And Man in Portions Can See…His Own Funereal Destiny
Chesterford's Tavern, West City
Late Spring, 1907
Roy Mustang: Age 22
"What about you Roy?" asked Hughes, smiling over a glass of beer. "Do you have a girl to talk about?"
Roy choked on his beer, spluttering and collapsing onto the bar until he had regained his balance and his breath. His friend looked at him in concern. "Alright there?"
"I really didn't think you were capable of talking about anyone else's romantic life."
"Ha-ha, very funny, Roy." An offended look flashed across Hughes' face as he pushed his glasses up his nose. "But I'm actually being serious. What's the love life of Roy Mustang looking like these days?"
The burning sensation of beer in his nose faded along with his laughter. Roy wasn't quite sure how to answer Hughes.
He glanced down, hoping to find an answer, or else find some clever quip to give himself an out, floating on top of the foam. Likewise, he looked around, as if he'd find inspiration from the group of newly-promoted First Lieutenants loudly boasting besides him about their romantic escapades, or the labels of the bottles on the bar shelves. But no answers materialized in his brain. He glanced back down at his glass.
The day—begun with routine promotions for some of the officers in his division that only brought questions about his own career trajectory—had ended with the triumphant yet unsettling capture of a serial killer who had been murdering civilians in West City.
He pushed the rising bile down with another swallow of beer.
Distance from his peers. That's what the day had actually achieved. His silver pocket watch was a leaden weight in his pocket. Instead of granting him freedom, it had condemned him. Its maddeningly eternal beating—judge, jury and executioner—dragged him to the bottom of a boiling ocean where no light or sound penetrated. Only Hughes' sudden arrival on some military errand had ensured he wouldn't be drinking alone tonight. The other Second Lieutenants chatted loudly around the pool table near the front of the tavern. None of them had any desire to socialize with him. Not after today.
With each drink he'd hoped to slow the agonizingly gradual drowning, to make an escape. But this seemed increasingly unlikely with the dwindling change that clinked against his pocket watch. He'd forgotten to grab more money when he'd stopped into his apartment a couple of hours ago. He'd been too busy trying to scrub the blood and ash from his hands and jacket cuffs.
Escape.
Deliverance.
"Libera me."
The words flashed through his mind with the full force of lightning, dazzling and rattling him. But he forced the memory of that phrase, along with all the other thunderous thoughts that followed, to the back of his head. Yes, he indeed needed something to save him, help him escape from the hell that the conversation and drinks were barely holding at bay.
He kept staring into his glass, waiting for an answer to surface. Because it was amber, like Riza's eyes.
Riza stared, eyes full of fear, at the sight before her.
Her father, dying or dead, clasped in the arms of his final student. The doorway rained light behind her. And yet her eyes still glowed as if all the stars in the sky danced inside them.
He knew that he'd never forget the terror in her face, or the silent resignation that followed.
Hughes took the minutes' silence as an answer.
"Haven't gotten any action since your Academy days, then? Huh. What's even the point of becoming a State Alchemist if it doesn't get you the girls? " He took a quick sip of his drink. "Or," he said, gesturing at Roy with a pointed finger and a sloshing pint glass, "are you trying to figure out how to tell me you've got five different girls in five different cities and you need help coming with excuses for each one? Or what about three illegitimate children and at least one angry woman who's chased you down for your military paycheck?"
"No, it's not that—Oh shut up Hughes, that's not even funny," he said, although a faint smile tugged at his lips. He thought another moment, wondering how honest to be. But something about the lonesome, taxing day pulled him toward honesty and candor like a moth to flame.
His last drink was starting to buzz in his brain, making the bar lights flicker a little more like stars, and dimming the noise of the crowd until it was a pleasing accompaniment to the melody of his thoughts and the buoying feeling of trust.
And Riza's eyes smiled up from the glass in his hands.
"There was one girl, though." He swallowed hard, pushing down the quiver of excitement that accompanied the sharing of secrets. "We—well, there was, when I was learning alchemy, out in the western countryside."
"Ahhh, I knew it!" Hughes pounced on this revelation, slapping Roy on the back and splashing beer onto the already-sticky floor in the process. "You never really said anything, but I knew there had to be a girl! We actually had a betting pool going in year four. 'Cause I was convinced you had an old flame, and Jacobs swore there couldn't possibly be anyone in your life, and then Watson thought you were already married and keeping it a secret."
"What the absolute hell was wrong with Watson?"
