Author's Note: This is a very short Riza-centric fanfiction. I hope you enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I do not own FMA, all rights belong to the creator.


'BROKEN'


How many times must you break before you forget what it is like to be a whole?

Riza had been shattered and put-together again so many times that it seemed habitual to her now.

The first time was when she felt her mother's hand slip from her's as her mother surrendered herself to eternal sleep. The doctor declared her dead and Riza was left alone to cry in the corner of the dark hospital lobby. She cried herself to sleep for who knows how long before her father regained enough sense to take her back home. What followed were dark days. For days on end, her father would lock himself and she would sing herself to sleep each night.

The second was when Roy shook her awake.

"Your father...I called the ambulance. " She was still groggy from sleep but as soon she heard Roy's panicked voice, something inside her stirred. She rushed to her father's study where he laid in a pool of his own blood, his eyes rolled back into his head.

"No pulse," Roy whispered, but Riza refused to believe it. She waited for the paramedics but by the time they arrived her father was long gone. Truly gone.

Then there was Ishval. She broke every time a bullet left her rifle. The scorching heat and the battle wounds didn't hurt as much as the guilt did. She would have reoccurring dreams of lifeless bodies and their blood spewed about. Her doings.

She broke when she saw Edward's steel eyes. She saw herself in him but she didn't see herself in him. He had seen things beyond his years, or rather he had seen things no man should ever have had the misfortune to see.

Riza broke again when she saw Roy being consumed by his own rage. The reservoir of emotions that were his eyes showed only anger. Vengeance had gripped him and had begun to rot him. She saw a madness akin to her father's. But she shattered completely when she came to the conclusion that she had to end him. She broke a thousand times over as she put the gun to his head. She had been broken so many times but none compared to this. It felt as if there was no resurrection for her, no atonement. After all, how do you pick yourself up when the sole force keeping you together is taken away from you?

It seemed clear to her now- Shatter as many times as Riza may, there will always be Roy to piece her back together again.