Roy swirled his drink in his hand, looking down into the whiskey with flat indifference. He probably should not have been drinking while his men were on a job, but despite himself, the wooden bitterness of the drink was a luxury he couldn't quite deny himself.
"Well, I'm officially bored."
Roy set his whiskey down hard on the countertop and glared sidelong at Havoc. "We've only been here an hour."
"Fifty eight minutes precisely, sir."
Roy rolled his eyes in the other direction. "Thank you, Falman."
"You're welcome, sir."
He fought the urge to pinch his nose. Rather than assuage his anxiety, the whiskey only managed to make his headache worse.
"Hey Falman, why don'tcha ask that chick at the end of the bar to come have a drink with us?"
Vato looked scandalized. "Absolutely not!"
Jean grinned impishly. "Don't tell me you're piss-scared of a bit of flirting."
"I don't flirt," huffed Falman. Then, after a pause, he muttered: "I talk at people in the hope that at least one of them finds it endearing..."
Havoc snorted. Roy threw back another swallow of whiskey, wishing he was somewhere else. Anywhere else.
"Okay, then, wanna see how many oyster crackers I can fit in my mouth?"
"Not particularly, Jean, n––"
"Ten Ryan dollars I can fit twenty."
Roy emitted a long, deep breath as Havoc lunged across the countertop for a packet of crackers. Jean Havoc and Vato Falman were good men and informants of the highest distinction, but their personalities necessitated some kind of mitigating presence –– to lesson the gravity of their strange characters, if nothing else. Heymans Breda kept Jean from acting stupid –– at least, stupider than was expected –– and Kain Fuery had a way of grounding Falman when the latter threatened to disappear into his own thoughts.
Unfortunately, both men were at present conspicuously absent. Kain Fuery's work with Rapture Radio made him too easily identifiable and would attract the wrong sort of attention in a place like the Fighting McDonagh's in Port Neptune, and Breda was currently playing the shamus with Hughes over at Fontaine Futuristics.
Roy listened to Havoc and Falman spill cracker crumbs on the bar floor and took another sip of whiskey. He looked around the pub –– at the scrawny bartender with droopy eyelids picking his teeth with a swizzle stick, chatting quietly with a woman seated at the bar. Her flushed, shingled cheeks suggested plasmid use, but her coherent speech told Roy she had not yet succumbed to full-blown ADAM addiction. Otherwise, the Fighting McDonagh's was empty. The proprietor himself was otherwise holed-up in the foundries of Hephaestus Core. Evidently, something had gone wrong with a new cold water pump that required Bill's immediate attention.
It was perhaps more than mere coincidence that the designer of the pump was Edward Elric –– Roy had promised the boy lunch for a week in return for keeping McDonagh distracted.
Roy turned to his left, looking over his shoulder to grumble something uncomplimentary about Short Stack to Riza... only to be reminded, not for the first time, that his guardian was not standing two steps behind him.
He knew Hawkeye would have very little patience for his pity and less for his concern for her safety, but he couldn't stop the summersault of his stomach at the thought of her in Sander Cohen's company... in Solf J. Kimblee's. As the evening progressed, it had reached the point where Roy couldn't ascertain whether it was alcohol or bile making his throat burn.
"That's seventeen."
"Now-ish no..." gargled Jean, which Roy took to be a contradiction of Falman's assessment. "There'sh twenny won..."
"Havoc, there are not twenty one oyster crackers in your mouth."
"Yesh thar ish."
In an effort to ignore his associates' antics, Roy's attention drifted again to his surroundings: the dim bulbs behind red-tasseled lamp shades illuminated each of a dozen maroon booths, which marched along one wall toward a murky porthole. Chipped formica tables anchored the booths in place. Behind the bar, sitting on glass shelves in front of a cloudy mirror, were rows of bottles –– Chechnya vodka and Old Harbinger beer and Lacas scotch –– each looking as forlorn as the people for whom they waited.
The crash of the Fighting McDonagh's front doors broke Roy from his quiet observation. Footsteps pounding heavily on the floorboards, breaths coming in labored, panting gasps, Heymans Breda crashed against the bar at Roy's side. To Mustang's alarm, the gingery man looked about as green as the Moonbeam absinthe behind the counter.