"Well, he knew you had letters under your pillow, and you'd never talk about it, and on one of our ruck marches, he heard you talking in your sleep, and—"
"Hughes, do yourself a favor and don't take anything Watson heard or said as anything more than absolute bullshit. That idiot smoked Xingese tobacco laced with opium on that march and I woke up at zero two hundred to the sight of him buck-ass-naked trying to wrestle shadow beings he claimed had infested his sleeping bag."
"Hey, don't shoot the messenger! That was Watson, not me."
"And who would have seen letters under my pillow? Huh. Only one of my roommates."
"So tell me about her." The scheming glint returning to Hughes' eyes with a wink, and a maliciously searching tone invaded his voice, a tone that implied scandalous, if not salacious, details in Roy's life. "What's she like?"
Riza, with her short hair and bright eyes, lay on her stomach, flashing a smile meant only for Roy. The chessboard perched atop her quilt separated them, yet his outstretched hand quickly claimed hers. In that perfect evening, for just a few hours, the secrets of flame alchemy no longer existed.
"Hughes, it wasn't like that," he groaned with a snap in his voice. He paused a moment, juggling the story about in his mind, picking which facets and angles were appropriate to share. Specifically, which were appropriate to share with Hughes. Hughes would die of laughter if he ever found out he had a crush on his teacher's daughter. But he needed to answer quick before Hughes' imagination could run wild with the events and emotions he believed Roy was leaving out.
"We'd…we'd play chess and stuff."
Shit. What type of an answer was that?
"And that's a metaphor for what exactly?"
"Nothing at all!" He wasn't sure whether it was the beer or Hughes that was making him want to scream. "We barely talked when I was an apprentice. Her father was pretty strict. So we only really got close—"
"Got really close...? I'm waiting, Golden boy."
"If you let me finish," Roy said through gritted teeth, "I would have said that we finally had time to talk, to talk Maes, and socialize like two normal young people, when I returned to learn flame alchemy from my alchemy teacher." He did his best to push past Hughes' interruptions and mock-scandalized expressions.
Stupidly, he pushed on, ignorantly convinced that if he rambled on long enough, he'd bore Hughes. "When I was an apprentice, I didn't have much time to just chat with girls, you know? Training occupied most of my days; she was always busy with schoolwork and chores. The majority of my memories of her are from times when we were reading, or working in silence. Yet every once in a while, we'd stumble on the same sunset or garden outside, or find each other in the same store in town, and when the stars aligned, we'd occasionally talk about our favorite books over a game of chess. And sometimes I'd watch her cook, and we'd eat dinner together…" He trailed off, once again cursing his mistakes.
"She cooked for you, did she?"
Damn.
"She was already, she was cooking for her fa—family, and I just happened to be there!" He found himself stammering, now frustrated with himself and ready to strangle Hughes.
"Of course." Hughes switched topics. "Was she pretty?"
"Beautiful." he said before promptly closing his mouth. He wasn't going to give Hughes any more information.
There had been stars, such lovely stars, that night. But their wool coats weren't enough to keep them from shivering. So they had left the lake and walked home, legs aching and frozen. The frost-covered ground had shone silver, the moon lighting a path on the snow. And as they talked about the future, their dreams hung in the air, like puffs of moon mist.
She was an angel in the moon light.
And she was even more beautiful by the firelight.
"Want to tell me what's making you smile?"
"No." Roy said, before realizing his smile and making a conscious effort to shrink it into a determined frown. But his lips cracked into a faint grin again as he took another sip of his beer.
Hughes smiled to himself, tasting victory. Without really trying, he had tricked Roy into telling him all about this girl, all about these precious, happy memories. Perhaps the beer was finally worming its way into his blood. Roy deserved a distraction, however momentary. And so, when Roy had set down his glass, a wistful look resting on his face, Hughes prodded him on with a question.
"How old?"
Roy spluttered into his drink. "Excuse me?"
"How old is she?"
"What sort of a question is that?"
Hughes judged his shocked defensiveness. "Alright, she's several years younger than you. Or way older. Next question."
"What!" Hughes was merciless in his information gathering. "I'm not into cougars, Hughes! I just don't know, it's not proper to ask a lady her age, you know?" She'd be almost nineteen. He'd just turned twenty two. A perfectly respectable age difference.
"I know exactly how old Gracia is, Roy. You're not fooling anyone."
"She's nineteen!" Roy cried, desperate to stop the barrage of invasive questions.
"And you're twenty two. How long have you known her for?" Hughes pretended to make a note on an invisible notebook. "Subject…has an…interest…in…teenagers."
"And I was a teenager when I met her!"
"Which made her, how old exactly?" Hughes asked with a scheming grin on his face.
"Hughes, I'm going to kill you, you know that? And I'm going to make it look like fragging. They'll never suspect me."
