A/N: A trigger warning for blood and violence, before you proceed. This takes place two months after the Promised Day and I'd classify it as angst and hurt/comfort, but it has a happy ending. Part one of two.
There is so much blood.
It has only been eight weeks since she was covered in her own. The scar on her neck is still pink and fresh, barely healed.
She did not scream when the man leapt from the shadows and grabbed her, she did not scream as she landed expert blows to his groin and feet, nor as they slammed into the china case, shattering the dishes she'd arranged that morning. She did not scream as the man threw her to the floor, as the broken glass bit into her elbows, as he dropped down to finish her with a small blade and she thrust a shard of porcelain into the carotid artery of his throat.
He puts his hands to the wound but it is useless. She hates the blood, the warm wet stickiness, metallic smell so sharp she can almost taste it as it spills on to her hands and clothes, as it pools on the hardwood floors of the Brigadier General's new apartment. The dog is barking like mad.
Riza, for all the lives she has taken and can't forget, has never watched death like that. Up close, so close his stilling body pins her to the ground. She screams when she sees the light go out of his eyes: a single, shredded, scream of agony, an existential question mark, now that she has killed a man in the same way she herself nearly died. There is a cycle to these things; they were going to end it. There is so much blood.
They announce the Ishvalan Reform Movement two weeks after the events of the Promised Day. The Brigadier General, his sight only recently returned, gives a speech over the wireless with the official endorsement of Fuhrer Grumman: from the helm of East Command, he will seek to return the Ishvalan people to their homeland, and heal the terrible wounds inflicted by the unjust war perpetrated against their race.
The first death threats arrive later that day.
There had been threats when the Brigadier General was still the Colonel, of course, but those threats came in passing, from angered citizens on the street, opponents of the martial state unable to tell one brass-plated uniform from another. Once a drunken man took a swing at her superior; Riza dislocated the dissident's shoulder. Easy stuff.
The new threats come sealed in an assortment of envelopes, spelled out with letters snipped from newspapers and magazines, or insinuated in pages upon pages handwritten of anti-Ishvalan rhetoric. A good number are postmarked from Central, and more from East City, understandably. Every single one crosses Riza Hawkeye's desk, every single day; by the time their first week as "the Brigadier General's office" is over, she has heard her superior called a coward, a tyrant, a Xingese half-breed runt, a murderer, an abomination, and a philanderer—this last letter, she suspects, is a broken heart couched in political dissent, and she tries her best not to wonder which of the Brigadier General's ex-girlfriends might be incensed enough to send him hate mail.
None of it really bothers her, not deeply. She knows how to judge danger and there isn't any in these letters. Some people need to voice their outrage at the prospect of change and the Brigadier General is change personified—young, strong-willed, with a plan, having already led a successful coup. His name lines the papers and echoes over the radio waves. She creates an official incident report for each letter and files them away, where he'll never lay eyes on them, because he has never bothered to learn her filing system, because he is Roy Mustang.
But there is this one letter.
It is notable because it is one letter, many times. The same letter every morning, nestled in the stack of mail, beginning the day after the Brigadier General's speech. Postmarked from East City with no return address. While others may send more than one correspondence, there is almost always some variation; not so with this one.
And it is the simplest, too. In a clean typewriter font on creamy cardstock, it reads: Death to Ishvala. Death to the Reformer. We know you.
There is a they, and a you, another them and another us. Every time she and her Brigadier General right a wrong, it seems to spin out from beneath them, generating more wreckage.
After the sixth day, the clinical little cards frighten her, but because she knows they are made to frighten her, she staunchly ignores them. Files them away with the rest. Watches his back closely, but no closer than normal.
Nothing has changed between them. Or, she doesn't think so. Since they left the hospital she finds herself constantly embroiled in pregnant pauses, the two of them exchanging a significant look each evening after the office empties and they are alone together. He opens his mouth to speak and, seizing up, Riza announces that they really ought to go before it rains, or that she has another form for him to sign, or that Breda has been leaving crumbs everywhere lately and it's driving her mad. For years her mouth filled so easily with words about the future and justice and what's right for their nation, she has forgotten how to talk about this tiny interpersonal hiccup, if she ever even knew. Possibly not; with Roy, the feeling has always been there, muted, suffering from growing pains.
Maybe one thing has changed—they used to touch like it meant nothing and now she jumps if he comes within a foot of her, her heart in her throat, pink-faced like a schoolgirl. Nothing is different, they have yet to accomplish their goal of making him Fuhrer, or better yet, President, but after the Promised Day that silent pact they'd made not to complicate their relationship any further seems… moot. A lock on a door when the unwanted party has already entered—if anything, they are making it worse. But she keeps freezing with her hand around the key.
