April 22, 1918
Winry Elric

They had only been in East City for six days, and yet she and Ed had managed to get their things all over Mustang's guest room. Winry crawled under the bed, digging around for the automail equipment that she had brought with her. It had been intended for repairs, in case Edward's leg broke down, but she had taken to tinkering with it in the evenings, after the children had gone to bed but while Ed and Mustang were still theorizing.

There was a soft rap on the door and Winry started. "Come in," she said, wondering who it could be at this time of night. Edward wouldn't have bothered to knock, and Azula and Zuko were already asleep.

The door swung open, to reveal a rather disheveled looking Riza Hawkeye on the other side. "I was hoping that I could talk to you for a bit, if you weren't too busy."

"I'm not too busy to talk." Winry looked down at the pile of pieces on the floor. "I've got to put this away, that's all. And work always goes faster with company."

Hawkeye looked rather startled, and to took Winry a couple of seconds to realize that she thought she had been asked to help. "You don't have to help," Winry hastily added. "But this is just sorting, not anything I actually need to think about."

Hawkeye relaxed noticeably, but she still looked tenser than a surgeon about to make her first cut.

"Did you want to talk to me about something?

"I was wondering how you did it. Juggled being married and running a business, that is."

"Oh." That seemed like a weird thing for Hawkeye to ask about, because, for all that Ed was still in the East City Command gossip chain, there was nothing to suggest that Hawkeye had any intention of getting married soon. In fact, the rumors about her and Brigadier General Mustang suggested exactly the opposite. "Well, the business is still really Granny's, even if I do most of the automail now. She keeps the books and makes sure we have enough supplies and all of that."

"That wasn't exactly what I meant," Hawkeye said, and Winry repressed the urge to sigh. She had no idea why Lieutenant Hawkeye, of all people, was asking her for advice (if that's what this was), and she did not feel especially qualified to help anyone make major life decisions, let alone someone who was close to twice Winry's age.

"It might help if you told me what you were worried about," Winry said, hoping that it wouldn't come off as too condescending. "Then I would know what kind of advice might help."

Hawkeye stood as still as a statue for several seconds, not even blinking. "I joined the military because there was someone I needed to protect," she said softly. "But I'm worried that I won't be able to do that anymore."

"Are you going to be transferred to Briggs?" Winry had heard, mainly from Ed, that things were heating up with Drachma, but she had not thought it had gotten to the point of mobilizing the rest of the military.

"I haven't received any orders yet, but it's been suggested." Winry wondered who in the military would suggest something like that to Hawkeye, before any orders had actually been sent. It certainly wasn't Brigadier General Mustang, since everyone knew how much he relied on his aide.

"Is Brigadier General Mustang being sent to Drachma as a State Alchemist?" That was the only plausible reason Winry could think of, since the Flame Alchemist himself was the equivalent of an entire artillery brigade alone and Briggs might not need any more foot soldiers. Hawkeye might be expected to stay in East City and run the command. She would certainly be capable of it.

Hawkeye grimaced. "No. The troops in the North don't need that amount of firepower right now. But Major General Armstrong has been hinting that she could really use a few good snipers. Or one particularly brilliant one."

"Oh." Winry was certain that Ed had not told her everything there was to know about Mustang's unit and the Ishvalan war, but the impression she had gotten was that Hawkeye in particular had been haunted by it. "But, surely, if it will keep the country safe–"

"I'm not entirely sure it will." Hawkeye sighed and ran her hands through her bangs in a way that almost reminded Winry of General Mustang. "Major General Armstrong has been trying to get me transferred to Briggs almost since the day she met me. And I suspect the Fuhrer has other reasons for wanting me transferred away from Mustang."

Winry had always gotten the impression that Fuhrer Grumman liked General Mustang, but she had only met him once, for a few minutes at a party, and so she was probably not the best judge of him.

"And I'm not entirely sure it won't," Hawkeye continued. "After Ishval, I swore that I would do whatever it took to ensure that future generations never had to live like that, never had to make the choices I did, but it looks like when push comes to shove, I'm not willing to follow through."

For a few minutes, there was silence, as Winry tried to work out what best to say. "That's not what it sounds like," Winry said, after a few seconds of thought. "It sounds like you're willing to follow through, but you don't want to and you're hoping that something will justify you not needing to."

Hawkeye nodded slowly, but made no other response.

"Miss Riza, this would be the first time since Ishval that you've been in an actual war." There had been fighting during the lead up to the Promised Day, and on the day itself, Winry knew. But that had been a military coup, with specific short-term goals and Hawkeye working directly under someone she trusted rather than a full blown war with nebulous aims and dubious orders from on high. "Won't it?"

Riza nodded, a wry smile stretching across her face. "I don't believe we're officially at war with Drachma at the moment, although I expect that to change any day now. But, yes, this will be the first time I've been officially deployed into a combat zone. And Major General Armstrong is not known for her soft touch."

Winry thought back to her time at Briggs. She hadn't spent much time with the Major General, but she remembered the devotion her soldiers had for her, enough to rival the way Mustang's men felt about him. "I think Major General Armstrong understands the difference between civilians and soldiers."

"I'm certain she does, but I don't want to kill soldiers any more than I want to kill civilians." Hawkeye pursed her lips, some of the color leeching from her skin. If Winry had not known the kinds of things Hawkeye had faced down before without flinching, she would have thought the woman afraid. "That didn't come out the way I wanted it to."