"Was she blonde? You'd always have a blonde on your arm for the Academy Balls."
"Yeah, she had blonde hair, but she cut it—wait, I don't have a thing for blondes!"
"Methinks you doth protest too much," Hughes mocked. He paused a moment before taking another sip and offering a serious observation.
"You know, the reason I always suspected there was a girl on your mind was that you never seemed truly interested in any of the girls you met. You were polite, sure, and always had to outdo the rest of us by finding the prettiest girl for dances and dinners. But I always thought there was someone else who ruined the rest of womankind for you."
Roy was silent, unable to answer. Hughes was right. There hadn't been any other girl for him, not really. Something about her. Something about Riza Hawkeye that made her so much more than a memory.
Hughes leaned against the bar, shadows lengthening on his face. "So, what was it? What ruined dating? A regret, or a promise?" But, before Roy could answer, he asked in a calculatedly casual tone, "Do you still keep in touch?"
Roy knew exactly how many days had elapsed since they last embraced, as well as since their last letter. He had tallied the days on the walls of his brain, his conscience like a prisoner praying daily for release. But he just knew those dates, he tried never to contextualize them, or think about the pain that distance caused him.
Nine hundred twenty six.
So he ignored Hughes' question and let his mouth follow his heart. Words began spilling out.
"I don't know when, but I had fallen in love with her." Hughes' face perked slightly, as if to say this isn't what I asked. But he knew better to interrupt a man speaking his mind about matters of the heart.
"Regardless of when it was, I had to leave for the Academy and I think her father had an inkling as to where I was headed. He wouldn't have liked that. He always disapproved of the military, especially for me."
"Did he try to stop you two from communicating? Withhold letters?"
"I doubt it. But I also doubted we'd built enough of a connection to last the distance. So I gave her my address and prayed it'd be enough. I knew I'd had to go back to finish my training after the Academy eventually. But I didn't want to return as strangers."
The first farewell had been too painful for him. He had no idea if the tenuous bond they'd built would be enough to survive his absence. Would she even care? He had left his mailing address, scribbled on a sheet of paper ripped from the back of his alchemy notebook. But his promises to himself of regular communication were broken as soon as the rigorous summer training at the Academy began.
"Remember the first summer at the Academy? We couldn't even mail a letter for six months, let alone have the time to write one."
His name was rarely called during mail call that first summer. And the letters he received never bore the name that was tattooed across his brain. His mailbox remained empty once term began, save for the letters from his aunt and sisters.
"It wasn't until the second year at the Academy before I'd become brave enough to mail a letter to her. And we barely talked in the years that followed. Then I received a letter right before the holiday break of our fourth year. Postmarked as urgent."
He took another sip and a sliver of a haunted gaze stared back at him out of the golden glass.
"Her father was dying."
The memory of the fear that had shook him as he opened that letter returned in trembling hands. When she'd written to him with news of her father's worsening health and begged him to return, he had hurriedly ran to Central Train Station. "I took the next train west."
"What happened?" Hughes' voice had dropped to a quiet dread.
His face flushed, as if a fire roared in front of him. Indeed, one was blazing inside, twisting his guts about, his heart fluttering from the memory, and now sparks were dancing in his eyes.
They had stood so close at the meagerly-attended funeral. If he could even call the austere service that. The undertaker had said some simple words, traditional chants and sayings, and the handful of local townspeople had responded with the customary responses, the men in dark hats and the women in black headscarves. Feeling that he was being watched, Roy had turned around and noticed an old man staring at them with a melancholy smile on his face. For some reason it caused a warm flush to steal over his cold face.
He had wrestled with the urge to reach out his hand, take her small hand in his larger one. Instead, he had spent nearly twenty minutes fiddling with the cuff of his overcoat, picking at a loose thread dangling from a button.
Then the neighbors departed and they were left alone with the crows and the skeletons of trees.
They were left alone with the words that had been left unsaid in the previous two days, both the conversations Roy had tried to initiate and the emotions that Riza seemed unable to verbalize. They had almost avoided each other as they circuited their own all-consuming orbits—Riza and the shock of sudden grief, Roy with the arrangements of undertakers and municipal entanglements. He had wanted to leave Riza with as few uncertainties and responsibilities as possible once he left, and so twice he had walked the mile into town to clear matters with the bank. Thankfully the late Master Hawkeye had been responsible in his finances, if negligent in almost all his other responsibilities. And so, with the assurance there was no debt or loans to be paid, Roy had arranged for the account and it's meager contents to be transferred to Riza's name. She didn't know he had done it, but he would tell her before he left.