"The missing girls..." he puffed, hands on his knees, bent over at the waist as he fought to catch his breath. "Over... at Fontaine's. The Tucker kid..."
"Woah, ease up there, big guy." Havoc, bar snacks forgotten, rubbed small circles into Heymans's back. "What's the matter?"
For the first time since Roy had met him, Breda sounded truly frightened, a glisten of sweat shining on his upper lip. "It's Fontaine..." he croaked. "Somethin'... somethin' to do with the Big Daddies and... and the orphaned girls... with ADAM..."
Nameless worry pounded in Roy's head like the dull drumbeat of drunkenness. The details of the Fighting McDonagh's resolved themselves slowly: a flash-lag effect of Breda's obvious fear and the apocalyptic aftershocks it portended.
"Heymans," asked Roy, slowly.
"Where's Hughes?"
Two Days Later
Andrew Ryan was in a foul mood.
The only thing that moved was his masticating jaw, as though tonguing food from his small, gray teeth. His eyes were hard-rimmed and fixed, so much so that it was as though he was no longer able to move his eyeballs, like they'd rusted in their sockets. His long-boned expression, tapering to a pointed chin, was stern, even a little agitated, his gaze steady but impatient.
"The children, you say..." muttered Ryan, brow furrowed as he considered Sinclair.
Augustus inhaled slowly, his innards unfurling in the smoke. Taking a small, slow draw of his cigarette, he said: "Sure seems that way, Chief. Rapture's a high-stakes town, and Frankie Fontaine's Lil' Dimples are the jackpot. Once Futuristics bought a stake in the plasmid business, turning a profit was gravy."
Sinclair affirmed to himself what little information he'd scrounged from Roy Mustang's intel and Riza's infiltration of the Manta Ray executive office: Fontaine and his eggheads were using the Little Sisters Orphanages to kidnap young girls, before genetically altering and mentally conditioning them to reclaim ADAM from corpses around Rapture. According to additional statistics collected by a skinny Mendel Memorial librarian named Fenric or Fallow or something, the mollusks endemic to the sea floor did not naturally produce enough ADAM for serious research and commercial exploitation. Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum, under Fontaine's superivison, had developed a procedure whereby an ADAM slug was implanted in a human host's stomach, and the symbiotic interaction between host and slug produced up to thirty times the yield of usable ADAM. Young girls, apparently, were the only viable hosts.
In a subconscious gesture of disgust, Augustus's nose wrinkled and he drew his head backwards. "From what I've been able to gather, most of the girls in Fontaine's keep are orphans from the poorhouses. Accordin' to his ledger, a vast majority of the missin' tykes get turned into these gatherers."
"It's astonishingly efficient," conceded Ryan resentfully, his mustache twitching. "Fontaine floods the market with newer and better plasmids, a vast majority of which are highly addictive, thereby aggravating the opiate crisis, resulting in more deaths, more orphans––"
"And more waifs to use as his little ADAM factories," finished Sinclair, grimly. "More plasmids, more orphans, more ADAM, et cetera and so forth."
Augustus had to admit to a certain grudging respect for the brute: Fontaine had flipped Rapture on its dome. Topside, the type of efficiency and sustainability Fontaine favored tended to be enemies of a competitive economic structure, since they ran counter to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption. But, what with the growing number of splicers and the dark underbelly of the entire plasmid market, coupled with Rapture's isolationist policies, the entire system, in an economic sense, was based on restriction. Scarcity and desperation had become the movers of money. The more problems there were, the more secure Fontaine's seat on the gravy train became. The smuggling was incidental, an opportunistic exploitation of the social unrest Fontaine had helped to sow.
"So you figure you outta have the scoundrel trussed up before the Council?" asked Augustus benignly.
"Raise your sights, Sinclair," grumbled Ryan, picking up a pen and paper. "We drew a line in the sand, and that hoodlum elected to scuff it out with the heel of his shoe. Fontaine is finished."
"Oh?"
"We have more than enough evidence to launch a raid on the Fisheries," decided Ryan, his tone brooking no argument –– not that Sinclair had any to give. "Aside from the intelligences obtained by young Miss Hawkeye, the murder of the detective inspector near the Futuristics campus gives the Council the necessary authority to waive certain... provisos regarding Fontaine's private shareholdings. The circumstances warrant a strong response, Sinclair."
