AN: I've had a bunch of vague thoughts about Riza swirling around in my head and they seem to have taken shape in the form of a loveletter to/about Riza disguising itself as a drabble. I just love her so much? Please bear with me.
There were many ways to define the life of Riza Hawkeye. Every few years there was a major event, a red flag to draw a line and label it a new stage. She lived in befores and afters. Before her mother got sick and after her mother died. Before Roy came to stay and after he left. After her father carved his research into her back and before Roy Mustang burned it away. Before the military academy, before she ever held a gun, before she killed someone, before the war. After. At a certain point, all the lines diverged and she found herself twisted in a tangled map of what was missing and when and how. She preferred not to let loss define her. Riza distinguished change in all its forms by the person she became in its wake.
She could not remember much of the person she'd been while her mother was still alive. She knew only that she'd been afraid to go too near her mother, that she walked heavily and clumsily and always made too much noise, and that she hadn't known enough of loss to understand the hollow feeling she was left with after her mother was gone. She knew that she was different after that.
Riza held herself like her muscles were made of threads always pulling inward. She learned to tiptoe. Sometimes she made a game of it; stepping softly outside her father's study, pretending there was a monster she was trying not to awaken. She took sandpaper to her sharp edges and became a graceful, quiet, obedient thing. Though she never lost her voice, she had no need for it. In a mostly empty house there was little to say and no one to say it to. Not until Roy Mustang showed up on her doorstep, at least.
Roy never tiptoed. He strode confidently around her house, dropping heavy textbooks onto tables, mumbling his lessons aloud, and occasionally knocking things over. Watching him made Riza's legs ache so that she had to stand and walk and run to remember what it was like not to tiptoe. Still, there was something hesitant in her stance, but there was light in her movement and laughter in her eyes and the house was less quiet. Her father said one day that she stood taller and she realized she was growing. She learned. She pictured Roy knocking on her father's door when all signs pointed to do-not-disturb when she thought of bravery, Roy grinning over his first successful transmutation when she thought of determination, Roy sitting and eating with her though she knew he had a stack of books to read when she thought of kindness. It was in picturing these traits that she realized they were all things she wanted to be.
Riza realized only after Roy left that she'd stopped tiptoeing. Her steps were not noisy, but they stood out in the stillness her home had adopted in the absence of her father's student. She held herself like something growing, always stretching to the sun. The first time her father traced the tattoo into her skin, she arched her back and blinked tears back as she looked at the sky.
Afterwards, it was nearly impossible to stand so tall. Every movement pulled at developing scar tissue and sent waves of pain crawling through her skin. She did not move as freely or as often for the first few days. Instead, she held herself like a ragdoll gingerly lifting itself upright. It did not last long.
She learned to stand even with a transmutation circle in her skin. Riza pretended it was not there, though she learned not to turn her back to those she was hesitant to trust.
When her father died, she changed again. Her shoulders slumped like she'd finally put down a burden after years of struggling, but could not remember what to do with her hands. Only Roy seemed surprised. Only Roy seemed to notice that she'd tied knots of the fragile threads that held her together and double bound her joints. He looked at her with understanding, and she saw that he knew the struggle of bending without breaking, of building yourself up without turning every corner into a sharp edge. He did not tiptoe, not even around her father's grave, and with one look she saw all the good he had not lost in the years after he left. It was the first time she chose to change, and she relished in the freedom of it the moment threw herself headlong in.
The burns were not as heavy as the tattoo. It was a pain that Riza chose, all white-hot and blinding and so much easier to bear than the intrusiveness of a needle that clawed into her veins. As she pulled on her shirt, she remembered stories of a bird that lit itself on fire and reformed in the ashes of its past. Riza Hawkeye was no bird, but she'd always believed in the possibility of rebirth, and she'd seen people rise stronger from nothing but dust more than once. She'd done it herself, and she'd do it again in time.
As new scars blossomed, her skin grew back thicker. It had tightened with the tattoo, become suffocating and constricting, but when it healed, it stretched to make room for her. She felt new and clean, the way she imagined new-formed metal was after its impurities were burned and hammered away.