He had returned to the Hawkeye house late the night before the funeral and felt as if he had returned to the earliest days of his apprenticeship; the house bore no trace of Riza, but there was a mug of tea and a bowl of hot stew placed on the kitchen table, with no trace of the young woman who had made it. She must have noticed his lantern bobbing up the lonely country road and waited to serve his dinner before quickly running for a secluded corner of the house.
The image had made him laugh before a sudden sob burst out of him. He was supposed to take care of her. Yet how could he? And what type of care did she actually need? It always seemed that she was the one taking care of him.
In retrospect, Roy realized that they had both felt as if they were intruding upon the other and had no desire to encroach further. So they let the distance be and didn't try to push further. The empty house, haunted not only by the corpse that had lain for a night on the settee in the study, but by the ghost of the man that had preceded it, was happy to separate them. But when the floorboards creaked in the wind and moonlight stared from the portraits in the hall, Roy wished he could have found Riza reading at the kitchen table or else found the courage to knock on her door and ask for conversation and tea. The loneliness of the house and the thought of leaving her alone in it terrified him.
Yet she had not asked anything of him. And, once the funeral concluded, he would have exhausted all reasons to remain.
So, when he found her in her black dress in the kitchen that morning, he had told her he planned to return to Central on the evening train. He had prayed she would make some protest, but she nodded and murmured some empty affirmation. She looked as if she hadn't slept. But something about the black dress she wore disguised any trace of her tiredness. It was regal in its simplicity, and it complimented her pale skin and large eyes. For lack of a better word, she was beautiful. Was it a strange concept? She was only some three years younger than him. She wasn't the girl he had left nearly four years ago. She was almost the age he had been when he had left this place. And he had felt so much like an adult when—
Why was he thinking these thoughts? He merely wanted to be sure she would be alright once he had left. And he needed to hear her voice, hear her say it.
He was surprised then, when she was the first one to speak as they stood before the grave. And, as she apologized for relying on him, his mouth kept opening and closing in the wordless, mechanical repetition of the previous twenty minutes of solitary silence. He still didn't know what to say.
Why did she have to apologize? There was nothing to apologize for. Afterall, he was supposed to look after her. So he wasn't lying when he assured her that, "It was nothing. He was my mentor, I would do anything for him." But really, it was her that he would do anything for. And it was something. Doing these things for her meant everything to him.
But was there anyone else in the world who would do anything for her? Anyone at all? He turned to look at her and watched her pale, downcast face. "Do you have any other family?"
She shook her head. He had already guessed her answer. Her mother had died when she was a girl; both her parents had been estranged from their family.
She had no family that she knew of. "It sounds strange, but they never told me anything about their relatives. For all I know, I have none."
For a moment, the tiny lump of anger that he had suppressed the past few days flared and gnawed like bile at the back of his throat. He wasn't just angry at the father who had neglected her in life and abandoned her in death. He was angry at the teacher that had failed to pass on his flame alchemy. Didn't she have the secrets to flame alchemy? That's what he had said. And yet she had made no mention of it. Wasn't it his right inheritance? The man was dead. No one else was going to use it.
Shocked at the shameful flash of emotions, he shoved his hands further into his pockets and scrunched his eyes shut. The jealous anger vanished as fast as it had appeared. The secret, if she did actually have it, was hers to keep and hers to give.
"What will you do now?" A sudden anxiety wrenched at his guts at his question. But the anxiety was better than the emotions that had preceded it.
"I haven't decided yet." Her voice was steady and calm, honest and yet reassuring. He exhaled the breath that had strained at his collar. "Fortunately, my father made sure I received a good education, so I'm sure I'll find some way to get by on my own."
She was speaking more than she had since her father's death. A cloud shifted to reveal the sun, or the wind lessened, but whatever the case, the wane winter day seemed to warm. The barest hint of spring, or at least the promise of it, took its place. And with this subtle change, the girl herself warmed and revived. The girl he had last properly talked to three years prior returned. She seemed quieter, more reserved, as if her father's death and the intervening years had muted her spirit. But Riza emerged from the impenetrable cocoon of grief and shock that the preceding days had woven around her.
Perhaps she was the one making the winter day warm.
He smiled at her tenacity, her courage. Just earlier this morning she had seemed a husk of herself, of her quiet confidence. It so happily surprised him that a low, "All right," was all he could manage in response. He still wasn't fully convinced, but how could he critique her determination?
He pulled one of his cards from his jacket pocket. "But if you ever need any help—anything at all—don't hesitate to contact me at the Military Academy." He tried to squeeze as much genuine emotion into his words. Truly, he'd do anything at all for her. And not at all because she was the last link to flame alchemy. "I'll most likely stay in the military for the rest of my life."
