"So, you're awake?" Roy blinked, worked his lips around some foul and unknown taste, his mouth dry and feeling as though he'd spent the entire night chewing cotton.

"Where am I?"

"My house." The old woman, Pinako, was looking down at him. Roy tried to meet her gaze, but the sudden motion of trying to sit set his stomach roiling. That foul taste was suddenly much worse, rushing up his throat and out his mouth and all over his lap, the sheets, the bed. Pinako was cursing in the background, but she didn't move to help him, just let him expel the night's poison.

When there was nothing left to regurgitate and he was just dry heaving, hands braced against bile stained sheets, Pinako watched him from the end of the bed, pipe resting at her closed lips. "I hope you don't plan on making a habit of this."

Roy stared at his hands.

"You won't make it another year, if you keep this up," Pinako continued. "Kind of a waste, wouldn't you say, young man?"

Won't make it another year? That – that was fine. Roy looked up at her, feeling as though he'd been run over by a train and dragged (what was left of him) from the tracks. "I don't plan to trouble you."

"That's not really an answer," Pinako said. "Ah, well. Reckless young people will do as they wish, I suppose." She fumbled through her pockets then, grumbling something about a match, and Roy looked down at his bare hands and thought, I could have done that.

Then again, sifting through the blurred memories of the night before, of his hands and fingers in the face of an innocent bystander – probably it was best that he didn't have his gloves.

Pathetic, that's what it was. Nearly thirty years old, and he was – he was just existing for as long as he had to. Roy would have been happy to be buried next to the rest of his men, next to the fragments of his life Lior had shattered.

"I'll go get you some water," Pinako said, shocking him back to reality. She walked out of the room, leaving only a trail of fresh smoke behind her, and Roy contemplated jumping out the window.

Trying to crawl out of the bed and somehow getting over to the window was too terrible to contemplate, though, in his current state. Roy's stomach made an uneasy liquid sound and the room toppled, spun in his view. He couldn't remember how much time he'd spent drinking, couldn't even picture more than two or three of the glasses he'd emptied, despite knowing there were a great many more in the span of the previous night.

His feet were on the ground and he was facing the window when Pinako returned, glass in hand. The breeze coming in through the window felt good against his feverish skin, quelling the nausea and the sensation of being at once too hot and too cold.

"Going somewhere?" she asked, tone mild, and set the glass down on the bedside table, out of reach to Roy unless he climbed all the way back in bed. Clever shrew.

"Not really," he said, pulling himself back onto the bed, legs swinging straight until he was lying down again, making the act of drinking rather difficult. Water dribbled down his chin and shirt, but it felt so good against his raw throat that before he knew it, the glass was empty and he was still treacherously thirsty. Pinako watched him with sharp eyes and took the glass when it was empty, pretending not to notice the way he stared after it.

"You ought to go bathe," she suggested. "I can get some clothes for you. I'm not sure there's any point in trying to save those." Roy wasn't sure he'd try even if there was a point. The cloth of his shirt was soaked in vomit. The clothes would reek for months no matter what he did.

"Throw them out," he said, still sluggish. "I'll bathe later."

The drink left him feeling better, though he was still craving more water. He felt like he could drink a lake – that same wretched feeling of dehydration, straight out of the desert and his memories like it was a punishment made specifically for him.

Sometimes, Roy wondered if maybe, just maybe, he thought too much of himself.

"You're already miserable," Pinako said sternly. "Don't make it worse. You'll feel well enough to walk after a bath," which was apparently his cue to get the hell out. He must have overstayed his welcome.

"What time is it?"

"Just after eleven," she responded. "You passed out during the drive here last night." She frowned, thinking. "I'm pretty certain that was around midnight. My mind's not what it used to be, though, so there's really no telling."

"I'm sure your mind is fine," Roy reassured, on autopilot. "Women's minds often outstay men's by—"

"Save the charm for someone who cares," she cut him off, blunt. "Bathroom's down the hall. Drop your clothes outside the door, and I'll get them when I come by."

Resisting the urge to yes, ma'amthe woman, Roy tried to stand, unsteady on his legs. The room was still spinning, and every step he took seemed to bring the door further away. His head throbbed in time with the fall of his feet. Roy somehow still managed to stumble out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. When he closed the door behind him, it felt like he'd been running for hours.

Clean but still feeling like he'd gone through the wringer, Roy left Pinako's house. Once home, Roy carried himself up to his bedroom, itching for some sort of action, for something to break the monotony he'd trapped himself in. He ignored the trunk and went straight for the chest of drawers up against the wall, jerking open each drawer until he found the little box he'd left his gloves in. When he went to pull it out, his hand brushed up against something cloth like. Frowning, he pulled out the box and whatever else was in it, drawing out an apron, stained yellow with time and splotched with residue from many a night over the stove.