Her path from that point forward was a steady road of stumbling growth and promises made to herself. She joined the military academy and learned to straighten her spine like a tin soldier. Her fingers grew callouses shaped by the trigger of a gun. Riza learned to march, steadfast and rhythmic, and look everyone in the eyes. Pride bloomed in her chest like a balloon, puffing it farther outward with every deep breath she took. She could like being a soldier, she expected. She had hands capable of fighting for her convictions, for the world she envisioned, for those who could not fight for themselves.
It took her longer to realize that she had hands capable of killing, and by that time, she had changed again.
Riza stopped seeing the world around her with the same clarity. There was so much dust in the air in Ishval, so much smoke. And anyway, most of her time was spent peering through the telescope of a rifle; seen directly from her own eyes, the world was warped and distorted. When she closed her eyes, she saw outlines and imprints, like the ghost traces of light that dance on closed eyelids after staring at the sun for too long. It was easier to lose sight of who she'd been trying to become.
But she would not let that happen. She found Roy early in her deployment and did not take her eyes off of him if she could help it. His eyes were changed too, like maybe when he looked into the future he did not see the same dreams he had in his childhood, but she saw in him the same endless capacity for righteous revolution. She looked at him in his singed white cloak and told herself that change was what they had both wanted, and that they would change for the better.
Riza returned from Ishval with her back straight as ever, but her head bowed. Her fingers curled at her sides as if still trained against a trigger, fighting against every instinct to tremble. She hadn't carried blood on her hands half so often as she'd lived with dirt buried beneath her fingernails from clawing out graves in the sand for corpses that had been children, but the scent of gunsmoke lingered in her hair even so. Everything felt transient. She felt on the precipice of change without knowing which direction she would fall, unsure and bordering on powerless.
When Roy called her into his office, a nearly empty room as new as his latest title, Riza changed for the last time. He asked her to be ever-present and sturdy. He asked her to be vigilant and mindful. He asked her to take care of him, his goals, the people he protected. He looked at her and saw the strength she'd always held, mirroring ever bit of faith she'd had in him. He offered her a promise, an opportunity to begin walking down the path she'd been trying to reach since she was a child repeating her father's promises of improving the world, and to grow strong and tall enough to look the demons of her past in the eye.
There was never a chance of her turning it down. Riza Hawkeye had always planned to take that road, even if it led her into hell. She'd been worse places, without Roy and the light he brought with him at her side, and it scared her less than the thought of living her whole life with shadows chasing her heels and a memory of a warmth she'd turned her back on.
She became a woman chasing progress and following the man who pursued it. She became a protector, a guardian. A woman who would choose a weapon over a shield because, oh, was she tired of holding her arms up against attacks and letting herself be moved; she learned to use weapons to protect and to survive and to throw herself at the things that scared her.
Pride still lay settled in her spine, but it was determination that kept her upright. It was hope. It was the resolve to feel sadness knock on her door day in and day out, and to rarely invite it in and to never, ever let it stay the night.
Riza Hawkeye was a woman who had always been capable of great and terrible things, but at every turn chose to build rather than consume. She would rather hold a friend up than stand on his shoulders. She never really felt right accepting thanks from the people she helped. She did not have the same faith in equivalent exchange as an alchemist; she would not believe that saving a life atoned for taking one. But that would not stop her from trying to atone.
Everything she did was to build a world in which no child was buried on a roadside by hands that spent nearly every day holding a gun. To take the world she'd built with promises whispered in the dark of her bedroom, written in the margins of scraps of paper, shared with a young boy who never sat still, and to construct it brick by brick in reality. Even if she never planned to be part of that world.
Riza Hawkeye had held dreams long before Roy Mustang dumped his ambitions in her lap, but she carried his as carefully as her own anyway. It didn't bother her when people assumed they were all his to begin with. It was enough to know that she was changing. It was enough to devote her life to change, to a man who worked for it and to a world that needed it.
She lived in the time after she'd started along a path she believed in, the time before all of her dreams were realized, but above all, the time during her deliberate transformation. And most of the time, she was happy.