Her quiet voice wavered with concern and awe as she held his information card in hand. She studied it before meeting his gaze. "For the rest of your life?"
He nodded in affirmation.
And then she had cried out "please don't get killed," and something in his heart shattered.
She still cared.
"Don't jinx me," he muttered, unable to hide his shock at her gall to say such a thing outright. But then he noticed her embarrassed look and softened. She had been nothing but genuine. "I can't promise that."
He went on. "In this profession, you never know when you'll wind up dead in a ditch somewhere, like a piece of garbage. But if I could help strengthen this country's foundation and protect its people with my hands, that would make me very happy." He stammered and found his face hot against the chilly air as he nervously told her his plans for the future, the one he hoped to build. With each word he felt he was just some overly-romantic boy with a silly notion of good and evil. She'd see right through him and laugh. "That's why I studied alchemy. But in the end, he never taught me his secrets."
"Sorry," he said, scratching his neck. "I must be boring you with my naïve dreams." Their eyes met. She must think him stupid. He looked away and scratched at his neck. He was silly, juvenile—
"Not at all."
And then she allayed all his fears all his doubts with six words. "I think that's a wonderful dream."
The insults her father had lobbed at him were nothing. Nothing compared to her words. Hers was the approval he was seeking.
He gasped slightly, amazed.
If he had been a braver and a stupider man, he would have asked her to return with him to Central. He would have put her up at his Aunt's until he had graduated. And then, if his life were simple and perfect, he'd—he'd… He felt his face flush again. But how else would he take care of her?
But the silence was hers so he waited on her words.
"My father didn't take his secrets to the grave."
Another feeling stirred low in his guts. He couldn't help it, his heart had begun racing once more. Just as Master Hawkeye had said; she held the secrets to flame alchemy.
"He told me he hid them in a code that's indecipherable to the average alchemist."
And then she had murmured cryptically, "No, not on paper anyway."
"So how did he record his legacy?"
"That dream, Mr. Mustang…"
Oh how he hated when she called him that. Mustang was a title that belonged to his military life. And he just wanted to be Roy in her eyes.
"Can I trust you—" she stuttered for a moment before finding her voice again. "c—can I trust you with the notes so that I can help make it come true? Can I truly believe there will be a future in which everyone can live happily?"
And Roy found himself momentarily forgetting the dream he had just been telling her about. Because the only happy future he cared about was the one he wanted to share with her.
She had invited him back to her home, or he had asked if he could walk her back. He had forgotten the conversation, only the two of them stammering and looking anywhere but at each other. Whatever the case, both of them were blushing as she threaded her arm through the one he had extended as they began the long walk up the hill from the cemetery. But perhaps it was just the sting of a winter's breeze adding color to their cheeks.
They walked fast and he buzzed with a restless excitement. It was all he could do to remember to slow his pace to match Riza's smaller steps. He wanted to run to meet his future, reach it as soon as he could.
He was going to learn the secrets to flame alchemy. And he was going to spend a few more hours of conversation with Riza Hawkeye. Yet the chill wind left him cold. And the house, its wintry husk of ivy clinging to the crumbling façade and lifeless windows ogling him, made him fear he'd never feel warmth again. Was the future he was condemning her to? Was he going to take the secrets she had hidden and then leave her to this prison?
His excitement had mutated into stomach-dissolving unease. So, when they had returned to the dim, stale kitchen, he had stood transfixed by the under-fed fire as Riza bustled about the kitchen, breathing warmth and color into the room with her every move. She opened the curtains and welcomed warm slants of yellow that stepped across flagstone floor. The trembling shadows of the rose bushes in the garden, shook themselves as if begging to be let in too. She set water for tea and a large pot of stew on the stove. An entire solstice feast, smelling of mulled wine and bourguignon, began to bubble.
Standing in his socks by the fire, he felt less frozen. Yet the relief was only physical. The peculiar embarrassment from sharing his dreams, and a nervous anticipation of receiving her father's notes still gnawed at him. He looked again at the fire and imagined moving it, siphoning it into a thin rope and pulling it out of the fireplace. What knowledge would allow him to control it?
Perhaps the kitchen cabinets held liquor. Finding a dusty bottle of what looked like whiskey on a shelf by the stove, he opened cabinets until he found two glass tumblers. He could hear her now at the fire, shoveling some of the old ash out while adding a few more logs to the flickering blaze.
