AN: The Royai and Elric brothers family is near and dear to my heart, and while I've seen a good few parental Roy and Ed fics out there, I haven't seen a lot of Riza and Al. So here I am trying to contribute to the pile!

Outside the window, stars silently glimmer far above in the inky midnight sky, lightly streaked with wisps of thin clouds that glowed a dim silver in the moonlight. Barely any cars travel the streets at this late hour, lending the tall buildings that stretch upwards, reaching for the sky, a quality of serene stillness, broken only by the occasional shooting star arcing across overhead. There's a meteor shower tonight, and it is rather beautiful.

Precisely none of this is on the mind of Riza Hawkeye at the moment. There are more important things to be concerned with, things that need to get done. There are always more important things, no matter how nice the sky looks.

She sighs shortly, brushing her hair out of her eyes with an impatient hand before surveying her handiwork with a slight nod. For once, the Colonel's desk is visible, not covered in stacks of paperwork he has yet to finish going through—everyone agreed to pitch in and help get it all done this week, even Mustang himself. Maybe it was just that they were all sick of seeing so much work, or maybe it was that tensions in Central keep rising and all of them wanted to make sure they were as free as possible to deal with any situations that might arise; whatever the reason, with the last few pages filed away now, it's done. She can go home and get a bit of sleep before showing up in the morning.

Glancing at the clock, she finds that it's nearly three in the morning. Fabulous, that means all of three or four hours of sleep, depending on how long it takes to get home.

She pushes herself to her feet with a weary sigh—that's allowed because no one is around, or else she'd never let herself show any sign of weakness—and leaves the Colonel's personal office, turning around to lock the door behind her as she steps into the main office, which is empty and dark. Which ... makes sense, given the current hour. It's time to be done with today.

"Lieutenant Hawkeye?"

The unexpected voice startles Riza's hand into leaping for the pistol at her hip, her feet automatically squaring into a firing stance, before her tired mind catches up to her instincts and says no, stupid, that's Alphonse Elric, and firing at him wouldn't do anything for you even if he was an enemy.

"Alphonse," she greets, dropping her hand back to her side and looking around the room until she spots a familiar suit of armor by the window, painted a faint silver by the moonlight. "What are you doing here so late?"

"Oh," the boy sounds almost sheepish, "just going through the reports the Colonel gave Brother to read before we head out again. He never reads them closely, so I figured I might as well..."

She should have guessed it was something to do with taking care of Edward. With Alphonse, it's always something to do with taking care of Edward.

"Not a bad idea," she agrees. Then, looking at him again, she asks, "Do you need more light? We could turn on some of the lamps if that would make it easier."

"Mm..." he looks around as if only just now noticing the darkness. Riza wonders what it's like not having eyes that need to adjust to every shift of the light. "No, I'm alright, I won't bother you for that," he finally decides. "I like the moonlight. Plus, it's not exactly like this is straining my eyes, so you don't need to worry."

That statement gives her pause—it isn't that she was worried about his eyes, really. But for a fourteen-year-old boy to stay up countless nights to take care of things for his brother... that's something that does worry her, at least a little. She's had plenty of conversations with the Colonel about how the two of them are just children.

It also makes her feel impossibly sad in that moment, because his first concern was whether she was worried for him. Why does this boy put everyone before himself?

(She knows why other people do it, people like herself and her Colonel—and that's because hell doesn't leave you unchanged when you go through it. She knows that Alphonse and his brother have been through their own hell, too. If anything, that explanation makes her sadder.)

(Children should not have to go through hell. She wishes she could help him; this kind of existence is so terribly lonely.)

"It wouldn't be much of a bother," she says softly, making a spontaneous decision right then and there. She can try to help, at least; there's always more work to be done, and three hours of sleep wouldn't have been much anyway. She resolves to put on some coffee. "Wouldn't that make it easier for you?"

"I—well, yes, but I wouldn't want to run the electricity bill for the office up by having the lights on for hours at night!" Alphonse says, surprised. "You don't have to trouble yourself with that, Lieutenant, it's so late! You should get some sleep."

Riza chuckles softly. "We're a government office, so it doesn't come out of any of our paychecks. And besides, I have work to finish," she tells the boy, stepping forward until she finds her desk and her fumbling fingers manage to flip the switch on the lamp. Immediately, the room is flooded with a soft golden glow that only increases as she turns on first Havoc's lamp, then Fuery's, Breda's, and Falman's. That's gotten her across the room, next to Alphonse, and she stops to look at him more closely.

He's sitting with his knees tucked to his chest, as if he's trying to make himself smaller while reading the reports. The moonlight seems dimmer now that the lamps are on, but now the pages in neat stacks on the floor are more well-lit.