It's strange how things came easier when she was passing him coded intell in the cafeteria under the constant scrutiny of an oppressive regime. Now that Roy is free to spend his time with Hawkeye unencumbered, he finds himself grappling for a way to broach the topic that never escapes the periphery of his thoughts. It's a knowledge that lives in his head and his heart and teases his tongue but never finds his lips: he loves her.
He can't tell when it started, and he doesn't particularly care. Maybe since he first laid eyes on her, when she was thirteen and he not much older. He recalls sensing she was smart as a whip—something in the tiny machinations of her big brown doe eyes as she labored over small domestic tasks, as if frustrated by the work's triviality and her own sense of duty towards it.
Maybe it happened in Ishval. Maybe the love got him out of that place, but some nights he feels as though he never really left, so that doesn't seem right.
Maybe it was watching her blink him a message as the life bled out of her. But he doesn't care to reexamine that moment; it is hard enough to shake the memory of her body in a red smear on the floor.
Once you arrive at love it doesn't really matter when the journey began; looking back from the love-realization every word spoken and glance exchanged and moment passed in contented silence gets rewritten by the love. So the maybes mean nothing and everything. Mostly nothing, mostly he cares about now, and getting her to touch him, he has been staring at her hands.
"Maybe I should have retired and let you have this one, Brigadier General."
"And deprive Amestris of a leader such as yourself? Nonsense, sir."
Grumman smiles behind the bushy curve of his mustache; if possible, he has gone greyer in the two months since he took office.
"That's the charisma that'll have you sitting at this desk one day." Roy feels his chest lift and tries not to eye the seat too covetously.
"I hope so, sir."
Grumman's pen scratches across the bottom of a single-page form. "Brigadier General, you are hence forth reassigned as first officer of East Command. Congratulations." The Fuhrer hands Roy the paper; the document feels heavy. "I'll leave you to handle the reassignment of whatever subordinates you wish to accompany you to East City, since I suspect there will be a few."
"Yes, sir." He fights back a smile, staring at this form like a bar of gold in his hand. He is the youngest commanding officer of a military district in Amestris's history—he checked the martial records this morning.
"And," Grumman adds, not looking up, "Tell that granddaughter of mine to stop by before you take her away again."
"She hasn't come to see you?"
"Not since the hospital," says Grumman heavily. He looks more grandfather in that moment than Fuhrer. Hawkeye's distance does not surprise Roy; he knows where she's been instead of with the last remaining member of her family, he sees her twelve hours of every day of every week, even Sundays. And he understands Grumman's predicament, too, if with a different lilt: it is never anything less than delightful to see Riza Hawkeye again.
Roy salutes his Fuhrer. "I'll be sure she comes by, sir."
They stand in the cold dusty room that he calls a study, putting papers in boxes. Tomorrow they will load everything into a truck and leave for East City. Riza will drive; her Brigadier General will try to get her to play Twenty Questions and fail. He'll laugh in the back of his throat and it will be a beautiful sound.
But tonight they are packing. Today's letter arrived with a handwritten X in red ink beneath the usual message. She knows what this means—the letters have been coming from East City, and tomorrow will be his first night as head of East Command. Her palms sweat thinking of it.
"Ha, I thought I'd lost this," the Brigadier General says happily; she turns to see him beaming at a heavy leather-bound volume, alchemical symbols glinting on the spine. He has shed the heavy coat of his uniform, rolled up the sleeves on his crisp white dress shirt.
"I've made sure your new residence is furnished with bookshelves, sir." His nose wrinkles and he gives the room a speculative glance: for a study, the absence of a desk, chairs, and any kind of storage for books is striking. The books and papers sit in stacks on the floor—many, many stacks, the annals of his ongoing research—and some scientific glassware clutters a rickety little table. The rest of his place lacks the same necessities; perhaps the best-curated room in this apartment is the closet. He doesn't dress like a man without a kitchen table.
(Every time she's here she remembers giving him a tour of her father's grand, half-dead estate, when he said, grinning, "Say, Riza, don't you ever feel a little small with all these big old rooms?"
She looked at him so emptily, empty as her mother's parlor. Father said that city people were rude.
"It's impolite for you to call me by my first name. You have to call me Miss Riza, or Miss Hawkeye."
Mister Mustang—he remains Mister Mustang until the day her father dies—gaped at her and ducked his head. "Sorry about that, Miss Hawkeye." Father said he would learn manners if he wanted to learn alchemy. Father said a lot of things like that, and she hates that she still thinks of them as wisdom.
What will he do when he becomes President? What will he do in that mansion, all by himself? Imagine the scandal, the President of Amestris sat on the floor each night, eating beans out of a can. She makes a note to give him a stern talk on Inauguration Day about the importance of furniture. Now that you're the leader of our country, sir, you must sit in a chair even when no one can see you.)
