Living on Borrowed Time
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Author's note: mwhahaha! I've got you all asking if Eli is the one that set her up…and being the evil being I am, I'm going to make you wait for a few more chapters ;P
Chapter 21 – New Body, Old Mind
Riza watched him sleep for a little over half an hour. She wondered what he was dreaming…were they thoughts of her? 'No, they couldn't be,' she reasoned with herself, 'Nothing's changed.' It was a lie. Everything had changed. He knew how she felt, and how did he feel? She didn't know, but she was beginning to suspect that he didn't know either. It was a small consolation. Staring down at his handsome face she felt compelled to lie beside him, rest her head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat. When she'd been just a soul, and it was the dead of night, she'd done just that. She knew he wouldn't wake up and she let herself float next to him, giddy at her boldness. In a strange turn of events, she was almost sad that she once again had a body. Being just a soul had been so light, so free. Consequences were nonexistent, and she could do or say anything she pleased. 'The grass is always greener on the other side, I suppose.' She thought sadly. Quietly, she sighed and looked around Mustang's bedroom. Her eyes came to rest on his bathroom door. Hawkeye looked down at herself, suddenly remembering that she was just dressed in Roy's shirt and boxers. She felt the urge, no, the need, to take a shower. Gently she got up from where she sat on the edge of his bed and made her way into the bathroom. Quietly, she closed the door and turned on the hot water. The water heated quickly and small streams of steam began to fill the air in the bathroom. Discarding her counterpart's clothing, she slipped into the shower and stood beneath the stream of hot water. She took a deep breath of the water vapor and let the heat wash way the past week and a half. It was so strange how she felt in her body. She felt as if she'd never died…like this body was home, but something just couldn't shake the creepy feeling that it just wasn't true. She looked down at her new fingers. They were beginning to wrinkle from the exposure to the water and she studied her hands. They looked like her old hands, they even had that tiny freckle on the pinky of her left hand, but she new that this wasn't her real body…this was a body made to order. She studied the rest of herself. Her arms, her legs, her stomach, even her breasts were exactly the same as when she'd died. She even had the same small brown birthmark high on her right leg. The only thing that was slightly different was a small section of skin near her heart, it was a slightly darker shade. 'Mustang does good work…' she thought, surprised at his skill. 'The people at work won't be able to tell my new body from my old one.' Suddenly the realization dawned on her. What was she going to do? She couldn't go back to work, she wasn't alive anymore! She couldn't even pretend that it'd been an imposter, or even that she faked her own death, she'd been dropped on the front steps and no less than 30 people had been there when the paramedics had pronounced her dead. She couldn't just walk into work the next day and play dumb. 'Who died? Oh me? Well you must be mistaken!' No one would buy that! This was some life she was coming back to… 'What life?' She thought, annoyed. 'I'll never be able to leave these walls…' While the idea of living the rest of her life alongside Roy was slightly appealing, she knew she'd never be able to spend the rest of her life stuck in a house. 'Why couldn't Roy think before he acted? I was better off dead. The only consolation to this whole mess is that I'll be able to take down the Red before they hurt someone else.' The thought of the Red brought back the memories of what they did to her. The beating…the violation, the whole affair weighed heavily in her chest. Sorrow soon turned to anger, if they'd never killed her, she wouldn't be looking at a life sentence of house arrest. Hawkeye wasn't the vengeful type, but she wasn't about to sit back and let them go unpunished, she wouldn't let them kill another innocent person. They would pay.
Suddenly a knock at the door startled her out of her thoughts. "Hawkeye?" Mustang's voice called through the door, "Are you in there?"
"Yes." She called back.
"Are you coming out sometime today? You've been in there for an hour." Roy called.
"Yes, of course. I'm getting out now." She said as she turned off the faucet and wrapped herself in one of his towels. It smelled faintly of his cologne. She looked at her face in the mirror above the sink. The same red eyes of her previous body were staring back and at her and through them she could see the real her. Suddenly, she was beginning to feel a lot more at home in her new body.
Sorry the chappie's sort of short. I'm getting ready to go back to school. The next chapter should focas on them going after Red and that sort of thing. Believe it or not, but I'm getting close to the end. Oh and just in case you're confused, Hawkeye's body is exactly the same as it was when she died because it was her soul that made it a duplicate of her former body. Roy made it a body, her soul was what made it look like her. Don't like the explanation? Oh well, pretend it's my world and it works.