It was, without a doubt, not his.

The gloves were, though. He dropped the apron on the bed and sat down next to it, pulling his gloves from the box and sliding them on with a practiced ease, the feel of the fabric comfortable, familiar. It had been so long.

He felt the urge to burn something, the habit so long ingrained in him that it left him physically uneasy to have gone so long. Alchemy was what he was, not simply something he did. Roy smoothed his fingers together, listening to the sound of the fabric rubbing against itself. He looked down at the apron. It didn't belong in the house, wasn't his, so why not? Why not get rid of it the best way he could?

Throwing it on the floor, he snapped, a gentle barely-there motion, and watched the thing ignite. Seeing the fire felt like coming home after a long journey. Roy found himself relaxing despite the persistent throbbing in his head, body slumping down the brighter the flame burned. He'd been conditioned for it, and he finally had a reason to be thankful for the fire.

Even after the apron was reduced to bits of charred thread and ashes, Roy found it beyond easy, for the first time in months, to lay back and close his eyes. Sleep seemed so simple.

So really, it made sense that when sleep was finally within his grasp, dreamless and kind, reality would come to tear it away. Though, to be fair, reality seemed a questionable concept to Roy as of late.

There was very little else in the world as disturbing as waking up in one's own home to the sound of a child weeping desolately alongside the firm knowledge that there was no child in the house. Roy lay frozen in bed, eyes clenched shut, and listened to the sound, a pathetic whimpering that, if he were to strain his ears, might contain the shrill crying of a child calling for its mother and knowing there would be no answer.

There was something very wrong with his house.

It didn't make sense, and that was the worst part. The logical part of Roy's mind, the scientist, refused any and all of the theories his overactive imagination supplied. A crying child in a house with no children, a family dead and gone – the first thing he could think of was that his house was haunted, and Roy staunchly refused to believe in something as foolish as ghosts.

The child continued to cry, and Roy stared up at the ceiling, the sheets pulled up to his chin, and waited for the morning light to creep through his bedroom window. Everything would look better in the morning, had to, because Roy honestly hated the thought of how his world could get any worse.

"Some days," Maes said. "Some days I just really wonder what the hell I did."

"Meaning?" Roy didn't take his eyes off the potato he was peeling.

"Meaning I keep getting stuck with a load of shit, and I can't figure out why. I hate this, Roy." Maes sounded tired, defeated. Roy put down the potato.

"It's war," he said. "It's not supposed to be nice."

"I want to go home. I want to see my family. It's been—it's been a year, hasn't it?" Maes asked, awed. "We've been here a whole goddamned year, and nothing's happened. We're going to die here, Roy."

"We're not going to die. We're going to go home, Maes. I promise."

Maes didn't say it at the time, but Roy could see it on his face.

You were never all that great at keeping the promises that mattered.

But he did keep his promise, just not in the way he intended. Roy went out on the battlefield and picked up every single piece of Maes he could find. He made sure they got home.

He'd spent the entire night dreaming about Maes Hughes, and that was never a good thing. Part of him wanted to get up, find a phone that worked and call Gracia, just to hear the woman's voice, to know she was alive and coping.

Roy wouldn't, of course, but in his head, he watched himself do it, and it was more or less the same thing anymore.

He was still in bed and having trouble finding a reason to get up. The noise from the night before was gone, and he'd managed to drift off at some point. The thought of it was still disturbing, though. Perhaps it was just another flashback, he told himself. Certainly, he'd seen plenty of children crying during both wars. The sound of it was the only thing haunting him in this house, that was all.

When he opened his eyes, sure in his conclusion, his stomach twisted into knots at the sight of the wall before him, smooth and even save for a series of random lines running vertically from the where the floor met the wall and upward where he knew the door should have been. His chest heaved, and no matter how fast he breathed, Roy couldn't seem to get enough air. Pushing off the sheets with shaking hands, Roy stood, his head completely clear of the previous day's inebriated fog, now cluttered instead with the heaviest sense of fear.

The door should have been there. It should have. He walked cautiously toward the wall, ran a hand along it, feeling the strange ridges of what could have only been a rushed transmutation.

Somewhere in Resembool, Roy realized, was an alchemist – one who had been in Roy's house while he was sleeping off a hangover, possibly while he'd been stone drunk and vomiting all over himself that very first night. Suddenly, the possibility of being murdered in his sleep was no longer some suicidal fantasy. Roy, for the first time in a long time, could taste that fear, a familiar flavor tinged with the unreasonable desire to live, to survive.