Back in his shabby excuse for a study, she dumps a leaf of parchment into a box. There's no use keeping everything in order when there's no order to begin with. The Brigadier General squints at her, half-smiling. "You're looking forward to getting out of this apartment, aren't you?"
He says this like the apartment is equally her responsibility, a thing they share. And she's spent time here, sure, and more than a few nights on the sofa—he offers the bed, she refuses claiming the principal of the thing, because she is his adjutant and he her commanding officer—while in reality she fears the intimacy of sharing sheets. Too many smells. "I'm looking forward to the work we'll do in the East, sir," she says, too diplomatically.
He gives the room a mock once-over. "You know, I don't actually think any of Bradley's bugs are still lying around here." She frowns at the teasing, but he keeps going: "If they were, could they still be active? Is there a homunculus we missed? What do you think the mystery sin is, and what's it going to do if it knows how much you loathe my apartment?"
He has the charm playing offense tonight. The wide smile, and he must know what it's like when his hair falls in his eyes. Which, she supposes bitterly, is most of the time.
"I think the mystery sin is probably fraternization, sir."
It is a heavy statement, maybe she is trying to be witty, she isn't quite sure but the grin slides from his face. Riza swallows hard.
"Fraternization the Homunculus," he muses, running a hand over the cover of his book. "Clever."
The red X from that day's letter flicks across Riza's vision. "There have been threats."
Roy glances up—the Brigadier General glances up. It's too hard to call him that when his coat is off. "Threats?"
"Against your life. I think there may be an attack when we arrive in East City."
His eyebrows lift slightly, lips parting in a pause before he speaks. "Do you need me to do anything about it?"
"I need you to be careful, sir." He almost rolls his eyes—he's heard this before, it's not useful and she knows that, but she has to say it. "I'll stay with you the first few nights in our new post to make sure you're secure."
An odd little light comes into his eyes. "You'll stay with me, huh? Would that be—"
"On the couch. Sir." She doesn't intend this to be an answer to his question—she doesn't care about his question, about the twisting of his mouth when he starts to ask it, she hates thinking of herself as some sexual item to him and wants to squash any inquiry that could stray in that direction. Of course, preemptively refuting an innuendo ensures that there's an innuendo in the conversation somewhere, whether or not there had to be. And it's a meaner one, a non-starter. He manages not to deflate but hardens over instead, looking older.
"All right, Captain." She's still getting used to that. Captain Hawkeye. She misses being the Lieutenant, a bit.
The first words they hear upon entering the yard at East Command are, "Hey, Colonel, looks like rain, don't ya think? Better get inside before you're completely useless." Riza spies her superior's shoulders knotting at the voice, one they both recognize.
They turn in tandem to witness Alphonse Elric—less thin than the last time she saw him, but not quite the picture of health—muttering in Edward's ear: "He's Brigadier General now, Brother."
"Hello, Fullmetal, Alphonse," the Brigadier General grunts.
"Boys," Riza greets them, a little warmer than her boss, and Ed takes a cheerful step toward her.
"Lieutenant!"
"Captain," Roy snaps. Ed tosses him a glare.
"Captain. It's nice to see you."
"How are you feeling, Captain?" Al asks brightly, ignoring the grumpiness between his brother and her superior.
"I'm well, Alphonse."
"Where's Miss Rockbell, Fullmetal? She dump you already?"
"Winry's not my girlfriend," Ed spits, red-faced.
"Oh yeah? Well, I suppose she is a little young for me—"
"Shut up!" Ed's the same color as his coat now. "She's in Rush Valley, all right, she goes down every couple of weeks to do work for her customers there."
Her hesitance to touch briefly forgotten, Riza puts a hand on the Brigadier General's elbow and the Elric-related malcontent melts from his face; she proposes quietly, "Shall we go in for tea?" The brothers exchange a look, but not one she has time to read before ushering them into the building.
Behind them, she hears Ed mutter, "Like he can talk." Hm.
The halls of East Command are just as she remembers them, objectively speaking, but they feel smaller. The day they left this place everyone celebrated the promotion to Central, thinking Bradley had seen something exceptional in Roy, and that the something wasn't a propensity for troublemaking. She remembers where the tea and coffee things are, and makes a pot to share while they chat. Alphonse offers to help.
"Brother does like Winry," he confides, as he stands at the teacart with Riza, their backs to Ed and Roy's predictable conversation of one-upmanship.
"I know," she laughs. She is no fool, and neither is Al, apparently.
"When are the others coming, Sargent Major Fuery and Second Lieutenant Breda, and Lieutenant Falman?"
"They'll be relocating here in a few days."
