who dies
The registry office in Wellesley opens only by appointment—they had no way of knowing, and so wait outside for a nearby shoeshine boy to disappear down the road and then return again with the judge in tow. A chair is brought from the hotel next door, for Riza, and set beneath the narrowing shade of an overhung awning. They are married there, witnessed in the open air by the shoeshine and a passing farmhand dressed primly for church—because in his haste, the judge forgot his keys. Riza is too tired to stand, although she raises her hands to Roy's and manages to speak her vows clearly enough to satisfy.
Roy bends down to kiss her, and her cheeks and chin are coated in a fine sheen of sweat.
Driving to the house in his car is a bizarre experience—the road used to be just wide enough for one horse-cart abreast, but now it's paved smooth. The trees on either side have been trimmed back above solid-cobbled stone walls, and they even pass a pedestrian or two, wielding umbrellas against the reemerged sun.
Riza sees none of it. Fitfully, she sleeps with her coat wedged between the seatback and her tilted head. She'll be cold when she wakes, so he keeps a blanket waiting on the bench between them.
They've already had the furniture delivered, and groceries will arrive on a schedule worked out with the general store in town, and he's arranged to have a local girl come three times a week for cleaning and laundry and sometimes to cook. He's only learned a bit more domesticity during their too-brief engagement, and even if he's terrible as a husband, at least—the thought comes so quick and cutting and he cannot banish such ugliness outright—at least, she won't have long to suffer it.
The hired girl isn't around when they arrive, which he can take as a relief. He gathers Riza from the car and carries her inside to the waiting bed, watching the steps and her face in equal measure.
She won't look like this when she has finally died, but it's too close. The shift from his arms to the bed is boneless and near-silent, as guilt lodges a lump in his throat. He knows, but still he kisses her cheek and her temple and the edge of her hairline, coaxing enough movement from her to calm his racing heart.
"It's alright," he whispers, running his hand through her hair, tucking it behind her ear as she frowns into the pillow. "I'll just be downstairs."
Fresh flowers occupy each room—the girl will be responsible for changing them on every other visit—but otherwise, the space is impersonal. He spent little time in the parlor or the dining room as a boy—both seemingly shut up by cave-ins of boxes and debris, but he knew the kitchen well, and the library and his assigned room upstairs. Nothing remains of what he remembers here: splits in the plaster of every wall have been mudded over and painted, the clutter-occupied floors are swept and varnished to shine. All the furniture is new, from some maker a few stops down the line. The library has lost its shelves. The previous tenants blocked off its fireplace a few years back and used the room as a nursery.
Downstairs, sunlight floods through scrubbed windows, and Roy carries in from the car crate after crate of paintings and photographs that have made the long trip west. They retain only the faintest odor of mildew from their long storage.
The few chances he'd had to visit her up at Briggs and stayed the night, he would wake in her bunk somewhat unnerved by the sheer mass of faces peering down on them. She had festooned each wall with a collage of photographs, in a steady rotation of old and new. The mountain was a lonely place, as she'd written so often, each time imploring him to send pictures of anything resembling home: puddles in the street outside his house, the foggy glint of lamplight above his aunt's new bar, Havoc and Breda's candid grins when caught out on a break.
She almost never sent pictures of herself in return—cameras are contraband in the north, unless personally sanctioned by the führer. Roy has a few of those images, clipped from newspapers, of Riza frowning professionally at Lieutenant General Armstrong's shoulder or blurred in the background, a streak of gray on the endless white. Riza, naturally, hates every one of them.
The paintings require a keener eye. She had only spent a short time curating her collection, venturing out to the markets every Sunday, always seeking the smaller vendors who sold their own wares rather than dealing in reproductions. She favored flowers, still lifes of books and vases, and birds—always in cool colors, composed of pastels or pencils or crayon. Instinct tells him not to arrange by subject or size, but the gradient of hue he creates seems somehow unbalanced. He takes a few canvases down, puts them back up, matches and mismatches.
Only half the crate is empty, and inspiration has failed him. The clean and orderly whiteness of the room is only tarnished by his efforts. Frowning, Roy flicks through what remains unhung. A cityscape, a willow weeping over a stream, a cafe scene—and of course, the portrait.
