((This chapter is definitely more clear if you read the next, but this one's kind of boring. I'm sorry. I also wrote these chapters at two very different times, but I'm putting them up together to at least minimize the confusion as much as possible.))
A set of footsteps reverberated down the hallway in Central Headquarters. An echo followed. The original footsteps stopped. The echo died. The original footsteps took up their walk again, only to cease when the echo followed.
Anyone would think that a man of Colonel Mustang's reputation would have found some other way to amuse himself other than pacing down an empty hall. It was late at night, and the colonel's date had cancelled. Three days had passed since Lt. Hawkeye's deployment, and Bradley had been sure to keep them away from each other ever since the masquerade. Roy had always hated paperwork- that was a well known fact amongst his motley crew. Paper work serving no purpose other than to specifically keep him busy- that just pissed him off. But the Furher had declared those papers of the utmost significance, and the Flame Alchemist would have lost his job if he had used the forms for fuel.
When Hawkeye had been transferred to Bradley's office, he still feared that should he slack off, she would spontaneously visit and reprimand him, most likely through the use of bullets. But with her officially a few hundred miles away, there was little to no motivation for him to even show up at work. However, her absence also left him without motivation to procrastinate. Without Hawkeye, or any of his team for that matter, he was utterly alone. Fullmetal and Alphonse were even appearing less and less. Seeing his subordinates was probably the main reason they came anyway. Now that they were gone…
But Riza was gone forever. He had gotten the news early that morning. Now he remembered that wave of rage that swept through him, instantly blaming the higher ups for sending her needlessly, for sending any troops at all when that massacre had ended. But it hadn't, not officially. Scar was proof enough of that. But without Hawkeye under his watch, Bradley had pretty much lost his power to Roy. But so had everything else in life. Nothing held the man above ground and not six feet under, save a promise he made to Maes that he wouldn't kill himself. He cursed that promise numerous times.
But now he was resigned. Roy was determined to destroy Wrath and his inhuman brethren, now that they had taken both Maes and Riza from him. But the pangs for revenge were only glancing blows in his heart, and rage had only throbbed for a few hours. Now he was completely numb. The Furher had travelled to the West on business as part of a new campaign to reform trading policies. That left Colonel Mustang, Riza Hawkeye's former commanding officer, to come to Ishbal to make a verified identification of the body. Roy had originally thought, upon first hearing of Riza's death, that she had been intentionally killed off by the homunculi. They had already demonstrated that they had control over Ishbal, and killing off his Lieutenant in an area with such violent and spontaneous uprisings would fall under plausible causes. But it didn't really make any sense. Riza was their hostage. Why kill her off if unless they had something else in store?
This entire time he had kept up walking and stopping and walking again. His military issue boots clicked smartly off the polished stone floor, resonating coldly down the corridor. But to him, the cheerful chipping in of the echo, the shadow of sound, was by far the most amazing thing in the world. It reminded him of times before Riza's transfer, when she would follow close behind him. The echo, if only for a few seconds at a time before it died out, was very real to him.
But to the curious Brosh and concerned Ross, lurking just beyond the sharp curve in the passage about six meters away from his strange pacing, his continuous and seemingly pointless motions were just an antic to annoy the higher-ups. It was something he would do to punish them for keeping him so late with paperwork. Normally, any amount of paperwork would have kept him this late, but even other officers noticed his unusually large workload this past week or so.
Brosh commented on this to Ross, whispering. Roy couldn't hear them, so strained were his ears on his echo. He probably wouldn't have cared if he did. The Colonel was just killing time before his train to Ishbal was scheduled to pull in and board. He hadn't wanted to go home, there were too many memories. He didn't want to tempt himself with death for fear he would break his promise.
So he continued pacing the same stretch of hallway in the almost deserted Central Headquarters, childishly pursuing this faint illusion created by the mere echo of his own footsteps. No matter how much he thought, no matter how much he fought reality, to Brosh and Ross around the corner, he'd still be just a man in an empty hall.