He poured himself a glass before pouring her one as well. Was this what domestic life was like? The wordless rhythm shared between husband and wife? Once he received his assignment for his life after commissioning, he'd need to begin looking at apartments. Was he silly to dream of looking for apartments with the space for two bureaus in the bedroom?
By the time he had turned around and wiped the dust from his eyes, she had set two steaming mugs of tea on the table. Violins wailed and sang from the gramophone in the corner, and the shadows from the hearth danced in time to the melancholy Drachman folk tune.
"I don't know if you drink whiskey but I poured you some..." He trailed off, suddenly overwhelmed by the intimacy of her name.
"Thank you, Mr. Mustang."
"Roy." He corrected.
She accepted the glass silently with both hands, nodding in thanks. Color had returned to her pale skin. Still trembling from the cold, she sat down across from him, the length of the empty table and the pristine tablecloth separating them. They had barely talked at meals in the past two days, barely communicating except to exchange one-word answers about funeral arrangements. Once her father died, a sudden rupture had grown between them, or the four years of separation had proved too much and they made themselves known, all at once. Yet here she was now, sitting near him and even offering a weak smile. "The soup should just be a few more minutes."
"Thanks for leaving dinner out for me the past few nights."
"It was nothing."
"It meant a lot to me."
She glanced away blushing and sipped at the whiskey hesitantly, wincing at the first swallow. She had probably accepted it out of kindness, he feared, or a sort of peer pressure, a need to impress him.
And now she found that it burned.
"You can call me Riza," she said quietly. The smile faltered.
Then suddenly she downed her entire glass.
He startled, almost standing up and reaching for her.
She grimaced as she opened her mouth, unspoken words as much as the ghost of whiskey bitter in her mouth. Riza repeated what she had mentioned by the graveside.
"My Father had left me his secrets. But not on paper. He said he couldn't risk the destruction of his life's work." Something about repeating her father's explanation darkened her eyes and hollowed her voice. The way she said these things terrified her. And that terrified him.
"So where are they?" he wondered aloud. "Do you know how to decipher them too? Or is it that you just know where they're hidden?"
"They are hidden. I mean, they're not somewhere the average person would expect to find them." Her downcast eyes never left the empty glass in her hands. "There's no reason for me to keep them from you any longer. I'll go and prepare." She stood up.
"Do I need to follow you somewhere?" He rose to his feet, expecting her to lead him to one of the house's locked rooms, open a journal hidden underneath a floorboard or perhaps a code hidden in a locket. Her eyes dropped to the floor and he watched her fiddle nervously with the lace neckline of her dress.
"Wait a moment, please."
After fiddling with the stove, she darted into the shadowy hallway. The stairs squeaked as she skittered up them.
Confused, he fell back into his chair and finished his drink. The grandfather clock chimed four. The endless seconds followed, swelling into minutes.
No noise from the upstairs made its way to the kitchen. He downed a large anxious sip from the whiskey bottle and stood up, his chair scraping against the tiled floor. He walked toward the stairs by the front entrance. The shadows of the second floor poured down the stairs. No sign of Riza.
He glanced up at the sound of a distant door. Riza descended the steps, her eyes downcast. She didn't seem to see him as she passed him to walk into the front parlor. In the light he noticed that her face had grown even paler and she was wearing clothes she hadn't been before. Gone was the elegant black dress and the bolero she had worn for the funeral. In their stead were a long woolen skirt and a pale shirt whose collar she clutched at with bloodless fingers.
"What did you change for?" He watched her and paced into the parlor, utterly confused. "Is the research outside? Should I put my coat back on?"
But she didn't speak. She stood in the parlor as if waiting for him.
"Where are your father's notes?"
She drew a shuddering breath and turned away from him.
She stepped into a patch of feeble winter sunshine, turning toward the window like a sun-starved flower. He couldn't see what she was doing but she seemed to be shaking, fiddling with something in her hands.
And then she said his name—his first name—for the first time.
"Roy."
His heart stopped. He stepped closer, a thousand questions ready to pour out of his open mouth.
"Can I trust you with my back?"
He remembered the shock and horror that had surged through him as the tattoo blossomed on Riza's back, the inky lines expanding as the pale shirt dropped to her waist. The whiskey rose to his throat.
He reached a trembling finger to read the text, before stopping himself. She shuddered, as if anticipating his touch.
He had taken advantage of her. Not in the colloquial, physical sense, but in a far more visceral, far crueler way. And he had abused those secrets, the ones she had entrusted him. And he had bared them to the world. It would have been horrible if he had just used the knowledge to fuel his personal ambition. That would have been despicable enough. But he had now used them to kill.
