Jean and Kain decided to go into town to get some groceries while Roy and the girls got settled into the house.
"This house smells like dust, Daddy," said Maeve, his oldest daughter.
"Mmhmm!" Agreed his younger daughter, Christina. Both girls had their hands gripping onto Roy's pockets as they walked through the living room. Black Hayate snuffled and sneezed as he explored the room.
The girls hadn't let go of their father since they had got into the military van last night. A part of him was glad of it. It kept him grounded to have their hands holding him to the earth. Even if he did have to keep pulling his pants up.
"It's been a long time since anyone lived here," Roy explained to his children in a quiet voice.
Roy looked around the room. The furniture was covered by dust covers, but the shapes still looked familiar. Through the door into the dining room he could see a familiar oval table covered in the same faded tablecloth he remembered being there the last time he had been in the house. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, and as the trio shuffled forward dust came up in clouds around their feet, causing Christina to cough.
Hayate looked up in alarm at the noise and padded over to the trio. The black and white dog loved both girls, and tried as best he could to keep them happy and healthy despite being a dog.
Roy turned and picked Christina up, resting her on his hip and waved dismissively at Hayate to tell him that Christina was alright.
"Do you girls want to choose a bedroom?" Roy asked.
The girls nodded in unison, little smiles creeping onto their faces.
"There are lots to choose from," Roy said, feeling a smile of his own creep onto his face as he led the way, Christina still resting against his hip, down the hallway past the stairs to the bedrooms that may have at one time housed servants. When Roy had been in the house years before, the rightmost bedroom had been Master Hawkeye's study, and Roy suspected that it still contained alchemy texts, so he left that door closed. Opening the other doors revealed three rooms full of dusty boxes lined along the wall opposite the door, and a single dusty bed sat against the wall adjacent to the door. Each room also had a closet that was also full of dusty boxes.
The girls were not impressed by these rooms, so Roy led them up the stairs to the upstairs bedrooms. Roy noticed as he climbed the stairs that a good deal more of them creaked now than had when he had last lived in the house.
The rightmost bedroom upstairs was the master bedroom, and so the door remained closed. The next bedroom stood empty, the bedroom beside that had been Riza's childhood bedroom. Hayate took particular interest in this room, snuffling loudly and sneezing hard as the thick dust clogged his nose. The bedroom sat exactly as it had twenty years earlier, with the exception of a thick layer of dust that covered everything in this room as it had in the previous rooms. A chair still sat beside the bed, with a well-used candle on the bedside table.
Roy grimaced when he saw it, remembering long nights in that chair trying to decipher the secrets of fire alchemy from the tattoo on Riza's back. She obviously hadn't spent many nights in this bed after he had left to go to the war.
The last bedroom at the end of the hall had been his own during his apprenticeship, and the room looked just as he had left it, the bed made neatly and the closet empty save for an extra thick blanket folded on the top shelf.
"Can we share a room, Daddy?" Maeve asked, tugging on Roy's shirt to draw his attention away from his memories.
"Yes, Maeve," Roy said, "Which room would you two like?"
"That one," they girls said in unison, pointing towards the room that had been Riza's in the past.
"Of course," Roy sighed, "It's all yours, girls. We will try to get another bed in there soon."
"It's 'kay, Daddy," Christina said, "We can share."
"Yeah," Maeve agreed.
"Ok," Roy smiled, "You can share for now then. Let's see if we can find something to clean up some of this dust."
By the time that Jean and Kain returned to the house with armloads of groceries, Roy and the girls had found a vacuum cleaner and were attacking the thick layer of dust in the living room, having already cleaned the kitchen and dining room. The girls were both armed with rags and were furiously scrubbing the coffee table while Roy sucked up dust from the floor and furniture. Hayate sat by the couch, supervising the cleaning team.
"Good idea, Chief," Jean said, closing the front door behind him with his foot.
The rest of the evening was spent cleaning up dust, stocking the refrigerator, and finding out what was in the house and what they would have to buy in the next few days.
That night they all retired to their respective rooms, tired from a day of travelling and cleaning. Roy and the girls slept in rooms upstairs, the girls in their chosen room; the one that their mother had grown up in, and Roy in the room he had slept in as an apprentice. Hayate curled up at the foot of Roy's bed. Jean and Kain slept in separate rooms downstairs.
Nobody had touched the room that had once been the study or the boxes that lined the walls in the downstairs rooms.
Roy knew that the first night all alone would be hard. He knew that he was just torturing himself by sleeping in the same room he had slept in as an apprentice. But for some reason he had chosen this room anyway. So far he had managed to hold himself together. He had managed to stem the tears that had been threatening him since he had felt the life drain out of his wife's body. He had held himself together, however numb his body felt doing it, to stay strong for his daughters, to show them that everything would be alright even if he wasn't so sure himself that it would be now that she was gone. But now, lying alone in a bed that was far too familiar, the tears finally came. And when they came, they were anything but silent. They wracked his whole body until his muscles were sore and his tears ran dry and he fell into an uneasy slumber, dreaming of gunshots heard too late and glass shattering, falling around him like the rest of his life.