The helmet tilts up and those two twin points of reddish light glow warmly up at her. "Um, thank you, Lieutenant Hawkeye," he says.

"You're welcome," she answers, about to turn and find another stack of papers or something to work on as an excuse to stay in the office, but then something in her tells her to linger, so she does. "How long have you been reading?"

"Since Brother went to sleep. I came back to pick up the reports and Lieutenant Havoc was still here, so I sat with him until he went home." Alphonse answers. "That was around eleven, so ... hm, what time is it?"

"About three."

"So four hours," he nods. "I'm almost done."

"Surely the briefing reports weren't long enough that they took you four hours to read," Riza balks, surprised. The things are called "briefings", after all; they normally take maybe an hour or two, tops, to completely go over.

"Oh, no, they aren't!" If Alphonse had a face, she's pretty sure it would have just turned pink. He shakes his head quickly, holding his hands up and waving them about as if he can physically dispel that notion. "I read them and got some further reading from the library and the general information files. I thought it couldn't hurt to know as much as I can about where we're going, so if I have to get Brother out of any bad spots, I'll have some idea of what I'm doing."

Part of Riza's mind wants to say if you have to get Edward out of a tight spot? More like "when" you have to. However, this is the part of her mind that's spent far too long around Roy Mustang, and she promptly quashes that idea. "Is this what you do every time he gets a new mission?"

"More or less," Al shrugs slightly. "Brother doesn't always think before he acts, so I try to."

A sad smile has found its way onto her face. "Edward is lucky to have a brother as devoted as you," she tells him. He loves and looks out for his brother in much the same way as she does Roy. It's kind of funny, really, how similar her Colonel and Edward are—both impetuous, stubborn, scarred, and full of noble idealism under all the layers of everything else. For a moment, she wonders if she could see herself in Alphonse, too.

She shakes off that thought. It's too late to go down the route of self-pondering; if she does that late at night, she sees faces of innocents that haunt her from years upon years ago. They have never stopped being imprinted upon her mind.

"I guess," Alphonse says, breaking the short silence. "I just want him to be okay, that's all. And to get him back to normal as soon as possible. I mean, I can't feel anything, so I don't hurt, but his automail hurts him a lot. I just want him to be okay."

I can't feel anything.

A slight shiver runs down Riza's spine. An inability to feel anything, from the soreness of the neck after sitting on the floor crouched over papers for hours to the comforting touch of a hand, seems like a hard existence indeed. "What about you?" she asks. "Are you okay?"

Alphonse hesitates. That's answer enough.

"I'm fine," he says, as if she'll believe that. She almost wants to snort—she's been dealing with Roy Mustang for entirely too long to buy that lie. "Really. I, um, don't want to be getting in the way of your work..."

"You aren't," she says simply. "How have you been doing lately, Alphonse?"

"Fine," he says quickly. Too quickly. "I mean, that's all I can be, right?" The laugh that follows those words is too chirpy to be anything but forced; Riza presses her lips together slightly in disapproval.

"In a sense, yes," she replies, "because your body can't be hurt. But that isn't all there is to being fine."

Alphonse is silent for a second, lowering his gaze. "I can't be anything but fine," he repeats, but it sounds like he means something different this time. This time, it sounds like he's trying to convince himself. "Brother needs me to be okay, so I have to be."

"That doesn't seem fair," Riza says. "He's not always okay, and you're allowed to not be okay, too."

"It'll make him feel bad," the boy objects, shaking his head. "He always feels bad for me being like this, even though he's hurting too. He doesn't care about himself enough."

If there was any doubt the two of you are related, it's certainly gone now. Riza looks at him sympathetically for a moment. "Maybe you should set an example of that for him. Caring about yourself can be hard."

Alphonse doesn't answer that with anything more than a shrug. He fiddles with a paper on top of one of the stacks, sort of helplessly staring at it and laying it back down again. Riza considers him carefully for a few seconds, pondering which words to say next. He's obviously upset about something, but getting him to admit that...

"There are many ways you can be fine and yet not be fine," she finally settles on. "Your body is one thing. You can be in perfectly good health physically, but your mind might be tormented, by the past or present or even future." She leaves off the way she speaks from personal experience, the way that sometimes when she closes her eyes at night she still sees red-eyed children, hears them screaming. They don't need to go there. "So, are you alright?"

There's another pause. Riza gets the feeling that if he had had lungs, he'd have taken a deep breath, to buy some time and to steady his thoughts, in that moment.

"I... I don't know."