Hughes must have thought he had drowned in the recollection flooding his brain. He stared at his friend with visible concern.
"Her father died," he told Hughes flatly, taking another swig. "And his dying words to me were to watch over her." He paused a moment before adding, "this man begged me with his last breath to do that."
Hughes seemed unsure of what to say. "When did that happen, again?"
"At the start of our last winter break in the Academy, a bit before the New Year."
"You seemed so cut up about something, we all thought it. But you'd never say."
That sudden need for connection, a wave of loneliness swept over him again. It compelled him to honesty.
"Those were his last words. He begged me. And he had just admonished me, considered me unworthy because I had entered the Academy. Yet he still begged me to take care of h—" Roy trailed off, suddenly distracted by another thread of thoughts.
"I had promised that I'd take care of her."
He downed his glass. And whispered something he had worked so hard to keep locked away as nothing more than an abstraction in his brain, something less than a feeling, less than a thought, and certainly less than words.
"I—I was going to marry her."
Hughes gasped or coughed, Roy wasn't really sure.
"Did you promise her, or did you promise yourself?"
Roy startled, as if awoken by a log cracking apart on a fire, by Hughes' incisive question. He met Hughes's gaze and found eyes brimming with quiet understanding.
"Does it even matter?"
His voice was a hoarse whisper.
He tried to think, piece together the reality of their relationship. Everything had been left curiously unsaid, as if both were always waiting for a future moment when it would feel right, when the timing would allow them to dream of a future. And what exactly had they promised, and what had remained unspoken, implied?
Yet he was sure she reciprocated his feelings. He was an expert of reading emotions, after all. He had grown up surrounded by women and relationships and passions.
But what had followed that? Nothing. Perhaps she had forgotten him. Or thought that he had forgotten her. Or maybe, just maybe, she was waiting for him—
"Boys! What's up?" A soldier had stumbled up to the bar and clapped his hands over Roy and Hughes' shoulders for balance. His breath was all beer. He, along with the throng of drunken men following behind him, drowned their conversation with deafening chatter.
"Just commiserating about work, Caldicott," Hughes responded, extricating himself from the man's grip as he stood up. Roy slumped further onto the bar, not interested in the least in talking with old classmates.
"Wait, this is Mustang!" another man from the drunken chorus, Evans, yelled, sloshing his glass of ale over Roy's shoulders. "The one and only Flame Alchemist! The evening papers were saying you just roasted Jenkins today. Man, it must be cool to be an alchemist. "
"Yo Evans," yelled another voice Roy couldn't identify. "Back off Mustang, he's a field-grade officer now. I'm sure he doesn't want to be drinking with us inconsequential Second Lieutenants anyway." This had to be Robbin. Robbin had tried to make every aspect of his Academy experience miserable. "Isn't that right, Major State Alchemist sir?" he jeered at Mustang. "Oh wait, you're not actually a Major, Lieutenant."
Hughes seemed to step toward Robbin, but Roy grabbed at the back of his shirt, twisting his hand into the fabric until he sat back down. The last thing Roy needed was a bar fight to clean up right in front of his commanding officer who he was sure was still playing pool with some other Lieutenant Colonels.
"This is practically all of the Year Four, Floor 3!" Another voice shouted. "Damn, life was better back in the Academy."
"Who are we missing?" Caldicott asked, peering around and counting faces with glazed eyes that followed his jumping finger.
"Watson's up north," someone replied.
"Funny, we were just talking about Watson—" Hughes said.
Roy elbowed him in the ribs.
The largely one-sided drunken conversation continued for several minutes until one of the men actually had gotten into a fight and one of the bartenders had kicked the group of them out. Roy had watched the ordeal with bated breath, terrified that somehow he'd get involved, somehow be implicated. But that moment never arrived.
"Thank God." Hughes said, slouching against the wall once the last of them had been pushed through the door into the night. "I thought they'd never leave." He leaned forward, catching the other bartender's eye behind his glinting glasses.
Roy murmured in agreement, not even hearing Hughes' words. What had Caldicott said? "The evening papers were saying you just roasted Jenkins today."
So it had already made the papers.
The bartender placed two tumblers of liquor between the two soldiers.
"I don't have any more money on me, Hughes," Roy said, slumping forward with downcast eyes. One of the bar top candles had extinguished itself in a plume of fading smoke.
"These are on me." Hughes slid one of the glasses toward Roy and raised his own, waiting for him to take the first drink. "I heard what happened…with Patrick Jenkins."
Roy froze. Hughes knew. He knew what had happened.
The initial reports had already been typed and circulated around West City. By morning, all of Amestris would know of the young Flame Alchemist who had killed the notorious serial killer Patrick Jenkins.