Augustus quirked an eyebrow. "So what are we arrestin' Fontaine for, Chief? Kidnappin', smugglin', or murder?"
Ryan rasped his back molars in irritation; Sinclair tried not to look too pleased with himself. "All of them. None of them. It doesn't matter. But Hughes's death was the final straw. Fontaine's only leverage is a whisper among the weak. For him, there is a fate worse than death. Do you know its name, Sinclair?" Andrew's blue eyes turned flinty, almost vicious. "Silence."
The mention of the detective inspector evoked a sentiment within Augustus he had not entirely anticipated. Maes Hughes had not been a friend, but he had not been an enemy, either. In Rapture's world of ever-increasing division, neutrality was a rare thing, indeed. Sinclair had little doubt that the city had lost a good man, Bradley and Ryan a good investigator, and Riza...
She had lost a good friend.
Just what the poor girl needed.
The sight of Riza's stumbling from the Manta Ray Lounge elevator, her dress in tatters, her face busted, was one Augustus knew he would not soon scrub from his memories. Riza had not deigned to divulge the details of what had happened to her, and he had known better than to ask. After giving her his coat and escorting her from the party –– the pair of them thankful their masks obscured their identities from curious onlookers –– Riza had demanded an immediate audience with Ryan, and Sinclair, with some reluctance, had obliged.
Not long afterwards, word reached Bradley's desk that a Rapture citizen had entered the Atlantic Express train station at Fontaine Futuristics, and had stumbled across a body.
Maes Hughes was confirmed dead less than a day later.
"In the meantime," Ryan went on, breaking Sinclair from more maudlin thoughts, "Miss Hawkeye may be needed to provide testimony should Fontaine put up a fight and this business in the Fisheries turn ugly. The parasite's hanger-ons could very well do her an injury before she is able to give a spoken statement before the Council. I want her protected, Sinclair."
Augustus's mouth twisted into a wry smile. He tapped ash from the end of his cigarette holder, ignoring Andy Ryan's scowl as the ash piled on the man's plush carpet. "Never you mind about that, Chief.
"I sent her to the safest place in the city."
Elsewhere
Roy sat sprawled out on his couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing himself by tearing memories out of his mind at random like matches from a matchbook, striking them one at a time and systematically setting himself on fire.
He had taken to staring out the window, at the anemones unfurling like soft and brilliant flowers. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, the lime of calcareous proteans, coalescing with the bitterness of whiskey, was strong enough to make Roy want to retch.
He pressed his sweating hands to his face, ground the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. His skin felt cold to the touch. His whole room was like an ice box. A damp and tangible chill wrapped itself around him; Roy breathed out slowly, trying to recover his composure. His breath was visible, like a thick cloud of fog shrouding him as he sat there, stricken, his mind anesthetized by the alcohol.
Drink and grief braided together. Intoxication, he concluded, was a swift and effective catalyst for heartbreak. Roy caught a glimpse of himself in the reflective surface of his coffee table; he had a deranged look about him, a glimmer and a glint over his eyes, as though, in a moment of divine revelation, he knew how the world worked, and scoffed at its moral repugnance.
Each time Roy closed his eyes, his thoughts showed him variations on the same view, the same vision, but from thousands upon thousands of marginally different perspectives. A ticket booth. A bullet wound. A body. They came to him simultaneously and he had bite back the urge to cry out, the pain was so great. Reality seemed shattered, and Roy was caged, imprisoned behind the impenetrable barrier of his own helplessness, his inability to change what had happened. He felt crushed and broken as multiple regrets, a myriad griefs, all trapped under glass, merged together inside of him. The fractured, mutated shades of light, streaming through from the ocean, were warped, bent out of shape.
And his own grief was thick and small and shatter-proof. He felt the airlessness, the claustrophobia, the hurt borne of it, saturating the air around him.
Roy decided, then, that his sorrow had had a strange way of reuniting him with Maes. It was a merging; he felt as though a part of him was trying desperately to disappear right alongside his best friend. To follow Hughes as far as the living were permitted to go... and considering, at times, going even further than that...
But Roy knew, eventually, the mourning would pass and he would phase back into the world. Without Maes.