They say that sensory deprivation is one of the more psychologically damaging forms of torture out there, she almost says, but doesn't, because on the off chance the boy hasn't thought of his armor in that way, she doesn't want to be the one to plant such a thought in his head. "What do you mean by that?" she asks instead, leaning against the edge of Falman's desk.

"If you had asked me that in the morning," he says thoughtfully, "I would have said that I'm fine, and I would have meant it, too. But at night..." he shrugs slightly again, helpless. "I don't like it at night."

"Why not?" she asks quietly.

"It's too quiet," and there it is, the barest edge of despair in his voice. "It's too dark and too quiet and I can't sleep, so I just sit there and think. Sometimes I want to cry, but I can't do that, either. It's just... so lonely." He pauses, shifts and fidgets with the leather on his gauntleted hands. "... Don't tell Brother that, please," he begs. "He'll want to try and stay up all night with me, but he can't do that. He needs to rest."

"I won't tell him," Riza promises solemnly, even as his words make her silently reaffirm her conviction to just stay here in the office for the rest of the night.

"Thank you," he says gratefully. He hesitates just long enough for Riza to wonder if he's done talking, and then adds quietly, "He blames himself for this. Too much."

"I know," she tells him, a hint of a sad smile flickering across her face. "All of us can see that he thinks it's all his fault. It's a heavy burden for anyone to bear."

"It isn't his fault, though!" Alphonse bursts out, clenching his fists in hopeless frustration. "I can tell him that I made the choice to do it just the same as him until I'm blue in—I mean, until the world ends, but he won't hear me. He feels so guilty and I don't know what to do with him sometimes because if I'd just stopped him back then, he wouldn't be suffering now, and now I can't even feel it if I hold his hand—" he cuts himself off, a catch in his voice, made of tears that won't fall. It's horrible to know that a child is crying but can't even get the small relief of getting tears out, Riza thinks.

She opens her mouth to say something and is confronted by the reality that it's three in the morning, she's exhausted, and she doesn't know what to tell him. It's not his fault either, but how many times has he heard the words it's not your fault thrown emptily at him like a bandage to patch over a gunshot?

"I—I'm sorry," Alphonse says unsteadily. "That's not really your problem. I was just... sorry, I shouldn't babble about pointless things."

That's clearly an invitation for her to politely leave the conversation and get her work done, an invitation to leave him to stew in abject misery, alone.

Well, Riza declines.

"It's not pointless babble," she says, folding her arms and letting the desk take a bit more of her weight. "Tell me what you're thinking." It's a request, not a command, and she softens her voice accordingly.

Alphonse hesitates a long moment. "I... I think I'm tired," he says uncertainly. "I don't know for sure, though. It's like an old habit that won't quite go away, but I don't know what to do when I'm tired because I can't sleep."

She almost says something along the lines of I'm sorry, that must be rough, but stops herself. A mild-mannered ray of sunshine compared to his brother he might be, but that doesn't mean he isn't an Elric, and in her experience Elrics are terrible at accepting sympathy if there is any chance they can misconstrue it as pity. Instead, she tries to think of what she does when she can't sleep.

Hayate helps on her sleepless nights, always warm and comforting and loving. And Edward has complained many times of the way Al always stops to help stray cats and dogs, so he must like animals... Next time the boys are in town, she'll have to remember to bring Hayate to the office.

"And also," Alphonse continues softly, "I don't know if I'm tired. I don't really remember what it feels like. Or what anything feels like."

If suits of armor could look tortured, Alphonse would be the most utterly tormented one on the planet.

"I can't even remember what it feels like to touch my brother," he says, his voice a dull, miserable whisper. "He always tells me I'm still human, but when I can't even remember something as simple as that... I'm not so sure."

Sensory deprivation torture usually involves lack of hearing and sight. It's a lot harder to remove the sensation of touch, or of taste, or of smell—if one can't smell anything, it's usually not much cause for panic. But Alphonse has a unique prison; he can't smell, taste, or touch. He can see, and he can hear, but nothing else.

Riza feels that immeasurable sadness again as she looks at the boy in front of her. His world is ... a truly lonely one.

"You are human," she affirms, for whatever it's worth. "You're just ... a human in a different, very difficult situation."

The laugh he lets out sounds very bleak indeed. "I don't know if I am, though. For all I know, I'll be like this forever. Brother will never give up on the Stone because it's all we have now, but..." He trails off, doesn't finish, looks away, back to the papers front of him. He doesn't need to; she knows what he would have said. I'm starting to doubt. It's a thought he'd never voice or even think in the morning, but the stillness and silence and loneliness between dusk and dawn has a way of bringing out the worst of everyone's insecurites.

