The earliest memory Riza has is of her mother. Edith Hawkeye often liked to sit at her dressing table with a young Riza on her lap, brushing the little girl's hair before styling her own. This was how their mornings began, and one day, Riza curiously noted the slight differences between herself and her mother.

Riza's own hair was short, barely growing past her ears, while her mother's grew past her shoulders, long enough to put up in an elegant knot behind her head. Riza's eyes were brown, unlike either her mother's or her father's, but while her father's eyes were stern and rather frightening to look into, her mother's eyes were a shade of blue that reminded her of the sky on a bright and sunny day.

Riza asked then, "Mother, why don't I look more like you?"

Edith, having just pinned her hair into place, seemed startled by the question. She gently tipped Riza's face by the chin up and towards her so she could look at her daughter properly. "Oh, Riza. Don't you ever wish not to look like yourself. You are beautiful just as you are."

It was a new word to Riza at that time. "B-beau… ti…?"

Edith smiled. She bent down a little to put her face right next to Riza's, and mother and daughter looked into the mirror at each other. "Beautiful is anything that brings you joy when you look at it. Like the colorful flowers that grow in our garden and at the side of the road. The nearby lake, where we swim in the summer. Trees and the blue sky and candlelight—these are all beautiful things." She tapped Riza's nose with her finger, which made Riza giggle. "You are beautiful. You bring me more joy than anything in this world, my sunshine."

"You're the most… beau-ti-ful thing in the world, mother!"

Riza said the new word slowly, but she saw how much brighter her mother's eyes became, how her smile grew when she managed it.

She meant it, and she decided that if beauty brought joy, then she hoped she could someday be as beautiful as her mother.

Riza had believed, even at the age of ten, that she understood how Berthold felt when her mother died. It was as if a dark curtain had been drawn over the world, shrouding it in shadow and taking away all beauty that was to be found in it—in flowers, the lake, the trees and the sky and warm flames. Grief was the search for beauty in a world where her mother no longer held her or brushed her hair or loved her.

But Berthold's grief only seemed to run deeper over each year that followed, to disturbing depths that Riza herself could not imagine. While she tried to keep living by seeing beauty—in the keepsakes that her mother had left behind, in herself as her mother would have wanted, in the dependable friendship she'd formed with her father's apprentice—Berthold became unreachable, giving himself away to a pursuit that had nothing to do with what he should have cared for. He was a mere trace of who he was before Edith died.

Riza supposed that this was why he did it.

"You're strong, Riza, aren't you? You're brave, like you promised your mother you would be?"

Strength is a beautiful thing.

This Riza told herself over and over, from the moment Berthold first set his needle to her skin up until she found herself lying face down on her bed when it was over, her face red and soaked with flowing tears from the searing pain. It was as if her back had been set on fire, as if her body had toiled for several days, when in truth it only took her father from morning to midnight to bestow on her the burden of his work. It was priceless, he had told her. She knew that it was as precious to him as beautiful things were to her mother.

Riza no longer wanted to be beautiful. She wanted only to be free of her father's burden.

Rebecca Catalina was unlike anyone else Riza had ever known, military academy or otherwise. When she spoke, and often it was to say something that no one else was brave or reckless enough to even think, her voice filled the entire room. When she laughed, it was catching, and it was the only thing that brought Riza joy on most days. There was an unstoppable spark in her, something that came out through her eyes and the waves of her hair and the confident way she carried herself during training and even beyond it.

It was refreshing, beautiful.

Riza hadn't smiled so much in years, between her father's death and Roy Mustang's departure with the precarious secrets she gave him and, above all, the war. For a long time, the Ishval Civil War was merely something she had often heard of, a simple story of fighting and territory and the scorching desert sun. But the more she learned of it in the academy, the less she understood about what it was all truly for—and the more terrified she was.

It didn't help that Riza and Rebecca both knew, deep down, that the war would soon come for them and march them out onto a bloodstained field. It was even worse to think that perhaps only one of them would go, and they also knew who was more likely to be deployed and face death, or worse, the burden of taking life.

It took Rebecca a long time to convince Riza to let her do something special for her, but one night, with the uncertainty of their fates hanging over their heads, Riza finally decided on the gift she wanted from her best friend.

"Rebecca, could you pierce my ears?"

Rebecca's face lit up. "Could I? I've been dying to get some earrings onto you for the longest time—they'd be perfect with a face like yours! Okay, what kind of piercings do you want?"

Riza didn't even need to think. She reached down under the bunk bed, pulled out her luggage, and rummaged through it to retrieve a small bronze tin from beneath all her things. It clattered as she returned to her spot next to Rebecca, and when she opened it, Rebecca gasped softly and cradled the tin in both hands.

"Oh, Riz, it's…"

A simple pair of enamel studs, their color a silvery lilac. They were Riza's most prized possession, one of the few non-essentials that she packed when she left for the academy, and something she had kept hidden for years long before then, before she even imagined them on herself. If there was one last thing that Riza could do for herself, one way for her to hold on to hope in the face of war, it would be wearing them. They had been her mother's favorite.

