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Jigsaw Puzzle
"You haven't eaten," she says when she brings him his coffee the next morning. It is not a question. She sees him hunched by the windowsill in the pre-dawn, curtains pushed back, wind coming in through the open pane of glass, rubbing his hands in the half-light as if trying to keep himself warm like one would call forth a fire from flint and tinder.
Mustang's head turns. "Oh...it's you."
"It's me," she says lightly, though she does not feel light. Instead, she feels very heavy, each footfall carrying the weight of the world on her back as she sets the coffee on the table. "How are you doing?"
Mustang shifts slightly at the window, and she can feel that they are very heavy for him also, those colonel bars on his shoulders, though he will never say so. "Surviving," he says with a slight laugh. "Aren't we all?"
The scent of the coffee wafts through the window and she can smell it, the strong, almost pungent odor of a brew which she has carried to him every morning for this year and last year and for more years than almost she can remember. It seems to her that she has been standing here on this spot on the floor in his office for a very long time, watching his back as he stands at the window. She cannot remember having been anywhere else. Perhaps she will remain here forever.
"Thank you," Mustang says, and she starts.
"Sir?"
"We move on," he says over his shoulder, tossing her a tight smile as he picks up the coffee, sniffs it slightly. The wrinkle of his nose and the slight shiver that runs down his body are but two parts of the puzzle of the whole man she has come to know, and she wonders when the puzzle pieces will fall in more than just ones and twos, so she can fit them together neatly and place them in the frame which he has provided. This is her first thought every morning, but her last thought every night is that for a man like him, even the frame does not stay unchanged.
She moves to take up the tray and he looks at her as she picks it up. She feels he is about to say something, but he does not, so she simply says, "He would have told us that it was only a matter of time."
"I know," Mustang says. "But I had hoped to keep him with me for a while longer."
She smiles. "But see, that is the thing. He was a soldier first, and a soldier's work is to die. He wasn't yours, no more than you are mine."
The words fall like drops of silence in an empty room and they stand facing each other, a pair of dancers on the darkened stage of the world. It is with some gravity that she realizes the framework of the world does not stay unchanged, either, and she feels time whirring somewhere above her head, life passing her by in its heady rush. She wonders if he feels it too, as he stands there staring at her, saying nothing. Are there only two people in the room, after all, or are there three - the man and the woman and then the pale, transparent form of the dead man who has done his duty and gone ahead of them both? She waits for the shade to speak, but even if he does so, she has never been able to hear the voices of ghosts.
Mustang takes one step toward her and then stops. "This is good coffee. It tastes different this morning, for some reason."
She opens her mouth to speak, but the trumpet sounds at that moment for reveille, and there is the sound of dogs barking in the yard, windows slamming open and lights appearing in windows. "Thank you, sir," she says instead. "I must go." But she does not go. The spot on the floor seems so very familiar, and there is nowhere else in the world that feels quite like this place, as she watches him tilt the mug back and drain it with a great heaviness, a silhouette against the cloudy morning sky.