Rain.
It beat against the windows and the tin roof of the balcony of the flat below hers, a cacophony of tiny percussions.
Drips became droplets; droplets became tiny streams; streams became rivulets. She watched them gather and part, projected on the ceiling by the faint light of the slumbering city.
Riza shifted minutely, mindful not to wake her companion.
The rain hadn't woken her; it hadn't had the opportunity. Another sleepless night in a parade of sleepless nights. She was grateful for the company.
It had been different in East City. The rain there was seasonal, a symptom of the hotter climate.
It wasn't humid, like the West – a place Riza had spent very little time in, save for the rare manoeuvres the military conducted there. Usually East travelled to North for field practice, and West travelled to South, but every so often Command saw fit to change things up. As usual, the Hero of Ishval had been required to show his face and put the recruits through their paces, so Riza had found herself to the north of West City, running around trying to make sure their team looked like it knew what it was doing, checking dress uniforms and sweating buckets.
The rain had come about halfway through their allotted time, and she had stood in the sudden storm, revelling in the fat, hot raindrops crashing on her head. She had stayed out past curfew that night, granted conditional leave; she'd walked the streets until the dawn, privately delighting in this single meteorological marvel.
Really, the next morning hadn't been a great time for the Colonel to decide that manoeuvres were boring and try to shirk his responsibilities, sneaking off with Heymans Breda and Jean Havoc to the infamous Cretan Quarter, where exotic Cretan wine flowed and exotic Cretan women danced sinuously on tables.
At least, that's what Havoc had told her and Kain Fuery when the younger man had asked.
She made it a point, that time, not to enquire further, given how wistful and glassy-eyed Breda and Havoc got when someone mentioned it.
Not so their commander in chief, but however much of a reckless, philandering front the Colonel liked to put on, Riza knew better. You didn't have time for more than passing fancies if you were set on becoming the next Fuhrer.
Riza shivered, absently pulling the sheet a little tighter around her. Curled up beside her, Black Hayate snuffled in his sleep and turned over, a comforting warmth against her side. He was entirely upside down now, arms, legs and tail every-which-way, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, without a care in the world.
It brought the ghost of a smile to her lips.
It made her think of long nights in East City, when the weather or their work held them hostage in the office so long that there was no longer any point in going home.
Rain in East City was cold, like a sheet of liquid ice trying to find its way into the seams and creases of her uniform, freezing fingers and toes. Sometimes it came down so hard the tiles on the roof would rattle. On those nights, the team would exchange a look of resignation and draw lots to see who would be making a trip down to the canteen to fetch supplies.
Sergeant Fuery would always be the first one asleep, disadvantaged by his youth and the way his mind focussed so completely on the surveillance notes he'd been deciphering (always a bit of an effort when it was from Sergeant Penk from Intelligence's dreadful handwriting) or whatever he was currently repairing. He'd be slumped over the equipment on his desk, his headphones still around his neck, a screwdriver grasped tightly in his hand.
Breda would be next, fighting off a gargantuan yawn – and Havoc, who would belatedly realise that the one small sofa at the side of the room was about to be occupied. If Breda won, he'd curl up with his military dress jacket draped over him, snoring like a meat grinder, while Havoc would grumble his way back to his desk and fall asleep in his chair, his feet propped up on the desk. If Breda lost, he would stretch out under his chair, making the desk above him reverberate, while Havoc would drape himself on the sofa, his long limbs sticking out the far side over the armrest.
There would be no more of that, now. You couldn't be a sharp shooter once you'd invalided out. You couldn't prop feet you couldn't feel on a desk.
Riza closed her eyes for a moment, wondering if the man was sleeping, sedated again, brought down from the rage at the life that had been stolen from him. Or was he sitting up in his hospital bed, silently fuming that his habit had been curtailed to one-a-day, watching the rain come down?
Vato Falman simply slept in his chair, ramrod straight and perfectly still for most of the night until his head tipped back and his voice joined the cacophony; inevitably, then, Breda or Havoc would kick him and he'd snap to attention even in his sleep.
As the small hours crept on and the rain hammered against the window, the Colonel would survey his troops with a wry smile, then sprawl back in his chair, arms and legs akimbo, as if he hadn't a care in the world. He had told her, in a rare moment of unguarded candour, that the only time he could sleep undisturbed was in a room full of other soldiers.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That's what they called it – but usually only after they'd forcibly retired you, and Mustang had places to go.
Riza was going to make sure he got to them.