The drive to escape overtaking him, Roy still managed to keep his movements slow and even, listening for any sound that might indicate something that did not belong. Grabbing his gloves off the bedside table (I left my gloves out, they could have come in, they could have taken my gloves—), Roy pulled them on, swallowing against the urge to breathe loudly in his state of panic. If someone was there, they'd know he was awake. He grabbed the bottom of the window and pushed up, deciding the best move would be to simply climb out –

But the window wouldn't open. He stared, dumbfounded, as he realized that the lock at the top of the window, the one he'd never so much as touched, had been melded into the wall, the metal that it had once been made of now nothing more than a strange, solidified puddle holding the window firmly in place.

As he stood in front of what he'd hoped would be his escape from whatever lay beyond the wall that had once been his door, the humming picked up again, the broken tune of a half-remembered lullaby.

Roy's hand was up, fingers moved to slide a spark before his mind could process it.

The old woman's house had to be somewhere down the road, leaving his house (he wasn't thinking about the house) between the town and wherever she lived. Roy was running, couldn't even fathom stopping to breathe, to let air back into his lungs, because there was something in his house, something that didn't belong and that he couldn't get rid of. A person, maybe, and he could still remember his initial fantasy of the family's murderer, if it had been indeed a murder, returning and thinking his job not done. That might not have been such a far-fetched idea after all.

He kept running and running until a house began growing in the distance, taller than his own and significantly closer to the road. Roy slowed to a jog, his earlier panic finally beginning to fade with the sight of some other living person, one he believed to be safe. Sure enough, Pinako was standing on the front porch, puffing on the same pipe as before and watching Roy hurry closer. Her thin, gray brows dipped down, some sort of concerned expression stealing across her wrinkled face before disappearing altogether into something much less personable.

"You'd better not be drunk," she called down from the top of the steps when he stopped just in front of them. "I'm not cleaning up after you again." She was focused on him, though, eyes drawn to the clothes, the very trousers she'd given him the day before. "What's wrong with you?" she asked finally, taking in his disheveled appearance.

"The house," Roy said, trying to slow his breathing to a normal rate. "Tell me about the people who lived there before me."

"You want to know who lived in that house?" Pinako took another puff from her pipe and tapped it out onto the floor of the porch. "I thought you said it didn't matter."

Roy kept his hands in the deep pockets of his pants to hide their shaking. "It doesn't," he lied easily. "But I've been teased with the story enough that it's piqued my curiosity. Can you blame me?" He tacked on a smile, charming as ever. Roy could barely see straight for the lack of sleep, the bags under his eyes too heavy to truly keep his vision focused. Even without drinking, he was a mess. Sobriety was hardly worth the effort, but –

He had to know.

"I reckon I can blame you for a lot of things," the old woman said, tone dry as the day they'd met. "But in town, everyone knows the story. I'm shocked you haven't heard it by now."

She was lying, of course. Pinako was completely aware of how he spent most of his days, having saved him from himself once already. Roy resisted the inappropriate and nonsensical urge to pull rank on her. "You live the closest," Roy offered. "Wouldn't you know best?"

Pinako tapped the rest of her pipe out scant centimeters from Roy's boot and turned away. "I don't have time to deal with you right now," she said. Roy could see the tense set of her jaw, the lines fanning from her eyes deepening into a frown.

Roy took a step backward. "Maybe some other time, then," he said. If he pushed her, she would shut him out completely. Patience was a lesson one learned early in the military. She didn't speak to him as he walked down the dusty path from her house, slumped, hands burrowed in his pockets and face tilted downward against the chilly wind. Roy wasn't surprised she turned him down, and in a way, it strengthened his resolve. There was something important about the house, about what happened in it. He would find out, given enough time.

But perhaps, it was time to try a different channel.

He hadn't been into the town since the night at the bar. He barely remembered it, had been too far gone to really even know where he was or what he'd been doing, but the townspeople, he found, weren't so quick to forget.

How most of them even knew was beyond him, but they clearly all did. The moment he set foot in the town, still in the same ragged clothes and fresh off a nearly half-hour walk, a woman sweeping the walkway in front of a nearby shop scowled and turned her back on him. When he walked by her, she swept the broom in a way that sent dirt and bits of street trash at him.

So much for small town hospitality. Roy scowled at the woman and kept walking.

There was an aloof air about the town that day, at least where Roy was considered. He skulked around until the sun began sagging against the horizon, and the men of the town were out in the streets, children running through the steadily gathering night crowds to their homes.

None of them looked pleased to see Roy, either.

"You're not allowed," an older man said as he passed by.

Roy stopped, raising a brow. "Allowed?" The air was beginning to chill the darker the sky became, and he found himself wishing he'd had the presence of mind to grab a jacket before – before he'd left.

"In the bar," the man clarified, pulling a small square box from the breast pocket of his blazer, tapping a cigarette out. He waved the box at Roy, who quickly declined, his throat still raw from his last night on the town. "You made a ruckus. They don't like things like that, not around here."

