This chapter made me a bit emotional. I also had a heck of a time trying to get this uploaded.
"Where have you been all day?" the elder Hawkeye demanded out of his daughter.
Riza stood there, tears coming to her eyes as she stared at his feet, unable to look at her father in the face. "I'm sorry…" she choked out.
He frowned in disappointment, "Riza, you know you aren't suppose to leave the house."
She looked up at him. Never before had she questioned it, but now that she had seen the world she couldn't understand why. The girl was raised to believe that the world only extended as far as her front yard. There was nothing past it, no world that extended outwards. Why did her father do that to her? She didn't understand it at all. It wasn't bad, it wasn't scary. What was he keeping from her? Riza wanted to question his motives but stepped down at the last moment, afraid to question his authority.
Riza bit her lip, listening as her father scolded her but trying to block out all of the harshness in her father's tone.
"Go to bed." he instructed. Riza followed his orders without question and went straight upstairs.
She wiped her eyes as she walked into her room. She pulled off her dress and fished through her drawers till she found a nightgown and pulled it on. Riza looked in her mirror and still saw the ring of flowers on her head. She took it off and looked at it. The flowers still looked beautiful.
Riza placed it on top of her dresser and smiled. She then turned her attention to out her window, seeing Roy still standing outside.
His face had an idiotic smile on it as his cheeks looked to be stained red. Had he not moved since Riza kissed him goodnight?
She giggled and called out quietly, "Roy!"
The boy snapped out of his trance, "Y-yeah?"
"Aren't you going to go home?" she asked, cupping her hands around her mouth, "Won't your mom get worried?"
It dawned on him that he was in fact still standing in front of her house. His face flushed a deeper shade of pink as he scratched the back of his head. "O-Oh, yeah…"
The girl chuckled a bit and waved goodbye to the boy once before she crawled back into her window, making her way over the her bed.
Seeing Roy somehow masked her pain. The emotions and actions of her dad some how didn't bother her when she had his there. As she laid down in her bed she looked at the window. Was it the fact she had a friend now that changed everything? Before she always had felt two holes that were empty. She knew for a fact one of them was reserved for her parents to fill, but she never quite understood the other. The empty feeling in half of her heart now felt as if it were bursting at the seams.
She never quite knew what she was missing all of her life, but she felt it now and it was the most glorious thing in her life.
Her hand extended to the shelf next to her bed and she pulled out a book, flipping through it's pages. She read through each line multiple times, but it didn't even matter. She knew the pages by heart. She felt the broken spine of the book, proof as to how many times she had opened and closed it. The pages were old, aging as their edges frayed. Corners were dog-eared and damaged. The book had seen many days just as the rest of the ones in Riza's room.
Before this was all she had. Other than her toys, she had no real friends. Riza ran her fingers gently over the faded illustrations, tracing along the princess's dress in the story. It were the people like these that she spent her time with. The characters were her friends.
But they weren't real, that was the problem.
As much as she had wanted before, they would never come alive and talk to her. They were only animated in her mind and only followed the actions that were written down in text. She never had anyone, as much as she had tried to imagine it.
Her eyes grew heavy as she looked at the words. She had Roy now…and that sufficed. That filled every empty void that ever existed in her life. Her absent mother, her neglecting, psychotic father. The last thing she expected was for a friend to instill such emotions inside her.
Tears slipped down her cheeks as she thought about him. They appeared out of joy. For so many years, Riza had cried only out of loneliness or sorrow, for the first time she cried because she was happy.
"Thank you…" she whispered, closing her eyes. Sleep over came the young girl as she nuzzled into her pillow, her book falling to the ground with the pages open.
As the time passed, the moon rose high in the dark night sky. It added illumination to the night along with the mass collection of stars that offered the vision of millions of galaxies light years away.
Riza's door slowly creaked open as a man stepped in.
He pulled himself into the room and walked to her bed, his footsteps were soft but still clacked quietly against the wooden floor of her bedroom.
The man looked down when he heard the crack of paper. He moved his foot out of the way to see Riza's book, still open and lying on the ground. The man picked it up and dusted off the footprint left from the bottom of his shoe and closed the book, placing it back on her shelf.
He sat on the edge of Riza's bed and placed his hand on her head. "My daughter…" he spoke quietly, brushing her short hair gently with his hand.
The older Hawkeye sat silently for a moment, taking in how much his daughter had been growing and how little he actually paid attention to it.
He glanced over at her door frame where uneven, scribbled lines were drawn. Each line looked like it was drawn by Riza herself whenever she wanted to see how much she had grown. He was pretty sure that they weren't accurate and she probably drew them too tall or too short, but still…
He stared at the mark from when she was four. She was so small. As his eyes looked at the current one, he was amazed at how big she had gotten in such short years. Each date was written beside it and it only made him realize how much time had actually gone by.
Berthold hated himself for this, but what could he really do? He knew that he was sacrificing the one and only chance he would ever have to raise a daughter, but he knew his research was important. He had to keep telling himself that what he was doing would be revolutionary, that the end would justify the means.
But was it really worth it?
The elder Hawkeye looked back at his child, he brushed the side of her face gently as he felt himself on the verge of feeling the pain hit his heart. He hated himself and he couldn't get that feeling out of the pit of his heart. The man wanted to take care of his daughter, but he was doing a terrible job at it. Everything he did, he was trying to do to protect Riza. He wanted to keep his daughter pure, to prevent her from falling down a path like him where he ignored his loved ones only to pursue what seemed important.
But was what he was doing now really right? He was keeping her from everything…but it was all to prevent her from being hurt.
He brushed her hair again, "I never wanted to hurt you, Riza." he whispered as he leaned over and gave her a kiss on the forehead. "I love you." her Father spoke as he stood, walking towards the door.
The man stopped momentarily and turned back to her. She was smiling and hugged her pillow. His daughter looked happy despite how terrible he had always been to her. "You are the only one I can ever truly trust."