On those nights, Riza would slip out of her chair and make herself a sweet tea containing far too much honey, returning without a sound to watch over the men under her (for want of a better word) command.
On those nights, the insomnia that was her sometime companion was welcome.
Night watch had always been her preferred detail; it was cooler, and the people you shot were generally trying to kill you, instead of simply going about their day. She could ensure the safety of her colleagues with less of a black hole in her conscience.
She shifted again, and Black Hayate started to snore.
There was never any rain in the desert. The only water came from below, from the subterranean aquifers the Ishvalans used to water their crops, collected from rivers in mountain valleys, where the world was kinder. Sometimes there was a dew, but it formed sluggishly and burned off fast, quicker than a click of the fingers.
It had been sweltering in the day – a crisp, suffocating heat that burnt the nostrils and raised blisters unless you kept your skin covered – and ice cold in the night. When she wasn't on duty she had shared her tent with a string of fellow female officers. One or two lasted more than a month; the rest she hardly remembered their names, only aspects remained. A lost button here, a photo of a baby back home there. A blur of name tags and different coloured hair…
Their eyes stayed with her, though, mixed in with the faces and backs of necks of an interminable list of targets. Her list. Her sins.
She had slept on the nights when she was so exhausted she could no longer speak, or the rare occasions she stumbled into camp with Maes Hughes and the Colonel – a Major then, and heartbroken by the monster he had been forced to become. They had drowned their sorrows in alchemist moonshine, transmuted on the spot, and pretended for a few short hours that the stain of the souls they were forced to reap would one day fade.
For Hughes, who had spent his war in Intelligence, and had nightmares about the people he couldn't save, rather than the people he had brutally murdered, they did begin to fade. Not enough that he could entirely leave behind the sleepless nights, but enough that he could commit almost his entire soul to his marriage and his daughter. And he'd done it with dreadful enthusiasm.
They had joked, drunk and desperate, that they would wind up in a veterans home together if they survived, old and grumpy and decrepit, ruined like the buildings the young Major immolated. Inevitably, one of them would start singing, dreadfully off-key, and Riza would sit in the ice-cold sand, helpless, until someone came out of their tent and threw a canteen at them, whereupon Hughes would happily stumble off to his tent to spend another night beneath the canvas, and Roy Mustang would collapse into the sand beside her, drunk and unhappy, willing to sleep just about anywhere as long as it wasn't in his tent on the cot opposite Kimblee, who gloried in the death he caused even in his slumber.
On those nights, he would drop his head onto her shoulder and beg her to tell him that he was a good man.
Riza never could answer him because they both knew the answer; there were no good men left in Ishval. Only murderers.
They would sleep then, able to relax their guard when there was nothing left of them to care, and Hughes would shake them awake in the morning, before reveille.
Lying in her bed in Central City, with the rain pouring out of the gutters and making waterfalls on the street, she remembered their faces over the morning fire, the taste of the foul camp coffee in her mouth; the way they tried to cheer each other up with smiles that almost reached their eyes.
It was the same smile the Colonel had been wearing since they'd buried Hughes – tight and insincere. A mask to cover his grief, his exhaustion. It didn't fool Riza, and he knew it, which was why when he fell asleep in the Court Martial office and shaved in the men's room almost every morning, she never commented.
She had never expected to outlive either one.
The rain beat against the window-pane, whispering down the walls outside like stolen memories.
No, there had been no rain in the desert, only tears and blood; smoke and sand, and rotting corpses. Sometimes she dreamed she was still there, adding to the putrid pile; other times she dreamed she was one of the fallen, flies and maggots crawling through her fetid flesh, burrowing down, turning her back to sand.
Worse were the nights when she dreamed of her friends, laughing and joking at the end of her scope.
She shivered, despite the warm night.
At East, they had joked that she kept Colonel Mustang and his men in line with her guns, as if the threat of violence was the only means of persuasion open to a woman who didn't flaunt her sexuality. They were wrong. She never wanted to see one of her boys at the end of a barrel. Ever.
She would die first.
The wind picked up. For a moment the curtains swelled, rising and falling as if they were dancing.
There had been another night, when the troops had been pouring away from the place they had 'pacified', and Riza had barely been able to tear herself away from the city whose inhabitants she had helped a good man immolate. That night had been unnaturally still. Not even a breath of wind to disturb the desert air.
When he'd come to her, miserable but determined to carry out her only request, even the insects were silent, as if they knew something momentous was happening – something dark was being expunged from the world.