Grumman had commissioned an oil painting of Riza a year past, which she had gamely sat for—assuming she'd never have to see the monstrosity once completed. It was the perfect mirror of her mother's portrait, similarly commissioned before a sudden elopement, and the old man had once made it the centerpiece of his parlor, surrounded on all sides by hunting trophies and artifacts of battles past.
Perhaps Riza's portrait had been meant as a replacement—the way Roy remembered it, Riza resembled her mother in all but eye color—as the original seemed to have gone missing in Grumman's move from East City to Central Command. But with tears and sniffles of preterm grief, the führer had insisted they take this new portrait with them. It is the only piece Roy brings directly to the cellar, setting it on a shelf just above the floodline and leaving the canvas tightly twine-bound.
It's hard to tell if the cellar's been scrubbed out as much as the rest of the house, although he can clearly see someone's swept the scrolls and rats from the wine racks lining the southern wall. They never bothered to run electricity down here, and he doesn't have an ignition glove—he has to fumble around for the matchbox and nearly burns his fingertips trying to reach the wick of the oil-lamp waiting by the bottom of the stairs. Cobwebs and spirals of dust are illuminated, and not much else.
A few pieces of muslin-shrouded furniture congregate in the corner, and one of them, he thinks, looks just a bit like Master Hawkeye's old table from library. Instead, he finds a stack of crates, all missing nails and lids loose. Mostly it's books and musty curtains, but he finds a few photographs as well. Remnants of prior lives long gone. She won't want any of them, except—
Still pressed into its cardboard envelope, although the studio name has been worn away by time or exposure. He can remember the moment of the flash, and Auntie's hand tightening on his shoulder. Master Hawkeye stands as a solid column of black coat and hunched shoulders, and Riza clutches her bouquet of buttercups to her chest, eyes on some passing cart instead of the camera. A simple thing, posed and preserved in the murky amber of the old water printing.
Why had they taken it? Roy flips the photograph itself as though it might reveal an answer, but there is only a perfectly straight line of pencil letters across the back, carefully recording their names. Perhaps it had been at his own insistence, wanting some permanent record of the beginnings of his life, some proof that he had been a child with dreams and ideals, who'd boldly written a letter to a man he'd never known demanding a place as his apprentice. And Hawkeye had written him back, had agreed on strength of his former friendship with Roy's long-deceased parents, and had brought his little daughter to greet them at the train station with buttercups and an off-balance curtsy.
Roy doesn't touch the paper, wanting to keep the oil of his skin from staining the ink, but he gently trails a finger across their faces. Even if she doesn't want it, he'll keep it somewhere close.
When he finally ascends, Riza has made her way downstairs, appraising his efforts from an old-fashioned lounge set in one corner.
"It's alright," she says, without waiting for his excuses. "A couple of bare spots, but we can fill them."
She wants to be, in her words, properly married—she teases his caution, rightly noting that neither of them are exactly blushing virgins, but still he hesitates. She walks upstairs, strips down, and arrays herself on the bed all under her own power, as if to prove him wrong.
"Why do you think I saved up all my energy today?"
She is beautiful in such exposure. Even if it hovers at the very edge of every thought, he does not see her in these moments as sick or as a woman dying. She is freckled ivory skin and soft breasts, blonde hair spread across the pillow in a blinding corona, deep eyes like forest faun beckoning him down to rest.
Kneeling at the bed's foot, he kisses the inside of her ankle—a ticklish spot that yields from her a quiet bubble of laughter. He undresses out of her reach, following the hum of her pulse, up her calf, her kneecap, the warmth of her thighs, and then sharply around to her hip, outlining the bone just beneath her skin with feathered touches. Her smile is gentle impatience, silent, letting him finish, but she is imploring, as always, for more.
He is grateful for the time they have spent building this intimacy before—when the milky future had seemed so clear in her eyes, when he had dreamt with abandon of every now-impossible branching path. He had, with the balm of passion, soothed the aching loneliness that haunted them both, had taught himself the arc of her spine and the sweet exhalation of her undoing. The rough edges, too, and the moments mismanaged that saw them collapse into laughter on her narrow bunk. He can touch, can love, can embrace with the purity of perfect intentions, can watch the tremble of her lips and press his against her neck, can envelope her whispers with his own, can twist and tug the fraying thread that unravels her and then let himself follow after.