"No, I think I understand," Winry said. "You don't want to kill anyone at all. You're afraid of it, and it's eating you up inside. You said you joined the army because you needed to protect someone, but how did you make it through Ishval if you hated killing so much?"

It wasn't until Hawkeye winced that Winry realized she had asked that last question out loud.

"I'm sorry," Winry said. "I didn't mean to pry. You don't have to tell me anything just to satisfy my curiosity." Winry bit her lip, resisting the temptation to keep apologizing.

Hawkeye snorted in a way that was almost a bitter laugh. "But you aren't asking to satisfy your curiosity, are you? You're asking because I'm hurt and you want to know how you can help."

"Of course I want to help." Granny Pinako would have helped most anyone who needed it, the same way Winry's parents had, the same way Ed and Al would if they knew that Hawkeye needed help. "Why wouldn't I want to help?"

"One of the things I learned in Ishval was not to take goodwill for granted." There was no sorrow in Hawkeye's voice, only a kind of disappointed resignation, and Winry was not sure if Hawkeye was disappointed in humanity or in herself for thinking so highly of them as a child. Somehow, that was worse than any sorrow.

The silence stretched out for what felt like some minutes, but Winry knew was something more like a matter of seconds. "I don't know how to help," she finally admitted. "You never really got over Ishval, did you?"

Hawkeye shook her head. "It's not something you get over, Winry, like a bad breakup or a lost job. It changed us, and there isn't any going back and becoming the people we were before."

Winry was not so sure it was really as simple as that, when she knew that people were always changing, all the time, even if the change was not as sharp as the change from an army recruit to a veteran, but she couldn't quite put words to her reasons, and so she said nothing.

"And part of me thinks that I have no business getting over it."

"What? You're supposed to go on feeling guilty for the rest of your life?" There was something truly awful about that idea, one that Winry could not quite place. Perhaps it was simply that she had come to like Riza and didn't want her to be miserable for the rest of her life. "That won't make anything better."

"No, but it might stop me from making the same mistakes again– from following orders that I knew were wrong simply to please my comrades and avoid a court martial for insubordination." There was a heat in Hawkeye's voice, one that told Winry she was actually worried that, if she went to Briggs and fought the Drachman Army, she would turn back into the person she had been during Ishval.

And it was equally clear that Riza hated the person she had been during Ishval, which Winry would have expected to make it almost impossible for her to slide back so far, since she was determined not to do it. Or perhaps her determination not to become that person again was what had her so worried. Winry wasted half a second wishing that people's minds were as simple as automail.

"Are you going to quit the army?" Winry asked. That seemed like the simple solution to her, since once Hawkeye was no longer in the military she could no longer be reassigned to Briggs, but she knew it couldn't be that simple, since Hawkeye had not already done so.

"It's not as simple as that. I signed a ten year contract after the Ishvalan War, I can't quit for ten months."

"But you can quit then," Winry said. In her mind it was a little early to be thinking about quitting unless Hawkeye really did want to leave the army, but she did not think it politic to say that. "What would you do if you weren't in the army?"

"I don't know. I was younger than you when I joined the army, not even legally an adult when I started cadet school. I never considered any other options, and never developed any other marketable skills. The only thing I'm really good at, Winry, is killing people at range, and that isn't a skill that has much value outside the military."

"I thought your greatest skill was getting General Mustang to finish all his paperwork and turn it in on time." Winry clapped a hand over her mouth as soon as she realized what had come out of it, because surely Hawkeye would think she was making fun rather than taking this as seriously as it ought to be taken. "I'm sorry, it's only that's what everyone at East Command says whenever they think you and Mustang aren't listening– that you're the one who keeps everyone in line and that if he were left to himself, nothing would ever get done– I know it can't be entirely true, because you were transferred before the Promised Day and Mustang's office still functioned without you but it's still what everyone says."

Hawkeye looked rather like she had been hit in the head with a wrench, and for half a moment Winry was afraid that she was going to be angry, but then she laughed– a loud joyful laugh that set Winry giggling as well.

"You could buy a hotel," Winry said, because she could quite suddenly see Hawkeye, radiating her usual unflappable calm, stalking through one of those fancy hotels like they had in the city, keeping guests happy and making sure that everything was done properly and in a timely manner. "Hire a cook and someone to clean and do all of the paperwork yourself."

"I've been told that upset customers are considerably more vocal than grumpy subordinates," Hawkeye said. Her smile fell. "I'm better at getting things done than making people happy, Winry."

"That's not a bad thing," Winry said vehemently, and not solely because she was also better at getting things done. "Sometimes getting things done is what makes people happy."

"For an automail engineer, it probably is more important to make automail properly than to be personable–"

"Where did you get the idea that you're not personable?" Winry asked, before Hawkeye could cast any more aspirations on Winry's chosen profession.

Hawkeye shrugged, the gesture so completely antithetical to her usual aura of professionalism that Winry had to resist the urge to laugh. "All of Eastern Command is terrified of me. That's rather the opposite of being personable don't you think."

"It's a good sort of terrified," Winry said. It reminded her of nothing so much as the way the Elric brothers seemed to feel about their teacher. "It means they like you."

Hawkeye did not answer, but she smiled a little, and Winry thought that was good enough.