Riza simply said, "Beautiful, I know."

There are no words for the ugly, ruthless horrors of war, not now, and not then. Riza saw the worst of it in the gaping, glassy eyes of the dead, and when she looked at those she had killed herself, she loathed the fear and anger in them, a reflection of herself that she could always see even though she was never close enough to meet their gaze.

Riza ended the war with whispered apologies to the dead, to the god Ishvala even though she did not believe in him, to her mother, and yet she knew that none of it could make a difference or undo what she had done. Her sins had become a permanent mark upon her, like the bullets she had put into heaven knows how many heads, like the tattoo on her back. That curse, that burden, that thing which had turned one, then two, then three people into monsters.

"I have a favor to ask, Mustang."

It was not an act of atonement. How could it be, when it was hardly enough to pay for the blood that had been spilled by fire and bullets on the land that the dead once called home? One might even think of it as selfish, as Riza knew that it would serve only her conscience, enable her to do nothing more than feign innocence. But to destroy her father's inheritance was to come as close as she could to the young girl she was before she received it.

"Please burn this off," she implored of a horrified Roy. "Deface my back."

He agreed begrudgingly. Riza didn't care.

When it was all over, and she was once again incapacitated by an unendurable, burning pain on her back, Riza wept and screamed into her pillows—not out of agony this time, but out of catharsis and relief, then shame and regret that she ever had to bear the burden that she did in the first place. She could not tell where one emotion ended and another began, but for the first time in a long time, Riza felt as though she were welcome in her own self again.

In the years that followed, it was the scars that disfigured her back that she liked best about herself.

"Some tea?"

The blonde, blue-eyed little girl did not introduce herself to Riza right away. Riza knew who she was, however. Rockbell was not a name that anyone who had fought in Ishval would soon forget; on her part, Riza held the doomed pair of doctors in higher regard than anyone else who had been sent by the government onto the battlefield.

"I hate what you soldiers do," the girl said in a small, quivering voice. "Soldiers like you are the reason my mom and dad left during the war, and soldiers are the reason they're dead. And now, you… now, you're here to take Ed and Al away, too."

Riza was not angry or offended or hurt. Right then and there, she saw herself in the little girl—her hatred for war, her profound grief, and above all, the affection that she expressed for the boys whom Riza understood even then to be dear to the girl. And so, she spoke to the girl honestly, even when she was asked why she chose to become a soldier, a question at which Riza smiled.

"Because there's someone I have to protect."

As Riza and Roy began to leave, the girl followed them down to the front steps of the house and held her hand out to Riza.

"It's Winry."

It was an unexpected yet pleasant gesture of what Riza could only call friendship. An acknowledgment of what they had in common.

"Right," Riza responded warmly. She took Winry's hand. "Bye, Winry. I hope we meet again someday."

Riza never forgot Winry from that day on, even though there were only a few people who knew—Riza could only be certain of Rebecca—that Winry was the reason Riza decided to grow her hair out for the first time. It was a private remembrance of her young friend, someone Riza had decided that she wanted to protect too. It was also, quite simply, something that she thought she might like on herself. What better reminder was there of a kindred spirit than something beautiful?

Sometime later, when they met again, Riza was surprised to find that she too had made a lasting impression on Winry. Winry was quickly growing to be a beautiful young lady, but the most striking thing about her was that her ears had been pierced—twice more than what Riza had herself, but it brought Riza joy to see them.

Riza could not say exactly when she began to truly appreciate the beauty of simple things again, but it was enough to be able to love them.

Riza wakes up one day and sees the most beautiful thing there is in the world.

Sunshine.

On mornings like this, she does not care to recall how much time has passed since the Promised Day. She knows that its horrors are far behind them only because of what the events left on her body—the scars on her shoulder and her throat, red and noticeably raised, but long healed. Then, there's her hair, which she cut by herself only last night for no reason other than she missed having short hair more than she liked her long hair. To her surprise, she likes it now more than she used to, perhaps more than she did in the past couple of years.

And then, there's Roy. Riza doesn't know if she will ever get used to waking up with his arms around her, almost exactly as they were when they fell asleep the night before. She doesn't even remember when it began, how the battles they had been fighting turned into comfortable silences over midnight tea or wine—it doesn't really matter which—and distracting kisses while they try to cook breakfast in her apartment on a lazy weekend.

Riza does not refuse these simple, quiet joys. Not after all this time—not now that Edward and Alphonse have returned safely home to Resembool, that Fuery and Breda have been reinstated to their unit in Central with Havoc soon to follow, even that Elicia has turned a year older under Gracia's tireless care. She has never imagined peace like this for all the people she cares for, much less the peace of hearing Roy lazily whisper in her ear from behind her:

"Good morning, beautiful."

Riza swears that peace is something she will protect, something she will devote herself to for the rest of her life, until there is nothing but joy to be found everywhere, in everything.

Peace is a beautiful thing.

It is wondrous.