Cavanaugh Park – Something Corporate
You always said destiny would blow me away
The first time he saw her, it was through the window of an unfamiliar car.
She sat on the unfamiliar cement steps of an unfamiliar house that he was supposed to call home although it was still just a house, anyone's house, and certainly not his. She was an unfamiliar figure with blonde hair floating in a cloud around her face, escaping from her braids, clad in a soft purple shirt and worn overalls and bandaids in X's over both her elbows.
Her father was unfamiliar as well, for all that they had spent the past two days travelling together, but to a boy of only thirteen Master Hawkeye's long black coat made him as cold and distant as he had thought these mountains were, as cold and distant as they still seemed to him despite the fact that his feet touched down in them as he stepped out of the car. Her mother was nothing like his own mother, an unfamiliar, pale wisp of a woman in a pale dress with a voice like a whisper and long, thin fingers that seemed almost translucent.
The girl – maybe nine years of age - turned her eyes up at him and the intense stare with which she took in the intruder in her life came as a shock to him, as familiar as his own face because each morning, it was that same expression that greeted him in the mirror.
"Roy, this is my daughter, Riza," Master Hawkeye said in a deep, rough voice, dark like chocolate but not nearly as rich – dark like the distended corners of libraries and dark like a wood paneled study lit with a solitary lamp in the wee hours before dawn.
Roy reflexively held out his hand to shake hers – his own mother had instilled some manners in him, if nothing else – but she just fixed him with that same intense stare, face scrunched into a frown but her eyes holding him motionless, molten brown like honey and cinnamon or good strong tea.
"Riza," her mother warned, her voice faded like the dress she wore, like the knees of Riza's overalls.
After another long moment she took his hand. Her grip was firm and warm, her palm a little sweaty but then again, so was his.
From inside there came a loud wailing noise, a high pitched whistle.
"Oh no, I left the kettle on," her mother said.
Riza jumped up. "I'll get it," she said, and then she vanished inside the house with the screen door slamming behind her with a clack.
With her gone there was silence. Roy retrieved his suitcase from the car, small and brown, holding all his worldly possessions except for his pride, and the memories of his mother and sisters – those he carried inside himself.
"Your room will be upstairs," Master Hawkeye said, but it was his wife who led Roy inside and up the creaking stairs with elegantly carved bannisters to the second floor, and then up past that even to the third floor. It was larger than an attic, divided into three small rooms and a bathroom. One room had been emptied, the boxes from inside piled in the hallway leaving nothing but a desk, a bed and a small chest of drawers.
"We cleaned it out just for you," she said. Her words were quiet and thin, but they were kind, and he was glad of that. He set his suitcase on the bed and looked around at his new house – not home yet, maybe not ever that. Home was his mother, full throated laughs and his sisters, languid and smiling and fussing over him, not this austere, drafty mountain house.
The woman left – he still didn't know her name or what she wanted him to call her – and he folded his few clothes into the chest of drawers and set out the picture of his family on top, taking a moment to drink in their faces from the photograph, hungrily, though it had been less than a whole day since he had seen them.
Behind him a door creaked open.
He spun to find the door across the hall from him had opened and in the doorway stood the girl – Riza, was it?
"I'm Roy," he said, trying to smile, although the expression on his face was more like a grimace than an attempt at friendship.
"I know," she said. "You don't look like much of an alchemist."
He didn't. His hair was fresh cut and his clothes had been pressed the day before, but hours of sitting in a car had wrinkled them and they still didn't disguise his youth, long skinny arms and legs with prominent knees and elbows and a scar on his palm from touching his sisters curling iron when the heat had intrigued him.
"I'm not yet," he said. "Not really."
It was half a lie – he'd shown a gift for it of course, that's why he was here and not safe at home with everyone he loved – but he didn't know anything really, not nearly enough to call himself an alchemist.
She smiled at him then, radiant like sunlight or fire. There was something ineffably solid about her, reassuring, like the sturdy stitches of her worn out clothing or the steadiness of her eyes, neither as dark as her fathers or as pale as her mothers.
"Don't be so nervous," she said.
"I'm not nervous," he lied. She knew it was a lie and just shook her head at him slightly.
"My father is strict, but he's very kind," she said. Her words made the knot of tension in his stomach loosen slightly.
"He seems…" Not quiet, not like her mother, but – "stoic?"
"He doesn't talk much," she said in understanding. "It's usually very quiet around here."
And this time, as she turned away, he wondered if she enjoyed that quiet, and was angry at him for disturbing it, or if she would welcome the company of an equally lonely boy.