She had asked him to scorch her to be free of her father's burden. A tiny moment of selfishness in a lifetime of duty and service, but also because she had earned it, the cost of all those lives she had cut short. It might have been the Colonel's fingers that provided the spark, transforming sand into glass and humans into rancid piles of meat, fit only for the birds, but it was Riza who had put it there. She had unleashed this demon into the world, and she had to ensure it could never happen again.
She didn't remember much of that night, only the searing of her tainted flesh – and the pain.
Years later, drunk and candid again after one too many bad whiskies at a military function, he had told her she hadn't even screamed. The comment had caught her off-guard.
Of course she hadn't screamed. She hadn't deserved that luxury, not after what she had done.
She remembered waking after, lying uncomfortably on her stomach, the unfamiliar pull of wounds across her back, weak with pain. He was still there, sitting on the floor of her rented room, staring blankly into space. Riza had roused herself then, hissing with the agony of trying to raise herself up with fresh wounds, and grasped his hand. The look on his face when his eyes found hers nearly killed her.
She hadn't meant to punish him – at least not consciously. In the years since, when that look crossed his face again, she wondered if that had been her real intent, to blot out her guilt with anger and make him feel the same horror and guilt she did. To make someone else responsible. To make someone else suffer.
Selfish. Uncalled for. Cruel. In that moment she had been all those things.
He knew horror better than anyone. He already thought of himself as a monster. The confident young apprentice her father had taken pains to alienate was gone, and for a moment she feared she had been the one to end him. So she held his hand in the darkness and whispered apologies and forgiveness, and lied about the pain, and told him that a tattoo you'd never asked for was nothing but a scar to begin with.
Somehow, somewhen, in the darkest part of that night she had earned his trust. At the time, she hadn't known what to do with it, but now…
The wind dropped, releasing the curtains again. Riza told herself she really ought to close the window, but a small part of her – the part that loved the rain and hated the shadows – refused.
You're comfortable, it said. Your body needs rest, it said. Stay where you are; stay close to the gun beneath your pillow. It's dark in here.
The room was dark, and the dark used to be restful. Used to be. Before Pride saw her notice him, before the lack of light felt like a death sentence. The imagination is a terrible thing. Tonight, the creature infesting Selim Bradley was present in her mind – not in every shadow, but in any.
The window stayed open.
In the morning she would have to face the Fuhrer. Organise his meetings. Make his tea. Not betray a moment's fear. Her feigned ignorance to his true nature might be the only thing protecting the Colonel – that and whatever place they had for him in their scheme. She could see no other reason for them to keep someone so intent on interfering with their plans alive.
Her team were scattered to the edges of the country now. With Falman in the North, Breada in the West, Fuery to the South and Havoc heading back home to the East when the hospital got his wheelchair sorted out, they were quite literally at the four corners of Amestris. Lord only knew where the Elric brothers were, but knowing them they would be up to their necks in it, wondering how they managed to attract so much trouble.
Mustang was stuck in an empty office in Central Command, isolated and unprotected. Riza thought it was highly likely he wasn't doing any paperwork, not that that mattered now. She imagined him escaping the office at night to pretend to romance one of his aunt's girls, hoping for information or good news, whichever was forthcoming. Eating alone instead of with his men; feigning interest in the newspaper, or in the wives of his superiors.
Getting drunk and buying an entire car-full of flowers.
The corner of her lips turned upwards at that, just for a moment.
Riza was used to the military life, ready to move out at a moment's notice, following her captain wherever he led, but this was different. Pride comes before a fall – and Wrath, it seemed, was more than happy to assist in the descent.
The Colonel had gambled, and this was the price; not an equivalent exchange at all. Rather, a chess match held in balance. They thought they had won, and she knew the rest of the unit were itching to prove them wrong.
Riza hoped they were having better luck sleeping.
She watched the tiny streams of water buckled and break only to join again in another place, and wondered if that was how it would be for their team. Would they succeed? Would the Promised Day bring them success, or only ruin?
Would the man who had stood beside her at her father's grave bring on the new age he had naively dreamed of?
It was useless to speculate. She flung an arm across her eyes, blotting out the rivulets and the darkness that might conceal an immortal foe. They needed better intel, better lines of sight, more allies. Any luck. They needed to have each other at their backs.
She needed sleep, too, but that wasn't going to happen.
Instead, she shifted her pillow. Experience had taught her that her body could rest, even if her mind could not.
So she remembered, and hoped, and listened to the rain.