Berthold Hawkeye is dead.
It isn't the sort of news that Roy Mustang hoped to hear upon his return to this small town for the first time in two years. The shock cuts through the dull cold of a midwinter morning in the new year, through his long black coat, even through the new, deep blue military uniform concealed beneath it. He buries the new information away at the back of his mind, as if by asking to hear it again the truth will be different.
He does want to properly ask, but instead he says:
"I'm sorry, you must be mistaken."
The old carriage driver who delivered him the news shakes his head slowly, sadly. Roy is no stranger to him, having been his passenger between the town and the Hawkeye house many times when he was Berthold's student. The old man will not lie.
"''Fraid not. Been a month since anyone's seen any sign of life in that old house. You won't find a soul there."
This should have been all that Roy needed to hear to be convinced. Cameron is a small town in the East Area, where landed families have lived for generations and everyone knows everyone else, even those who live in the outskirts, like the Hawkeyes. If they're certain about the fate of one man who hadn't left his house in years, then they must have not missed anything or anyone, living or dead. But the casual declaration of Berthold's death—the vague four-word dismissal of someone Roy knew to be highly intelligent, harsh in his honesty, and as of two years ago very much alive—defies the objective truth that it speaks of.
He doesn't press further and insists to be taken to the house. The carriage driver's face is a picture of grim pity, with a knowing look that invites Roy to ask any question he might still have before he regrets anything. But Roy doesn't take the invitation. His mouth turns dry and runs out of words, and it stays that way throughout their long, uncomfortably quiet trip. He no longer wants to hear anything else on the matter. He might not be able to accept it until he has seen it for himself.
Even after two years at the Amestris State Military Academy, Roy retains a perfect memory of the Hawkeye house's exterior, from the shadow it casts forward at sunrise, to the paint and wooden trim worn away by time long before he first came here, to the firmness of the stone-paved path that he takes up to the front door. If he were to observe only these features, Roy would still be able to convince himself that he is imagining the eeriness that hangs above the house. No doubt that the house would be visibly stripped bare, its windows and front door boarded up if Berthold truly has died.
And then it hits him. The first harrowing sign that something terrible has happened.
It's the smell of the house, how it seems to have lingered in the past month, greeting only the most insistent of visitors who approach the front door. Smoke, wood, paper—it's faint, but its effect sweeps over Roy as he crosses the threshold, potent enough to sting his eyes a little. Something has burned here—much of it. Dread fills Roy's chest as he realizes which room in the house could produce such a smell upon burning. He breaks into a run through the ground floor and up the stairs, never mind the telling silence or the dust that seems to color every forgotten surface gray. The signs of lifelessness are not enough to prepare him for what lies beyond the closed, unassuming door of Berthold's study.
Roy doubles over coughing, suddenly overwhelmed as the room releases a concentration of the fumes he caught upon entry—and worse, traces of something that he is unable to describe but instinctively recognizes right away.
There isn't much of it anymore, but it's unmistakable: the sharp, filling, sickening stench of a body burnt to death.
And far too quickly, it turns into something more. It's the sweat that seeps out of his palms and the back of his neck, the goosebumps that crawl all over his body, the tingling at the back of his throat that threatens to spill out as sick at his feet.
Trembling, Roy staggers back and finds that his knees have gone weak. He slams his hand back against the wall and instinctively finds the light switch by the door as he tries to hold onto something, anything. Somehow, the smell isn't the worst of what he has come to find.
The once-polished floorboards are dulled by a dark stain of dried blood indistinguishable from scorched wood. In the middle is a dark mound that could only be what is left of his old master, a crushed and splintered mosaic of black, white, gray, and brown. What he supposes must have been ribs, arms, and legs have collapsed into a pile of snapped, disjointed bones; the only clue as to the orientation of the body is the unmistakable remaining half of a skull, with its cracked teeth and a hollow eye socket. Oddly shaped, cracked patches of skin appear here and there, and all over, the mound seems to ripple with the presence of small flies and beetles crawling in and out.
Indeed, who else can it be but Berthold? There is no one else who could have been in the study, much less died there. Besides Berthold himself, only Roy has ever had access to the room, during his alchemy lessons as a teenager—never even Berthold's young daughter.
Miss Hawkeye. Riza... how old is she again? She couldn't be any older than fifteen or sixteen. In Roy's memory, she was always shy and quiet, but easy to talk to once approached. Never drew attention to herself, always kept to some sort of routine so well that no one could ever tell what she was thinking or how she was feeling. The thought of someone like her around something so gruesome and violent makes his stomach turn.
Out in the hallway, several shaky steps out the door of the study, Roy swallows back his nausea. It takes him a moment or two to clear his head, and once he can breathe again, he knows where she would be if she were still at the house. He cautiously approaches a door at the end of the hallway; if his memory serves him right, then he'll find her room behind it.