A fragment had broken from Roy's heart. A cut that would never heal, and an empty space where before there had been something bright and warm and without name. A vicious, screaming grief had burrowed into the hollow, and all it seemed to want to hear was its own echo.
Along the back of Roy's kitchen counter were several gallons of wine, white and red, and a dozen bottles of whiskeys, liqueurs, and brandies. He had lost track of how much he had consumed over the course of the evening. But when Roy heard a knock on his door –– a distant, plummy sound, as though trapped in bubbles –– and lurched to his feet, he knocked over two empty bottles of wine and a carafe of expensive whiskey, of which only the dregs remained. The taste of burning at the back of Roy's throat flooded forward; he swallowed down the bile, grimacing. He stalked towards the door, feeling for the wall as though it might escape him unless he kept in touch with it.
Roy eventually found the doorknob, not before giving himself a splinter and bruising his knuckles, muttering venomously about Ryan's bastards disturbing him at some ungodly hour of the night. He opened his front door...
And saw the shock register on Riza Hawkeye's face before she could hide it. Her hand was still poised to knock, hanging suspended in midair. They stared at each other –– Roy in the doorway, Riza in the hall –– for a few long seconds before Hawkeye lowered her hand and bore her expression in a scowl.
"Damn Sinclair," she breathed.
"Sinclair..." slurred Roy, not quite able to put two and two together, and not convinced he wasn't hallucinating Riza entirely. Her face was indistinct and vague behind the brume of his inebriation, her blonde hair like a fan of coral. A hazy nimbus radiated from her clothes, making her look airy, almost ethereal, against the dark and damp corridor.
"I was ordered by Ryan to go into witness protection," she explained gently, her soft-spoken words still enough to make Roy's head throb. "He didn't say where I was supposed to go. Sinclair gave me an address."
"My address," Roy finished, the realization crystallizing slowly, like calcium salts dripping into a stalagmite. Of course, Riza knew he lived in Mercury Suites, but she had staunchly refused Roy's every invitation to visit –– most made in jest, but a few, Roy admitted to himself, cast with the narrowest line of yearning.
"Sir…" Riza looked him up and down, her expression creasing in concern, in pain. She stared at him as though seeing him for the first time. Roy became acutely aware of the state he was in. His white shirt mis-buttoned and stained, his breath reeking of alcohol, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen. His face wet from tears.
Riza's anguish surged with her every breath. Roy could almost measure the swell between each peak. It never seemed sufficiently soothed by her long intakes of air, the heat of their shared proximity. Roy felt around inside himself for grief, or horror, or rage at the sight of her. But all he could feel was the dulled tension in his muscles as he held himself in the doorway –– in his drunkenness neither moving nor at rest.
The currents of silence and sorrow buoyed Roy, the wounds of the city falling away. The moments seemed to drag their heels as the slowed-down world flickered past. Riza's eyes were unguarded, burdened with a grief that took his breath away. And Roy realized, then, that he couldn't bear it. He wanted to slam the door in her face, to kiss her, to throw back his head and howl.
"Riza," he gasped, the sound almost a sob. His eyes stung, and he blinked. "He's gone… Riza."
"Roy…"
"He's gone… and I… I can't bring him back."
Something tore inside of him. Roy's legs began to tremble, violently. He stumbled from the doorway and Riza took a step inside, shutting them in the apartment. Roy arched his back, chest to the ceiling, driving out a cry that pulled from far deeper than the bottom of his lungs.
"What have I done," he whispered hoarsely, the words weak and watery. "Riza, what have I done?"
"You are not the one who murdered him, Roy," she said slowly, with impossible gentleness. Though she did not touch him, his proximity to her was like being inside her consciousness, a closeness that real life with its real bodies could never hope to imitate. "You have done nothing."
"If I hadn't…" Roy swallowed. "If I hadn't challenged Ryan… Fontaine…"
"Maes's sacrifice was done for you… not committed by you. This is not your fault."
Roy's lip quivered. "Would it have been better…" He spoke so indistinctly his words seemed to blur together like paint in rainwater. "Would it have been better if it had been…"
Her grip on his arms, when it came, felt like drowning in the half-empty carafe of whiskey all over again, except this time, he was drunk on Riza's eyes, her smell, the luster of her hair. She seemed to encompass multitudes: flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene.
"How dare you," she said quietly, but with absolutely frigid clarity.