She almost wants to go to him, to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him it'll be okay. She doesn't, for many reasons. Firstly, there would be no point—he wouldn't feel it. He'd only notice even more poignantly his lack of ability to feel. Secondly, she doesn't want to lie to him, and "it'll be okay" is possibly the world's most common lie.

"I'm not fond of the middle of the night either," she says instead, pushing away from Falman's desk to walk to the side table where the coffeepot is. As she puts some on to boil, she glances at Alphonse. "It often leaves me thinking about Ishval."

"And then what?" he asks, sounding like a small child desperately clutching at hope for a happy ending to a story. "Do you do something to stop thinking?"

"I don't know if I will ever stop thinking," she shakes her head, feeling a pang as the hope vanishes from his posture.

"Oh," he says. Silence falls again, punctuated only by the bubbling of boiling water.

"Some things can help," she says thoughtfully, trying to find anything to tell him that could. "Sometimes I take a walk. Or read a book." The water is done boiling. She lets it brew now.

"A story might be nice," Alphonse says quietly. "But last time I read one, I couldn't get into it. They kept saying things like 'the cloth felt softer than silk' or 'there was a smell of apples' or 'the weather was very snowy and cold', and I don't really remember any of that. I didn't know what it was talking about."

"Oh," Riza says quietly. She doesn't know how to reply to that, not really, and busies herself with getting a mug.

"It's strange," he continues, almost as if he didn't notice her lack of response. "I know that Brother always used to smell like the honeysuckle soap our mom had, and a little bit of dust from all the books, but I don't remember what honeysuckle or dust smells like. Winry once told me honeysuckle smells sweet, but I don't remember what 'sweet' is, either."

She's never been that good with words. There's no way she can think of to describe what "sweet" is. How ironic, she thinks as she spoons a bit of sugar into her coffee. Normally she drinks it black, but right now it's late enough that she knows she'll be having more in a little while anyway, so she may as well add cream, too.

"Lieutenant Hawkeye?" Now there's more than a hint of hesitation in his voice. Riza looks at him and raises an eyebrow slightly.

"Yes?"

"Can... can I tell you something? —And you can't tell my brother, whatever you do!"

"Of course," she says, wondering if this is another thing that would make Edward feel guilty. Alphonse stares at the ground for a long moment, as if weighing words in his mind. Finally, he looks up.

"I actually ... I hate being stuck in here," he says quietly, despairing. "I don't feel real. I feel like I don't belong in the same world as everyone else, where you're all normal and I'm not. I feel like I'm broken and I'm just clinging on and pretending I'm the same as you. It feels like... sometimes, it feels like it would be better if Brother hadn't brought me back."

Silence falls like a stone.

Of all the things he could have said, that was the one Riza had been desperately hoping it wouldn't be. She wishes she could say she's shocked by the revelation that sometimes, he wants to die, but all it does is make her even sadder on this poor child's behalf.

Taking her coffee in hand, she walks back to him, sitting down on the floor on the other side of the stacks of papers. "You're not going to do anything to yourself, are you?" she asks him. If he hesitates, she'll have to tell Roy. They can't let that happen.

But to her relief he immediately shakes his head vehemently. "No! I would never do that to Ed. After... after Scar almost killed him, I made him promise that he wouldn't go get himself killed and leave me alone. I couldn't do turn around and do the same thing to him."

"Good," she says, blowing on the steaming mug. Then she looks at him again, considering her words; if there was ever any doubt that he was miserable in that suit of armor, it definitely is gone now. "You know... they say that sensory deprivation torture is one of the worst methods of psychological torture that exists."

Alphonse goes very, very still. He's not stupid—he's just as brilliant as his brother, even if he stays in Edward's shadow most of the time—and he can easily put together what she's implying about his existence. "...oh?" he finally breathes, timid, unsure, afraid, and yet almost relieved to hear that his misery makes sense.

"After even just a few days it can break a man's mind and spirit," she continues, taking an experimental sip to gauge the temperature of her coffee. It's just shy of scalding, so she takes a bigger gulp. "Most of the time, people have their sight and sometimes hearing taken away. Living in the uncertainty with their minds trying to fill the gap of what's missing... it hurts people badly."

He looks away. Riza reaches out and places her hand on the side of his helmet—of his head, and guides his gaze back around, so he can see her, and looks steadily into the flickering soul-light in his eyes.

"You're doing fine, Alphonse. Better than fine," she says gently. "And it's understandable that you're upset about things."

The cool metal under her fingers trembles, and she hears a strangled sob in his voice, like earlier but even closer to crying. "Thank you, Lieutenant Hawkeye," he chokes out, and she feels her heart twisting.

"Riza," she says suddenly.