Years later, he will remember this night as the last time they made love, forgetting the few quiet hollows that followed after, each shorter and more awkward and fumbling, as the long line of final days spiraled around him, unbroken.
It is essential to establish a routine—she sets up a study in the old library and chafes at his over-attention, preferring that he should have his calls and his telegrams and his campaign of letters in some other room of the house. Necessity of command does not shutter itself just because he needs a leave of absence, and although he's built a new team worthy of uninhibited trust, Roy is grateful for the distraction. Riza tells him to take the typewriter because she hates the clacking of keys, but he knows the tremble of her fingers has already weakened their dexterity.
He doesn't ask what she spends all day writing—from breakfast to afternoon he can hear the nib scratching across pages, a feverish pace that seems to speed as she begins to slow.
"It's important. Things I've thought about. Things I remember. I had so many ideas for the future of this country, and I'm not going to let them waste with me in the ground."
Roy laughs, dividing lunch between their plates. Downstairs, the hired girl is sweeping.
"You sound like your father."
"Please," Riza says. "He lost his fight and then gave up on the future. He wasn't an anarchist from his deathbed. Just a selfish old man."
A spark flashes through her eyes—a memory? A moment of confusion?
"Oh!" she breathes. "That's a great title for a pamphlet."
They're set at a little table beside her desk, and she leans over, snatching up a pen and a scrap of paper. Anarchist from the deathbed, she writes.
"I'm not publishing that."
"Who says I'm leaving any of this to you?" she retorts lightly, tossing the scrap back onto her pile. She hasn't yet touched her food. "You forget, I've seen your paperwork."
"I can hire an editor."
She smiles, plucking his hand from the tabletop and kissing his knuckles.
"I suppose. I only married you to avoid writing a will."
It's difficult to mark the precise start, but her decline is quick. She used to spend their evenings after dinner reading in the sitting room, but gradually the books disappear and she takes up teaching herself to paint with oils: a small series of canvases depicting flowers in artfully arranged still-lifes, which grow steadily impressionistic, day by day.
He'll find her sometimes midday, studying the photographs arranged through the room with a hard frown creasing her face. When caught, she'll call him in and quiz him on each image—the subjects, the date and location, the precious personal significance of each. He knows why, and plays along with all the greater enthusiasm.
Telegrams begin to pile up unanswered, and he calls the sub-district operator to instruct that only emergency calls are to be forwarded. He finds excuses to sit in the library with her, to bring her tea and rearrange the shawls wrapped around her narrow shoulders.
At night sometimes, she wakes with screaming terrors, certain in such moments that her father will claw his way from the grave to kill them both and eat their bones. She sees specters of old friends and twice begs his indulgence for the poor quality of her paperwork. In moments of lucidity, she mocks her ramblings with cold frustration. Her hands tremble all the more, and she clenches them white against her knees.
She keeps writing. She tears the paper, scratches over, speckles her skin with ink. Some of it, he knows, must be nonsense. But he picks up each scrap, smoothes each balled-up page, and does what few little things he still can for her.
He is adjusting the wireless signal in the library when she drops her pen for the last time, her head shaking and her throat sighing.
"No more," she says, when he offers to transcribe her dictations. She meets his eyes when he kneels into her down-turned gaze, as though surprised the question had had a corporeal source. "It's not all there is to say, but it's enough."
That was a Monday. On Tuesday, she argues with her father about money and then falls silent for two hours, staring through her empty canvas. She jumps at every sound and cries out to him for protection the moments he disappears from her darkening sight.
It is breaking the rules—she had said goodbye in all the ways that she wanted, long before there was such certainty—but he calls mostly on a whim late that night, while writing out a check for the groceries due to arrive tomorrow. The stairs have become a growing vexation, and for the fifth day in a row, Roy has carried Riza up to their bed, ignoring the protests that emptied her wheezing lungs.
Rebecca picks up and calls Jean to the extension before Roy can object. He begs them to bring the dog.