"Miss Hawkeye?"
He knows in his heart that he will be met only with silence, that by now she would have come to him and told him everything he needed to know if she were anywhere in the house, but calling for her—for anyone, anything that could help him make sense of what he's just seen—feels like much-needed release.
"Riza?"
Roy runs the last couple of steps to her room, then freezes as soon as he grabs the doorknob. Real, gut-wrenching fear fills him for the first time since he arrived at the house, haunting him from the horrific scene he has just left in Berthold's study. A voice at the back of his head screams some fate worse than, say, witnessing her father's death. No, no. Perhaps she was in town when it happened. Perhaps she was home, but managed to escape from whatever killed her father. But where is she now?
He finally opens the door and steps inside.
The old carriage driver is still out by the roadside by the time Roy has finally composed himself somewhat and emerged from the house an hour later. He feels embarrassed, recognizing the favor that the old man has done him by keeping him company, but at the same time relieved that there is someone who could possibly answer some of his more burning questions right away. He approaches the old man, who looks up with a jump and appears slightly disoriented, as though he has just woken up from a nap.
"Sorry you had to see what you did," says the carriage driver, yawning. "Never saw it myself, but I did hear talk. Poor fella. And that young lady…"
Roy is still breathing heavily. "What exactly happened?"
"The folks about these parts say it was an accident. You know old Hawkeye, with his flame alchemy and all." The carriage driver seems to hesitate for a moment, then he sighs. "I doubt it was that, really. Old Hawkeye's always been some strange fella. I'm thinking it mighta been his own hand that done it, you know?"
"You're not saying…?"
The carriage driver draws a line across his own neck with one thumb, making a crackling sound with his mouth as he does so. "Just like that. You never really know how them alchemists' minds work. 'Fact, I never understood you. Always seemed like a promising young fella, and you've gone and joined the military, eh?"
Roy nods slowly. The carriage driver continues, "That's good, making something out of yourself. Reckon you would've done better with a different teacher, though, don't you think? Someone a bit more… all right upstairs. You a State Alchemist now, then?"
The silence that follows is short but uncomfortable.
"No. No, I'm not." Roy looks back up at the old house. "I never completed my training with Master Hawkeye."
There is a painful lump that settles in his throat, maybe out of fear.
"His daughter, Riza. Where is she?"
The carriage driver purses his lips, clicks his tongue, and sighs. He averts his eyes from Roy's, and now Roy almost wishes he hadn't asked. "Ah, the young Miss Riza. 'Fraid nobody knows. No one's even seen her since before we learned about her old man, see? The state her room was in when the folks hereabouts found it… they think whatever killed old Hawkeye's done her in too."
"But there's no sign that anyone else in the house had… you know."
"Who knows? Haven't looked into these happenings myself. But everyone here knows the pretty young lady, don't they? Noticed she didn't call for no one after old Hawkeye died. Only thing I see coulda' happened, hate to say it. A real shame."
Stubbornness bristles within Roy as the carriage driver looks into the distance, as if now searching for answers himself. Roy knows he cannot blame him for drawing this conclusion so quickly. The Hawkeyes were never particularly close with their neighbors, certainly not enough for anyone to at least clear out Berthold's bones from the scene of the crime. Roy wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that he knew the family better than anyone else in the town. There are questions, he's certain, that only he is asking.
"Where to next, then?" asks the carriage driver. "'Fraid I don't have all day, 'specially since no one really comes this far out."
Roy shakes his head. "You go on ahead, mister. There are a few more things I want to see here. Thanks for your help."
The carriage driver looks at him incredulously, but thankfully doesn't prod. He simply shrugs and helps Roy unload the single heavy piece of luggage that the latter had come off the train with. He then raises his hand in a gesture that is somewhere between a wave and a salute, then trots off in the direction he and Roy had come from. Roy watches the carriage driver disappear beyond the bend, and when his surroundings are quiet and deserted once more, he returns inside the house.
He braces himself with a deep breath before returning to the study, and the smell is no less repulsive than when he first walked in. This time, Roy is able to take in the sight of the room better, avoiding the burnt, rotting distraction in the middle of it all. Gone is the handsomeness of the hardwood shelves that line the walls, the warm familiarity of the yellowing, leather-bound academic titles in every corner and every surface. Some have suffered more ruin than others; close to Berthold's corpse is an unrecognizable black and gray mass, with only curls and splinters to serve as clues that it was once wood and paper. Roy nudges the edge of the mass with his boot, and some loose ash comes disturbed, swirling an inch off the ground.