Was it better that Hughes had brought it up first or would it have been better if Roy had spent the rest of the night drowning in silent anguish, gasping for the right words and grasping at the right moment to tell him? Would it have been like killing twice, if he had had to tell Hughes about it? He couldn't decide.
"Do you know what happens when a human being burns?" Roy asked, before downing the rest of the glass and raising his finger in the direction of the bartender, asking for another.
The silent horror in Roy's voice sliced into Hughes like an icy knife in his back.
"Fat dissolves in the air. You can taste it on your lips and feel it in your nose." He stared ahead, at the brick wall and the bottles in front of it. "I can't get the feeling to go away. I—I burned the perp alive." He felt himself begin to shake. "I'd never used the flames on a person before, and yet I didn't have my pistol, and he was about to shoot, and…"
"Roy," Hughes hissed, leaning forward and fixing him with a fierce gaze, "I'm in West City because my unit was tasked with finding him. I saw him. It was my squad that shipped him back to Central for the autopsy."
"You saw it?" the bile rose again. "I think I'm going to be sick."
Hughes grabbed his shoulder, "Roy Mustang, you listen to me. Patrick Jenkins murdered seven people in West City alone, four of them underage girls. Did you hear what he did to some of them both before and after he stabbed them? That should make you sick. He deserved every moment of agony you inflicted."
"You didn't hear the screams. No one does."
"He needed to be stopped, Roy. You just had the misfortune of being the one to stop him."
The silence flickered around them. The bar had emptied significantly. Shadows and smoke above empty votive holders was all that was left of the night. Where had it gone?
Roy sipped at the glass that the bartender had just placed in front of him. It burned. He heard ice clink in a distant glass.
Hughes tried to revive the conversation with a switch to lighter topics. "Hey, you said she lived in the western countryside? Is that why you put in for the position out here?"
"No, I wanted Central to be honest. She seemed to suggest she was going to move to Central, but I don't know if she has. To be honest, we haven't talked in over two years."
"Yeah, if you had gone to Central with me, we could be out drinking every weekend instead of just whenever they send my sorry ass out here to investigate tractor theft and cow slaughter. Why'd you have to go live out here in Hicksville, anyway? "
"Cow slaughter? Shut up, Hughes, there aren't cows in West City." Roy found himself laughing. "And don't insult West bum-fuck, I rather enjoy being bored to death by uncultured swine on a day-to-day basis."
Somehow Hughes had made him want to talk again. Somehow he had made him laugh for the first time in what felt like weeks. "So this Gracia you mentioned, you just me her last week, correct? Yet you're already obsessed with her and you still have the audacity to tease me about girls."
"Don't you dare mock my feelings for Gracia! If you met her, you'd know she was the most beautiful and amazing girl ever to walk this planet."
"Picked out a ring already, have you?"
"No, but maybe next week," Hughes said seriously. "I need to find out if her quiches are any good."
"Well try not to get married in the next two months. I'm all out of leave at the moment."
"Roy Mustang, I would not force the girl of my dreams to plan the wedding of her dreams in two months. What sort of dirtbag do you take me for?" Hughes set down his glass as he huffed in mock indignation. "But you should come to Central once you get more leave."
"Believe me, Hughes, I'd love to get out of this place."
"And as you know, I have quite the connections and resources." The scheming glint returned to Hughes' eyes and a smug smile stretched across his face. "We could find that country girl of yours and track her down. Summer's a lovely time for a wedding."
"Hughes, I'm not marrying her."
"Why not? Found someone else?"
He shook his head. "I've done something. I could never face her. You wouldn't understand but perhaps I'll explain it all to you later."
"If you tell me her name I might be able to find out a bit more about her—"
"Don't you—" Roy hissed, his voice suddenly cracking. And Hughes saw his jaw quiver and tears flicker in his eyes.
"You know what, I think it's time to find a bar with a band and do some late-night singing!" Hughes exclaimed suddenly, throwing off Roy's hand and jumping to his feet. "The night is still young and I'm—"
Roy sighed to himself before sliding off his chair and staring at Hughes, where he lay collapsed on the floor.
The drunk ruse always worked, Hughes thought, as he felt his face beginning to stick to the beer-drenched floor. Perhaps Roy had thought that his intelligence-gathering was hindered by the beer, that his skills were watered down by alcohol or distracted by the arrival of their old comrades. But no, tonight he kept track of everything.
But Hughes kept that thought and the knowledge he had gained to himself.
If he was lucky, he might be able to weasel some more information out of Roy in the taxi.
