The one person we all meet in time gives Maes a final gift.
After the initial burst of pain –hazy, yet vivid, and red as…red as the blood blooming from his chest- he felt everything as if in memory. He knew he was falling, or maybe he had already fallen and he was remembering, and that thing that looked like his wife, his beautiful, adoring Gracia, stared down at him with a cold smile on its lips. A dull ache settled into his chest, and the cold ground came up to meet his back, catching him gently, and then in the blink of an eye it was over and-
And he was watching it happen, like a dream. He stood over his body, watching the angry red splotch grow across his coat, watching the thing that had ended his life shed its cruel disguise and walk off into the night, leaving him for dead.
He looked around then, at the homes and shops, the streetlamp and the telephone booth and the stars. There was a woman standing off to the right, just behind him.
"I guess I'm dead," he said slowly, because he could think of nothing else to say.
"Good guess," she said gently, sidling up beside him to look down at his body.
"How about you?" he asked, turning to face her. Maybe if he drew this out, he would awake and find it to be no more than a bad dream. "Are you dead too?"
She just smiled up at him from a face as pale as snow and said, "No Maes, and this isn't a dream."
He rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably, still watching in morbid fascination as the blood began to pool around him on the concrete. An odd, cold feeling had settled over him. His mind was going numb with the implications.
"I have a baby girl," he said quietly.
The woman sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.
"She's only five," he added, trying to keep the hysteria he was feeling from creeping into his voice.
"Come on," the woman said gently, pulling him away from his body, walking him down the street. "I'll walk with you a little ways."
Away from his physical shell, things were easier to bear. The blood on the concrete and the blank look in his eyes were the things his nightmares were made of- had been made of, anyways. Away from that, it was easy to pretend he was walking home, that he had offered to escort his companion to her door because the hour was so late, and it was, after all, the military's job to keep the citizens safe.
"It's not all that bad, you know," she said, smiling back at him as she led him through a maze of dark alleyways and lamp-lit streets. "Everyone dies. It's just a matter of when."
"Somehow that doesn't comfort me," Maes answered coldly, staring at the paving stones.
"Look at it this way," she quipped, drawing even with him and dropping an arm around his shoulders as they walked. "Your death will set in motion a series of events that will save this country from it's until-recently inevitable self-destruction. Small compensation at this exact moment, I know, but you'll see things differently once you've been dead a few decades."
Maes winced, and then let out a dejected sigh and resigned himself to his fate. It seemed there was no escaping it.
The woman stopped, pulling him to a halt with her, and looked up into his face. She tilted her head a fraction to the left and studied him, her wild black hair falling across her dark eyes.
"I like you," she pronounced finally, nodding to herself. "And I'm going to do you a small favor, since you're being such a good sport about this. You wouldn't believe the fight some people put up when they find they're due for the next life."
Maes raised an eyebrow at her, unable to think of a single favor she could do for him now that his life had ended.
"You'll see in a bit," she spoke up, hooking her thumbs in the belt-loops of her black jeans and ambling down the alleyway. "We've got a ways to go, yet."
He started after her, and she turned to him, adding, "You're lucky things are quiet tonight. Normally I wouldn't take the time out to do this, but the world's as peaceful as it's ever going to be, and you lived a good life and all…"
"Good enough, I suppose," he murmured.
"Don't beat yourself up about this," she advocated. "I know it's hard, but I can tell you're the kind of man who's going to worry more about your friends and family than you are about yourself. Whether it's a consolation or a discomfort, you should know they're going to be all right."
"How do you know that?" he couldn't help asking.
She just shrugged, smiled lazily back at him, and continued on her way.
They walked for longer than Maes had ever walked in his entire life, farther than he had ever been on his own two feet. They walked farther than time was able to take them, covering miles and miles at their slow pace in just a few hours: a journey that would have taken days for a car. He did not grow tired, and this strange woman was as good a companion as any he had ever known.
"So what should I call you?" he asked idly, when they had exhausted their store of anecdotes about career waitresses in greasy diners.
"I've got a lot of names, but I generally prefer Death," she answered after a moment's thought.
"Very forward," he said, nodding. "To the point. Keeps the less intelligent ones from getting confused, I imagine."
She laughed a little, and nodded.
"Where are we going, anyways?" he couldn't help asking, after it seemed a small eternity had passed.
"There are a couple of kids you knew, a pair of brothers," she said, stepping over a branch that had fallen onto the dirt road. "I just thought maybe you'd like to wave them off for the last time. It's going to be awhile before you see them again."
Maes could not help but smile at this. "Yeah, I guess I would like that."
He stopped suddenly, and she stopped as well, looking back at him.
