him. No one else could see that terrible inscription.
Never.
She could see the naked horror burning in his eyes, but she held his gaze until he dropped it.
"That could kill you."
That had stopped mattering months ago.
"I will not be complicit to genocide."
Again.
The word drifted in the air like smoke, though neither of them said it.
She watched Roy's face. It went through every stage she expected: horrified, then conflicted, then into that stage of awful, horrified resignation she'd become entirely to intimate with.
He looked back up at her, his face not quite reaching the stillness of her sniper's control. Perhaps he still retained some piece of the humanity she'd already sacrificed to the military.
"You want me…to burn your father's research off your back."
It wasn't really a question, but he couldn't trust something of this magnitude to the silent communication they'd built up over the years.
"Yes."
He was silent for a long time, and Riza could only see the edge of the struggle in his mind.
"If…if you'll make me a promise in return."
Riza's eyes narrowed slightly.
"What sort of promise?"
It was his turn to look beyond her.
"You've been guarding my back for a long time now." He inhaled deeply. "If I ever become what you fear…if I ever become one of those people you would keep this knowledge from at any cost…" he raised his arm and pointed straight at one of the handguns in her belt.
"…I want you to shoot me in the back."
She looked at him silently for a moment, and his black eyes blazed with a heat that matched the ice in her own brown ones.
She knew what he was capable of. She could read the fear behind the anger in his eyes.
"I will."
They kept eye contact a moment longer, and then she drew one of her pistols, flipped it around so it wasn't pointing at either of them, and laid it on his desk.
"I will," she repeated, keeping her hand on the weapon. "My gun is yours…whether for your orders or for your life."
It hurt.
It hurt more than she'd believed possible, but that only increased her resolve.
She had taken off her shirt and bra, and stood there topless while Roy examined her naked back. It could easily have been sexual, but it wasn't—Roy was trying to determine the smallest burn that would cover enough surface area to render the tattoo unusable.
He placed his hand gently on a spot near her left shoulder blade. She tensed.
"Are you ready?"
His voice was what she should have called expressionless, but couldn't. She could hear too much in it—regret, pain, even a kind of gentleness.
"Yes."
She wanted to say "yes, sir," out of habit, but he was not acting as her superior, not as Colonel Mustang. Right now, he was Roy.
He took a breath, and there was the sharp snap of ignition.
She might have screamed.
Fire hit her shoulder blade, jumped across bare skin to brand unconnected parts of her back.
It felt cold.
The pain receptors in her back couldn't quite process the pain of the fire that twisted the unspeakable knowledge off her skin, and so they spoke instead of a terrible scorching cold that leapt across her back, before finally resetting and allowing her to feel the heat, the burn, the awful, all-consuming pain…
Water.
He was pouring cool water across her back…was she kneeling now?...water that felt impossibly cold, but not as cold as the heat that had burned her…
Fire.
Fire that burned her, fire that disfigured her, fire that was her only salvation…
His fire.
Her fire.
Fire that was both her condemnation and her redemption.
She would never be used to trigger mass murder.
Never again.
The warm water of the shower poured over the scarred and puckered skin of her back.
That scar was her life.
She had other scars, true. Most of them commemorated some event or other in the Ishvalan War.
But the dark, angry skin of her back was different. The others marked yet another piece of her soul that she had given away for duty.
This one marked a piece of her soul that she had snatched back from the jaws of hell.
This was hers.
This was the reason she could still stand on her own two feet, could still face her reflection, even after everything she had done.
This was her fire.
This was her soul.
This was the visible mark of the moment in her life when she had stood her ground and said no.
No.
She would not be used.
No.
She would not be complicit in any more horrors.
No.
Even after all she had done, she was still worth it. Her soul was still worth fighting for, what little humanity she had left was worth preserving.
She knew the truth, now, the terrible truth that the leaders she had sworn her life to were willing to sacrifice their own citizens for their own purposes.
And that was why she would not die.
She would do whatever it took to stay alive, because she knew, and she had bought that knowledge with her soul.
Now she had a new duty, and this time it was a duty to herself and her remaining humanity. She had to stand against the oppression and horror and murder she had once been a part of. She had to stand for the remaining Ishvalans—not for their gratitude, they would never give her that, nor should they—and for the others who would be targeted. She had to learn more, to find out what the government was planning, to prevent it by any means within her power.
And she had to act as the check on Roy Mustang's quest for power.
That promise burned within her.
But this was not the terrible fire of destruction that she had tried so hard to prevent. This was different.
This was a warm core of determination that filled her, lifted her up when she fell, drove her to act.
She would stand.
She would walk, and run, and fight, and offer her last breath if it meant that she could stop the evil of the leaders she still followed.
I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.
But if that was true, then it was also true that the choices she made today would make her who she was tomorrow.
Riza Hawkeye stepped out of the shower, drying her long hair, and stared at her face in the mirror for a long moment.
Turning away, she pinned up her hair and got dressed, only wincing slightly as the fabric of her bra pulled at the long-healed skin of her back.
The uniform was crisp and clean, a picture of military efficiency. Automatically, she tucked the folds into place as she buckled the belt.
Her pistols lay on the bed in front of her.
Picking up the weapons one by one, she tucked them into their various holsters and smoothed the fabric back over them.
Crisp. Sharp. Professional.
When she picked up the last one, she paused slightly and looked blankly at it. Her finger brushed ever so slightly against the cool metal of the side of the trigger.
She slid it into the last holster.
Without changing expression, she straightened her uniform one last time, turned sharply, and walked away from the ghosts that surrounded her.