Physics, Roy notes, still knowing by heart how Berthold's books had been sorted in this room, and he sighs in lament for the material lost. He recognizes Practical Applications of Thermodynamics, an old favorite that he had often snuck to his room at night, now reduced to a small piece of deep blue leather with familiar bronze lettering.
The damage stretches out to all directions in different degrees. In the corner by the door, few of the titles in Berthold's philosophy collection were affected, their edges and bindings only singed but the rest of them otherwise salvageable. The other direction is marked off by a shelf that somehow survived a lick of flame down its blackened side; everything past it seems to be untouched. Finally, a large portion of the wall is a deep, dull black which fades upward into brown, then into the cracked and curled up edges of white paint gone yellow.
Across the room, the damage is minimal. The tops of two shelves have been blackened to coal, and on the books themselves, there seems to be no immediately visible damage. Roy marvels at the thought of a fire that had burned hot enough to reduce a man to ash and bones, but which had also left much of a room filled with wood and old, brittle books intact. This is how Roy knows right away that Berthold did not die by suicide or in an accident. Something that people do not seem to understand about alchemy is that it isn't magic but science; consciously and deliberately controlled, with very little left to chance. Given the state of his corpse, Berthold would not have survived long enough to contain the spread of the fire. He wouldn't even have been able to think through the agony of burning, or the lack of breathable air.
Berthold Hawkeye was killed.
Of this, Roy is almost certain. Berthold's proficiency with a delicate yet powerful craft such as flame alchemy is enough reason—indeed, the only one—that a recluse like him would have attracted the wrath or greed of an enemy. But with roughly a third of the books Berthold owned now lost to the same fire that killed him, Roy runs into a dead end. How is he supposed to prove that Berthold's flame alchemy research had been kept there, and how can he know whether or not it has been destroyed as well?
Roy walks around the room slowly, carefully going over title after familiar title that he spent the better part of his teenage years with. Yes, this is a start: most of these books had been written by someone else with some other expertise. Borrowed from a library, traded with other scholars, or shipped in from other countries, and never in Berthold's handwriting. Roy has read most of them, even helped catalogue them shortly before he left to join the military.
Would he have encoded his notes on a typewriter, or had someone else do it for him?
No, Roy quickly answers himself. His master was not fond of newer forms of technology, and he cannot imagine Berthold having something like flame alchemy transcribed by someone else just like that. Roy himself never saw a shadow of Berthold's flame alchemy research notes. At the very least, considering this gives him another lead; he will have to go through Berthold's personal notebooks, which he knows are kept in the master bedroom, always close by Berthold's side.
He finally allows himself to consider Riza again. Roy recalls her room, and how at first glance, it seemed normal, but slowly revealed details that begged more questions than they answered. In the middle of the room, her bed was neatly made; next to it, her wardrobe was left with its doors ajar. A few pieces of clothing had been scattered on the floor before the wardrobe, and those remaining inside lay disturbed. Her dresser was a more concerning mess, with some of the bottles on it knocked over, contents spilled and somewhat dried on the surface. And in the corner, a full-length mirror lay on its side, shattered from what Roy guessed was the impact of falling over.
There is small comfort in the thought that, whatever happened to Riza, it could not have been anywhere near what her father had suffered. She would have been left there to rot if she had also been killed. If anything, the state her room was left in is enough proof that she left the house alive. Whether she managed to get away or was abducted remains unclear.
The dresser, the mirror—these might be signs of a struggle, or of a terrified young girl crashing through her room to get away from her father's murderer. Her wardrobe, on the other hand, speaks more deliberately of a hurried escape, though not necessarily a spontaneous one. In Roy's mind, her departure unfolds in a thousand different directions:
At what point did she manage to run?
Did she meet Berthold's murderer right away, or did they give chase?
If she was caught, where did they take her?
Back in the present, Roy leans against the lone desk in the study in hopes of calming the flurry of his thoughts. Every possible scenario is followed by a sinister, pessimistic ending that he quickly buries away… but why? Why reject the worst in favor of a less certain gamble?
His eyes find Berthold's remains once again, and the sight of it offers him no clarity. And yet the somber finality of his master's fate, in contrast with the unanswered question of Riza's own and the whereabouts of Berthold's research, sparks something in him. A sudden but resolute flicker in his chest. It is the first hopeful thing Roy has felt since arriving at the house, and he takes it in carefully, but eagerly.
There is little more that Roy can do for Berthold than find out who had killed him. But as Berthold had left behind the only family he had left and a wealth of knowledge meant for only the most judicious hands, their safety—whatever their fate may be—is Roy's responsibility now. It's what Master Hawkeye would have wanted.
For his sake, Roy chooses to believe that the road ahead, illuminated by that flicker in his chest, will take him to where he needs to be.
To Riza Hawkeye, and to flame alchemy.