Roy found himself folding to the authority in her voice, too tired and sad and drunk to protest.
"I just told you a man died so that your life could become something new and worthwhile. I just told you a good man died. Your friend. He sacrificed himself so that you could live, Roy Mustang. And you immediately want to throw that gift away? How dare you. You wouldn't deserve to look Maes in the eye, in the afterlife."
"Riza––"
"You can be so damnably selfish, to think all of this is about you." She pulled in a shuddering breath. "And you can be so cruel, to think we would not feel your absence."
She was not angry, realized Roy. Just frightened.
"We…"
"I can't afford to lose you, Roy Mustang."
His own grief seemed suddenly rootless, his moorings poised to blow away. Roy did not respond, only clung harder to her, holding her with all the desperation of a man for whom letting go would mean losing himself forever.
What a miracle she was, Roy marveled. What a truly exquisite paragon of beauty and virtue. Roy wanted her. Needed her. As simply and clearly as one needed food and oxygen and light.
"Will you continue to follow me, Riza?" he managed, still slurring his speech. "No matter what?"
"... What do you mean?"
"Through Rapture, through life, through… through whatever we may come across."
The anticipation clung to his chest as Riza took her time in answering.
"I don't want to make it sound like a desperate thing, Riza." Though it was, he knew, exactly that.
"— Sir... Roy..."
"But I need you more than I first realized. You…" he swallowed, his expression twisting at the fuzzy dryness of his tongue, the disjunction between his mind and his mouth, "you know the dangers I pose to myself and others. You and only you." Their glances exchanged and there was a hint of vulnerability in his own, a hint of himself that was still strong but unsure of what direction to take. "I need… you. More than I thought before."
Riza said, quietly, "No. You don't."
The charge between them became a spark, pulling at the edges of the air. Burning his breath away. How much he wanted to touch her, then... how intensely he wanted to hold her. In an instant, Roy felt both numb and excessively sensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need to show her just how important she was, just how valuable her presence was... her companionship, her life...
Her love...
Night had fallen on the surface. The ocean was green-tinged and murky, but the little light it cast, the parts that outlined the angles and curves of her body... it seemed in some ways sufficient.
"But you have my support," Riza said finally, as though to assure herself as much as him. All she could do was meet his gaze and gently touch his cheek, not knowing whether that would be of any help, either. "You have my partnership. You have everything I have to give, Roy. This I promise you."
She looked across at him. Riza Hawkeye, a creature of infinite compassion and singular mercy. And she stopped his heart.
Were he in any coherent frame of mind, Roy would imagine assigning a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought.
Were he in any coherent frame of mind…
He probably would not have kissed her.
It was infatuation, and it was hunger, and it was a longing to be loved, and it was an all-consuming fire so hot it devoured worry and loneliness and fear and time and being. For a hundred heartbeats, there was no Rapture, no death, no pain, nothing hard, nothing terrible, nothing but warmth, and the taste of her.
"Roy," said Riza, breathless, her mouth brushing his as he surfaced for air, "Roy, you're drunk."
"I don't care."
"But I do."
It was as though someone had snapped a rubber band near Roy's ear. He flinched back from her, horrified with himself, the separation sucking the last of her heat away.
"I'm sorry… I'm so sorry, Riza, that was––"
"It's all right."
He peered at her, uncomprehendingly, black eyes awash.
"Roy," she said, again, her voice brittle, "it's all right."
Roy stared ahead of himself for a long moment, then gradually lowered his head into his left hand and began to cry. The sniffles became sobs, the tears running sideways across his cheeks. Roy cried until there was nothing left inside but a raw hurt that nibbled at his insides like a hungry rat.
Slowly, Riza walked across to him.
Softly, again: "It's all right."
Riza tentatively raised her arms, hesitating for only a moment, then slowly put her left hand onto Roy's arm and her right hand onto his back before sliding it upwards to cradle his neck. Riza moved closer, holding Roy's shoulder, pulling his head to her chest. Embracing him fully.
"It's not all right," wept Roy into her shirt, clutching at her desperately.
"No." She lowered her cheek to the top of Roy's head. He felt tears wet his scalp, her own sob break against his hair. Felt for himself the sublime pain that throbbed inside of her as it did inside of him.
"No... it's not."