He tries to help—rearranging certain photographs to cluster together, steering conversations over breakfast to East City and to academy days. It's so hard to guess what she will or won't know when they finally arrive. He braids her hair while she ignores the food, and he brings a thicker shawl down, and he begs her not to move from the chair he sets in the sunlight of the sitting room. She holds a book between her fingers and squints at the text.
"Do you have calls?" she asks. "I didn't even hear the telephone."
"No, no calls. They're all leaving me alone now."
"That's right."
Even the softest sigh weighs her so heavily.
"What else have you told me before?"
"Don't worry about it," he says, kissing her cheek. "Just stay."
"Of course," she says, with a wan smile. "I'll be right here."
He can hear the car crunching through the drive's untidy gravel, and he waits just inside the front door, where he can see and be unseen. Hunched together, oblivious, Rebecca holds her face in her hands, shoulders heaving, as Jean rubs small circles on her arms.
As instructed, they have brought nothing but the dog, and he bounds happily through the grass. He must be approaching old age, but he retains the energy of a puppy—tail thumping the ground hard as he comes to sit at Roy's feet.
"Hey, mutt," he says, kneeling to scratch Hayate's ears and the sweet spot on the back of his neck. The collar's new, and now there's an address stamped on the back of the tag. Residence of Havoc and Catalina, if he had to guess.
"Hey, uh—Roy."
Jean frowns. They're all civilians out here, and it feels wrong.
"Hi," Rebecca says, breathy from the recent tears. She lurches forward into a hug—and Roy accepts it, although they've only met a handful of times.
He leads them inside, holding the dog in both arms. Riza hasn't moved, although her hands are twisting in her lap, and her smile on seeing them is lopsided.
"Hello," she says hesitantly, with a look more frightened than friendly.
"Look who's come to visit you," Roy says, as he sets Hayate on the floor. The dog approaches Riza, tail wagging cautiously, before setting his chin on her leg. She places her hand between his ears, tremors hidden now by his fur.
"Hi, Riza," Rebecca says, kneeling to be in her line-of-sight. "I've missed you."
A flash—he will be the only one who knows, but Riza recovers from it enough to keep going.
"I," she says, "missed you, too."
Rebecca nods, joining Riza in gently scratching Hayate's spine.
"It's so nice to see you again."
"It's been a while," Riza says, a question directed at the dog more than the rest of them.
"Yeah, it has."
Jean's hand closes over his shoulder—Roy realizes then that he's retreated to the doorway.
"Let's give them a minute," Jean says quietly.
"There's…"
He blinks.
"Coffee. In the kitchen."
"Sounds great."
Riza does not look up at his exit—she is concentrating only on her current efforts, and there's nowhere in the house they could go that he wouldn't hear her calling, if he were to be needed. Nodding, Roy backs into the hall, leading the way to the kitchen's closed door. Rote memory: he enters, stopping only a half-pace inside, dazed by the effort.
"Why don't you just sit down? I can figure it out, boss."
So he does: pulls a never-used chair from beneath the kitchen table—he'd meant for it to host breakfast, but any meals he didn't bring to her library were always taken in the sitting room, with her photographs—and he drops heavily, as though his knees are only hinges, lacking any backstop. Limp flowers sit in a vase at the center of the table, long past their prime.
He'd told the girl not to come by today. They were having guests. And he'd call when she was needed again.
"So, how are you?"
"I—"
Answer on instinct.
"Fine. I'm fine."
"No offense, but that's horseshit."
He doesn't remember the process being so instantaneous—Jean brings over two cups of burning black coffee, and then he sits in the chair right beside Roy rather than across.
"You look like shit, boss. You lost a bunch of weight."
Jean stirs sugar and cream into his mug, brow raised.
"I eat what she eats," Roy says, "which I guess isn't a lot lately."
Coffee he's always taken just as is—he lacks a reason to swirl a spoon around the bottom and create a natural moment to pause. Instead he stares down into the corrupted liquid mirror, avoiding his own eyes.
"They said that's the first thing. That she'd stop being hungry, stop wanting food, before—"
Before. He feels the breath leave him, raggedly.
"I know it's coming. I mean—I've known. But it's close now. She's right here, and she's… so far away."