"And how's Second Lieutenant Havoc? We weren't sure…"
"Last I heard, he was hobbling around the hospital wing on his own two legs, distracting the pretty nurses." Riza can't help smiling: Alphonse's interest in the wellbeing of the Brigadier General's team grows out from a genuine pocket in his good heart. With luck, she thinks, this is something he'll never lose.
"I like holding the hot teacups," Al tells her, cupping one in his hands. "It's so lovely to feel the warmth again." The smile stretches over Riza's face—these golden-eyed children have been through too much. When she was nineteen, she had to pull a trigger and it changed her chemistry; she can't imagine what Alphonse and Edward have experienced. Yet again, there are no words.
"Damn, that Alphonse has gotten pretty good," Roy barks; he crashes through the front door of the East City apartment he'll be calling home from here on out, stomping, trailed by a brown cloud: the dust on his jacket stirs and makes him cough, and he hears his Captain wheezing similarly behind him. Hayate's yapping greets them. The little dog skitters into the entrance hall, wagging furiously.
"He certainly gave you a hard time, sir." Roy feels himself scowl, and he starts ripping off the dirty shell of his uniform, his heavy coat and blazer sending up more dust as he throws them to the floor, nearly smothering the dog.
"Remind me to stop agreeing to alchemy matches with people named Elric. Never works out like I want it to." Alphonse had made a dust storm—made a dust storm! Right there in the middle of the HQ yard! And he'd run right into it, like an idiot. Plus, he had yet to master clapping to transmute; he was a little busy for alchemy, lately.
"Yes, sir."
The only light in the foyer peeks through the open front door from the streetlamp, and when Hawkeye closes it behind them, they're in pure darkness for an instant while Roy strips away his dirty clothes. He's not sure where the day's gone, it's so late somehow, but he finds himself wondering that a lot with this job. Hawkeye flicks on a lamp and his hands pause on the buttons of his shirt—perhaps he's too familiar in her presence. He turns to see her watching him in the still-dim light, the glint of a peculiar emotion in her eyes, one he can only identify because he has known her so long and seen her feel quite a lot. He has made her nervous.
"Captain," he mutters, to himself mostly, with admonishing affection. Thinking, how silly of you to be nervous around me.
"Sir?" comes her voice, stiff and small.
"I'll go bathe. I suppose you know where to find everything."
"I do."
"All right."
"I'm going to conduct a perimeter check."
His eyebrows lift. "You are?"
"To verify there are no intruders. And Hayate needs to go out," she adds. The puppy rubs against her calf.
He dumps his clothing at the foot of his new bed, made for the first time that day. In the bathroom he can feel sweat and dirt in a film over his skin, and the random aches of travel, and tiredness making his eyes itch. One glance at himself in the mirror is enough to draw a small tsk from his mouth. No wonder Hawkeye was nervous, he looks halfway to death.
He could've stood under the hot tap forever. He starts singing to himself:
What do you do with a drunken sailor?
What do you do with a drunken sailor?
What do you do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning?
The apartment already looks better than his last, even crowded with boxes they'd yet to unpack.
Riza breathes the night air, the chill it sends through her lungs. Hayate pisses on a bush. The Brigadier General's new place comprises half a walk-up, and she circles the yard with the dog, checking for holes in the fence. There's a spot on the little maple tree where it looks like someone might've broken a couple branches hopping into the yard, but she can't tell how fresh it is in the darkness. Could easily be a raccoon. She tugs on Hayate's leash to get him back inside.
Showers breed confidence. Sometimes for good measure, sometimes to disastrous results. The hot air and the feeling of cleanliness can trick a man into thinking he's ready when he's not.
He tells himself it's the good measure confidence when the thought pops into his head, Tonight's the night. Him and Hawkeye. He excels at romance, he's done it a thousand times before!—well. A couple dozen times. Not as many as he lets people believe. Of course, Hawkeye's different from those women, they have history, and she's never shown herself amenable to charm. And what's Lover Roy (he calls himself this only in his head) without his charm? Regular Roy? And if she were interested, wouldn't something have happened years ago? She knows him better than anyone but who's to say that's a good thing, given all he's done? But no—the shower tells him, confident, Tonight's the night.
But still, it takes a lot of willpower to shut off the water. His usually steady hands shake as he does up the buttons on a fresh shirt, the damp of his hair bleeding on to the collar. When he's dressed he leaves the comforting, isolated steam of the bathroom and takes another glance at himself in the dresser mirror—having so many possessions is odd, like living in a stranger's house. He can see the glow from the oil lamp reflected in his gaze. He was not blind for long, but it is brilliant to see again. Roy sighs.
A scream cuts through the quiet house, and he runs.
A/N 2: Expect the second installment this weekend.