The Hawk's Eye. The academy sharpshooter. Just a child, really, and yet they brought her to the front lines and there, amidst the piles of bloodied corpses, made her wish that she was anyone but.

The stench of death and the undeniable fact that she, Riza Hawkeye, has caused all this suffering hangs in the air as Riza walks through the above-ground graveyards and wonders how she has sunk this low. Memories flash her back to her conversation with Roy Mustang; as they'd stood over her father's grave he asked her what she would do with her life.

"I haven't decided yet," she'd answered softly. She hadn't had time to think of such things.

He told her he was joining the military, "If I can help strengthen the foundation of this country and protect its people with my hands…that would make me happy."

Happy. An alien feeling—something then she hadn't felt in a long time. But his words had inspired her and she too had eventually joined the military, eager to help her country. To live the dream Mustang had given her.

Look at her now: a lonely soldier with thousands of deaths permanently engraved in her mind, hands stained red with the blood of innocents. The eyes of a murderer. If this is happiness—if this is the dream he'd wanted to live—she doesn't want it.


Sometimes during the war's never-ending months, Riza can't live with herself anymore. She almost fires the revolver that would end her life as it had countless others, but she never pulls that trigger and can't figure out why. God, perhaps? But who is God? There is no god in the war of Ishval. Not anymore.

So she struggles on, her soul torn more each day, her heart breaking piece by piece with every person she fires down. But she continues.

Until the end—the end they'd been waiting for for so long—comes at last.

At the cost of millions of innocent lives and a shattered soul, she thinks sadly, sticking a charred twig in the red dirt heaped over a crudely-made grave.

"Is it for a fallen comrade?" Mustang asks.

"No, sir," she whispers in reply. "It's for an Ishvalan child. His body was abandoned on the side of the road."

A lie. The child had been the last one Riza killed; his eyes—staring at her with so much hatred—will haunt her forever. She cannot blame him.

"Remember their faces. For they will never forget yours," Kimblee said, and he was right: she never will, as she will never forget that this war was pointless. No-one remembers why they fought, can never forget how it ended, with the life of an old man who with a bitter smile said, "I will never forgive you."Last words that will echo in every man and woman's mind. Because they can never forgive themselves.

She will always remember their faces—she could never forget—and when Mustang says, "Let's go home—this war is over," she shakes her head.

"Inside me, the war isn't over yet. No—it will never end as long as I live."

It never did. She can only blame herself—and her naive dream of happiness.