Out of sight when she hasn't been, for such a long time, and he can't bring himself to drink, tightening his hands around the cup enough that he wonders why the porcelain won't break. He is half-strength without her, half-sized against the looming of her absence.
"Roy, how are you?" Jean asks again, sincerity slowing each syllable.
"I really don't know."
It's bizarre to be the focus of attention, in this way. He's had confidantes, adjutants, lackeys, even a few hired thugs, but friendship was always difficult to come by. Roy hasn't thought of anyone in particular as an intimate—at least, not since Maes Hughes died, too many years past. Jean is close enough to being a contemporary, even if he was too young by a year to experience Ishval.
And there's something in the look he gives Roy: not pity, not close to understanding, but something akin to authenticity. The memory is buried deep, but they'd once shared an experience unique to all others—the proximity of death, the certainty that they both would be the last person each other saw. In the hospital, there'd been only jokes to mask a careful aversion of eyes, of delving too far into horror and transformation. But sometimes at night, Roy would lie awake and know from the unchanged pattern of breathing to his right that Jean was also lying awake. It was a comfort.
A drop of water appears on the table between his arms—such a strange occurrence, considering the chances of rain indoors.
"I tell myself it's not so bad," Roy says. "She remembers me—I think because I'm here. And even when—when she doesn't know, sometimes she's happy."
He glances up briefly, trying to smile, but Jean is awash in blur.
"She thinks we're just here, and we're happy. I don't want to lie to her, but…"
A shrug.
"It's easier. For me. And because in a minute or two, she won't remember it anyway. Is—is it horrible? That part of me wants it to just be over?"
"No," Jean says quietly. He sets a hand on Roy's arm—warm, gentle, unexpected. "It's shit, boss. Pure shit, watching this kind of thing happen to someone. Let alone the woman you spent your life loving."
"Were we always that transparent?"
"More than you'll ever really know," Jean says with a short, quiet laugh. Roy flattens his fingers on the tabletop. His nails look pitted, bitten down to the quick.
"I'm scared of what happens when it is over. I don't think I know who I am, after this."
"I know I don't have an answer for that," Jean sighs. "But I wish I did."
They leave the coffee in the kitchen—Riza will want none, and Rebecca is occupied with filling the quiet. She has pulled a little pouf up to Riza's chair and leans over the arm, holding both of Riza's hands gently. The dog is curled between them, leaning up against Riza's legs beneath the blanket.
"You're back?" Riza says to Roy. "When did you go?"
She is so small. He's been too close to see it until now.
"It hasn't been long. Are you tired?"
And she smiles, so relieved.
Jean tells him, somewhat pointedly, that they're going to stay the night in the village—after Rebecca is already in the car, door closed, and turned away to hide her face. Roy stands just inside the foyer to watch them go, waving once.
When he returns to the sitting room, Hayate is up, tail wagging gently, as Riza holds his face and runs her fingers down his snout.
"You're beautiful," she says. "I hope I told you that many times."
Roy carries her upstairs, to the bed, as she trails an arm behind, coaxing Hayate to follow. He's slow, but steady for a dog of his age, and he waits patiently for Roy to arrange the blankets before jumping up on the bed, turning his circles, and coming to rest against her feet.
"Do you want anything?" Roy asks.
"Some water," she whispers, turning her head to the pillow, "please."
The house is dim but not dark. The jars of flowers set before each window scatter the light, painting meadows and winding rivers across every room. Motes of dust dance between, illuminating an aisle to the door. The coffee cups still sit untouched in the kitchen, and the lilac here has browned completely. The shriveled little blossoms cloud around the vase, untouched by breeze or sunlight.
When he returns to the bedroom, Riza has turned on her side, faced away from the door. Hayate has moved up as well, curling close to her stretched arms. His eyes are open, and he is watching Riza's face.
Roy does not cross to her side of the bed—he sets the water on his own end table and kneels. He kisses her cheek and her temple and the edge of her hairline—and then lays himself beside her, molds his legs against her legs and stomach against her bent back. He is trembling, he is cold and hollow and he knows knows knows.
Beneath his hand, her heart thrums and skips.
"It's alright," he whispers. "I'll be right here, when you're ready."