Roy could hardly blame them. "I see," he said slowly. "Thank you."

"Now just a minute," the man said as Roy began to turn away. "We can talk a minute, can't we? Just two soldiers?"

"A soldier?" Roy echoed. "I'll have that cigarette now."

The old man laughed and tapped out another thin stick, passing it to Roy between two fingers. "You're an easy face to recognize," the man said. "Sanders," he introduced himself. "Second Lieutenant, stationed in North." He watched Roy brace the cigarette between his lips, holding a hand out for a lighter. "From what I hear," Sanders continued, "you don't need a light."

"I suppose that's true." Roy looked down at the gloves on his hands, grimacing. "If you don't mind, though…"

Sanders laughed, an unpleasant sound, as he flicked his lighter, holding it steady until smoke spiraled from the end of Roy's cigarette. "How was it?"

A slow inhale, exhale, then, "How was what?"

"Your war," Sanders said. "I was there the other night. I know a war when I see one."

"Ishbal," Roy said, speaking the word like scraping the scab off an unready wound. It was answer enough.

A knowing nod, then Sanders offered, "Drachma—near the border anyway. I spent three goddamn years up there, killing off those northern apes."

"And then?" Roy asked. "Then what did you do?"

"Got a train ticket," Sanders said solemnly. For the first time in a long time, Roy felt a sense of brotherhood. Another soldier, a different war – but the same view.

"Resembool's nice," Roy said, for lack of anything better.

"Sometimes," the older man agreed as he tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette, a hot clump dropping onto his work-worn boot. "So you're living here."

Opportunity was often subtle, requiring a sharp eye and a sharper mind to catch it before its door closed. Roy could at least consider himself fortunate this time. "In the house on the hill," he said, exhaling a smooth stream of smoke.

"On the hill? You mean the Elric house?" Sanders looked skeptical. "The hell'd you want to move therefor?"

A spark of excitement lit in Roy's gut. "I wasn't aware of the murders at the time," he said. "And no one's been very forthcoming about it, as I'm sure you can imagine." He let the thought hang and saw a flash of something in the old man's eyes.

"People in this town protect their own," Sanders said. "But it's your house. You bought it? S'paid for and all?"

"It was paid for before I ever arrived." Roy paused thoughtfully. "They were the Elrics, then?"

Sanders nodded, looking less and less at ease by the moment. He kept flicking the end of his cigarette, unaware that the middle of it had broken, the dried tobacco spilling out of the small break. "Two boys and their mom. Trisha was a nice lady."

Interesting. "No father?"

"A deserter," Sanders grunted. "He wasn't around much before, either. Never bothered with anyone in town." A thoughtful pause. "I take that back. He got on pretty good with Pinako, you know, up at the automail shop."

Roy had suspected the old woman knew more than she was willing to tell him. "Where are the boys now?"

"Well, as far as I know," Sanders looked distinctly uncomfortable, "only the one boy is still alive. The younger one, Al. His older brother's dead, a few years now."

"How did they all die?" It was the question he'd wanted an answer to for some time. Roy was quite certain there was something in the family's history that would help him.

"Trisha died in the epidemic that went through a few years back," Sanders began, "and Ed, well…"

"Well?"

"I don't think anyone actually knows what happened. I hear it was bad though, real violent. That's why his brother left." He snorted. "Or so the rumor goes."

A violent death. "In the house?" Roy asked casually. Sanders gave him an odd look.

"Maybe?" the older man hazarded. "Like I said, it's not something anyone around here really knows too well. Except the other boy, I guess. Maybe Pinako."

"Do you suppose," Roy was walking on thin ice even bothering to ask, "that the boy was murdered?"

Sanders' brow furrowed, tugging down with the corners of his mouth. "By who? No one comes through here, not really. The last person who came through here before you was the boys' father, Hohenheim."

Roy froze. "Hohenheim? The alchemist?"

"That'd be the one," Sanders confirmed, the nonchalant tone of his voice enough to tell Roy that he had no idea who Hohenheim really was. "Guess living here wasn't interesting enough for a worldly guy like that."

A thrill of fear trickled down Roy's spine like icy water. Hohenheim, the man the military had been searching for? The documents he'd come across on the man dated back at least fifty years. A supposedly dangerous man, coming through this town, disappearing – and then his own son dying a mysterious and violent death?

It couldn't be. Roy refused to believe Hohenheim had anything to do with this. Because really, if he did…

"What's the matter with you?" Sanders frowned at him.

Roy dropped the burnt-down cigarette, stamping it out with the toe of his boot. "Nothing."

If Hohenheim was involved, Roy was in a great deal more trouble than he'd thought.