Finding end to beginning.
That is brotherhood.
Remaining back to back through the eye of a hurricane; metal to flesh; guilt to forgiveness- brotherhood.
She's seen an abundance of this in her lifetime, biological and otherwise; the military breeds relationships such as that with an unkind hand- no one wishes to die alone, without family, so the soldiers create one. One made of bullets and sweat, fear and blood.
She does not regret witnessing this.
Yet, in that eerie moment between wakefulness and slumber, the calm before destruction, Riza Hawkeye likes to pretend.
She likes to pretend that days filled with laughing mothers and sisters, the lovechildren of compassion and alchemy, never passed. She likes to see October's bright blue weather overhead as she waltzes with death, and hear her sister's voice.
She likes to pretend that perhaps, had Ashleigh survived, the military would've been something you wept over in the paper before you went about your day, something pressing in the back of your mind you forget to have a semblance of normalcy. She pretends, but does not regret.
That would be to regret the Elric brothers, to regret following an individual that solely can make or break a country into hell, to regret life.
(After all, no one pauses to hate the swell of air in one's lungs, do they?)
Death takes souls from her city, her country; souls she shoots down with suburb accuracy; all the while remembering her sister's spirited blue eyes and the kind smile of a father later to succumb to the seductive call of a lucrative art.
Beside her, Mustang stiffens; she detects his slightest movements (they don't call her Hawkeye in vein, do they) and she turns.
"It's time," he says, and she jerks her head infinitesimally, her mind somewhere in a hazy autumn Shangri-La with another blonde child, riding the shoulders of a giant.
Sisterhood is love, she thinks, watching the world crumble to bits around her and her superior.
Calloused, undying love.