"W—what?"

"Call me Riza," she gives him a slight smile, removing her hand from his cheek to sit back on her heels and take another gulp of coffee. "Your friend Winry does, too, don't worry."

"Oh," he says. "Okay. Riza."

They sit quietly for a few minutes after that, Riza sipping her coffee as Alphonse shuffles through the last of his papers. After she drains the dregs of the cup, feeling a bit more awake now, she pushes herself to her feet and leaves to wash the mug. When it's placed on the stand to dry, she sits back at her desk and pulls out a notebook, pretending to read. She's up to date on work; she needs to sit and think now.

Despite his appearance, Alphonse is, ironically, the less noticeable of the Elric brothers, especially once one gets to know them. Edward is the loud one, brash and fiery and bold. He's always in headlines and he's always the name on everybody's lips—did you hear Ed and Mustang yelling today, or I wonder what Fullmetal got up to on the latest trip. It's almost never Al.

She briefly toys with the question of whether Al might resent his brother for that, but almost immediately discards it. Alphonse is too devoted and loving to harbor resentment towards Edward.

It's just so much easier to only notice Edward's problems. In fact, without an impromptu late night meeting like this, she doesn't know that she'd have even asked Alphonse if he was alright to begin with. And while he wouldn't have done anything about the thoughts stewing in his mind, he'd definitely be miserable. He still is miserable, honestly. She hopes that admitting it helped, at least.

Her thoughts drift back to what he'd been saying earlier, about how he can't remember tastes and smells and feelings. Everything related to those senses is lost to him, it seems.

For a moment, Riza tries to imagine what that would be like, to only see and hear. To effectively be numb in her entire body, perpetually, to lack all sensation and to see the world like a series of moving pictures only. To not be able to fully interact with anyone and partake of anything, to only exist as an observer, to have no idea what half of the common sayings and thoughts people express mean.

She thinks it might drive her mad.

It makes her wonder, what in the world can she do to make that easier for Alphonse? He's just a child, suffering so acutely. Surely there's something she can do. Now if only she could think of it...

He can't feel. Of the five senses, he only has sight and hearing.

Well, she supposes, if you have a blind person, you doesn't comfort them by showing them things they can't see, no matter how much they want to. Instead, if you have a blind person in need of comfort, you cater to the senses they do have. So... she should figure out something that he can see, or that he can hear, and avoid things involving touch, smell, and taste. Perhaps it's a matter of teaching him how to function in the new body without always comparing it to the old; maybe, given enough time, he could start describing Edward in terms of "he looks like spun gold and cherries", instead of "he smells like honeysuckle and dust".

Lifting her head from the notebook, she glances back across the room to Alphonse's corner, only to find him watching her.

"Did you need something?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.

"You haven't turned a page in that book in the last ten minutes," he says. There's an unspoken question in his voice—are you thinking about what I said?

Riza, for her part, is mildly impressed by his observational skills. "No, I haven't," she agrees. Most people would overlook that kind of detail, especially at three in the morning. Then again, with nothing to do but watch the world and be on the lookout for threats to his brother for hours and hours at nights, Alphonse must be rather observant.

"Mm..." The boy sighs, looking away back out the window distantly. "I'm sorry if I got in the way of your work, Lieu—Riza."

"You didn't," she immediately assures him. "I'm up to date on all of it, anyway. Don't worry."

He's quiet for a moment, and Riza is left to observe the incongruous sight of a hulking suit of armor curled up on the floor like a vulnerable child, painted gold and silver by lamplight and moonlight. In between there's just shadows, cold blue shadows that are punctuated by the soft red behind his eyes.

"There's shooting stars out there," Alphonse breaks the silence again, his voice tinged with wonder and wistfulness. "We used to watch them with our mom. She always said if you and someone who loves you wish on the same star, it means your wish will definitely come true. Brother always said that was stupid," he adds with a little laugh.

Riza, meanwhile, is suddenly hit by an idea like a brick to the head. She sits for a moment and scrutinizes it in her head, making sure it's not too good to be true, but it seems like it will work.

Watching a meteor shower is watching, not smelling or tasting or touching.

She pushes away from her desk and stands again, walking over towards him but stopping halfway, near the door. "Come on," she says calmly, holding out one hand to beckon him over.

Obediently Alphonse stands, armor clanking as he drifts toward her with a backward glance to the stacks of files he's leaving behind. "Where are we going?" he asks.

"To the roof," she answers, looking up at him with a hint of fondness. "I have to make sure we wish on the same star."

He stops and looks at her with a little gasp, and she knows that oh, if armor could smile, he'd have been beaming brighter than every star in the night sky.