"Listen," he began. "I… I know you're probably not supposed to tell people these things, but seeing as I'm already dead, and I couldn't possibly tell him or anything…" he looked up at her momentarily, and she nodded for him to continue. "You see, this friend of mine, he's got a bit of a reckless streak in him. He doesn't really think before he jumps into trouble, and he's got this crazy knack for attracting unwanted attention – honest to God, the only reason he's still alive is because his underlings watch him so closely."
She nodded again, gesturing for him to keep walking even as he spoke.
"I guess what I want to know," Maes continued, "is will I be seeing him any time soon?"
Death favored him with a small smile and said, "Roy Mustang has a good many things to accomplish in this life before he moves onto the next one," and she would speak no more on the subject.
They arrived, finally, at a train station: one of those small ones that was more for the town that was connected to it, however distantly, by the small dirt path than it was for the people on the train.
"The sun will be coming up soon," Death announced, and indeed the horizon was already pink with the prospect of dawn. "I've got a quick errand to run, so I'm just gonna leave you here. Theirs is the second train coming through here. Shouldn't be more than a few hours from now."
She left him on the platform, and took off down the dirt path.
"I'll be back before noon," she called back over her shoulder. In minutes she was out of sight.
Maes sighed, took off his jacket, and paced to cold paving stones; forty-eight paces from one end to the other. He spent hours like this, or maybe just minutes (time was slipping away form him - he could feel it), but the whistle of the first train broke him from his reverie.
It was a freight train, with only a little red caboose in the back. The faces of men, women, and children peered out from the windows, but they looked right past him, out to the countryside beyond. The train did not stop, and Maes continued pacing.
He fished a photograph out of his pocket, and gazed down at it fondly: his little girl smiled back, covered in mud from head to toe. Only her eyes, blue like her mother's broke the shades of brown.
Strange, that he should be so worried about Roy, and not Elysia. If things continued as they were, soon the whole country would be in turmoil, and his wife and daughter would be no safer than the soldiers hiding in Central while the war raged on in the east.
But Death had said his passing would prevent that.
And besides, Elysia had a wonderful, loving mother to take care of her. Roy had only his thoughts to keep him company.
"And now who's going to make sure he finds a decent wife?" Maes muttered to the picture. Elysia just continued to smile.
A second train whistle caught his attention, and Maes shoved the picture in his pocket. He left his hand there, wrapped around the keepsake, as the train whooshed by.
For a few moments he thought perhaps Death had been mistaken. Perhaps they were on a different train. Hell, they could have been sitting on the other side of this one, and he still wouldn't have seen them.
A glint of sunlight through one of the windows caught his eye. Something large and pewter-colored was sitting in the second to the last car of the train. It was shaped like armor, and across from it sat a smallish young man whose blonde hair hung to his shoulders in a braid. He was looking to his left, where Maes knew there was a pretty young woman with her long hair pulled into a ponytail, a piece of pie clutched firmly in one hand.
Edward Elric stared blankly out the window toward the upcoming train station as Winry continued to defend Lt. Colonel Hughes. Her voice had taken on the small, girlish whine she used when she knew she was right and that he wouldn't believe her anyway, and Ed had just tuned her voice out when a vision came to him.
Time slowed as their car passed the station, and there on the end, one hand in his pocket, smiling smugly and waving, was the Lieutenant Colonel. There was a certain finality in his movement that startled Ed, though he did not show it to his companions, and as soon as the vision had come it was gone.
Ed leaned out the window, and looked back at the station.
Nothing
"Ed?" Winry asked at the confused expression on his face.
"Did you see something, brother?" Al pressed when Ed did not reply.
Finally Ed said "No," and consumed the last bit of his pie piece.
He could say one thing for certain about the Lieutenant Colonel: he had married a damn good cook.
Death returned at eleven o'clock sharp, and they walked together out into the fields, away from the roads and the cars and the people. A tall tree grew in the distance, but Death did not approach it, and with a smile she turned to Maes.
"It's time," she said gently, and held out her arms.
"For what?" Maes asked, fearful now that the end had truly come.
"Not the end," she corrected. "Another beginning."
"Where are we going?" he wanted to know. She believed he had lived a good life, but that did not necessarily mean he was not damned for all eternity. Or perhaps it did. Her silence did not trouble him, in any case.
"How are we getting there?" he asked as his final appeal, looking around at the scenery. "Do you have a chariot pulled by skeleton horses? I've always wanted to see one of those."
She laughed and then stepped closer to him. Her arms came up around his shoulders, and her breath was cool and calming against his ear as she stood on her toes and whispered to him, "I'm going to carry you."
Fin
I like Death.