Four
One week easily becomes two—there is apparently no one left in Central capable of denying the request of a lieutenant general. It's a struggle for Riza to remember to call him grandfather.
He's excited at her presence but still busy, so she spends most of her time alone, giving a few hours to Rebecca and a few to reviewing Eastern Command. She is not high enough in rank to merit much attention, moving without remark from officer to officer. She thinks of going to the gun range once or twice—but it is only a thought. Passing, pointless. Nothing really has changed since her promotion to Central. The halls, maybe, are a little more empty.
She is expected at dinner each night when Grumman returns, and she attends without complaint.
"I don't like the idea of you living alone out there. I wish you'd come back."
"I work for Colonel Hughes now."
And Grumman sighs, and sets down his fork, and he stares at her across the dim table, while Riza works her jaw and swallows and stares back.
"I guess I never thought you'd make a career of it. Without him."
"What else am I supposed to do?"
Being a soldier is reflex now, an instinct worked deep into the marrow of each bone. What else is she supposed to do? She tries to recall the ambitions of childhood and comes up empty—there was her father, and the house, and Roy, and nothing of consequence between the three.
Ambition was always abstract to her. Roy lived by it—an idealist, in the most impure sense, and she could never understand. Pragmatism had always carried her through the worst. There was existence before and survival after: a self subsumed beneath basic needs. Only what is necessary to get through the day—that, at least, remains unchanged, even if her motivation is lacking of late.
Riza has no desires. She drifts, seeking anchors, and when Grumman shakes his head at her silences, she closes her fingers around the watch and fixes an empty smile to her face.
Most of the time, the watch lives in a small pocket hidden in the lining of her coat. She feels its impact against her heart with every step, and every night she takes it out—to polish and to re-examine, drowning in the unspoken certainty that she has missed something perfectly, vitally simple.
Get out. Get this to her.
She conjures scenarios and dreams of it, voyeur to his last moments—the official report was clinical in description, but her dreams easily fill the gaps with detail.
She begins with a shadowy impression of Roy, waking suddenly beneath a blanket of rebar and chunked stone, coughing blood and calling out for Edward. His protests were typed out, word for word, in the report:no, hold still, Colonel, I'll get you out. She can conjure the tremble in his voice, the cracks of pressure and fear, the skin scraping off his fingertips as he scrabbles through the drifting dust.
No description of injuries, so she supplies: fractured ribs and collapsed lung, a puncture wound or two. She had seen crush injuries in Ishval—mortars bringing buildings down on the heads of whole platoons, and the pure agony of waiting for a slow death, blood bubbling from the corners of their mouths. They were told not to waste the water, but at least it seemed to quiet the suffering.
So there was the taste of blood in the back of his throat—the report may not have mentioned, but it's a detail she revisits with each conjuration. Blood, and a cough, and the swift unmistakable realization of the coming end—and only seconds to make the final choice.
She cannot remember Roy's voice. Blurry, as though through a window long-dusted from disuse, she makes his lips form words and his eyes twitch in the mockery of expression, but it's all empty. Flat affect—he instructs through detachment.
No, Fullmetal, listen to me, it's too late, get out while you can.
The point of impact, the twist of his arm over and around and then the sharp snap at an already-weakened hinge. In this, the report was unclear, and so she can only imagine every conceivable possibility. He would have been too weak for a flat hand, positioned wrong for the necessary force. A twist of rebar, a nearby brick. His sidearm, perhaps, through blunt force or ballistics. However the method, Edward stumbled out with only wires dangling below his elbow.
Lacking alchemy: useless. Rendered inert and empty and without hope. It was so easy to explain in sunlight, to give voice to assumed reasons, with Edward's hand curled into hers and his tears soaking into her handkerchief. Lying quietly still in this overlarge bed, in the darkness of her grandfather's house, it is less easy to explain, and she feels an ugly spike of hatred for Edward.
Get out. Get this to her.
Sleep is not coming. Tonight, the fourteenth since her arrival, she has run down all possibilities, exhausted every painful aberration in a storyline of which she has always known the inevitable end. She is tired of this hermitage, tired of counting ceiling tiles. She slips on boots and buttons a shirt and checks the watch in the lining pocket of her coat. Hayate yawns at her passing from his box beside the oven, but he does not rise to join her.
The outside air nips at every scrap of exposed skin. She lets her hair fall over her ears and ducks her chin past the collar of the coat, hands curled into her gloves. Her sidearm rests, cold weight and reassuring, on her right hip, as she closes the garden gate with a snap.
Hatred is unfair—it's a mixture of envy and anger she feels, and Edward is assigned the ugliest parts for no greater sin than being where she wasn't. It's not his fault—she said it, and it's truth. The only people responsible are the ones who destroyed that building, the ones who were there and never identified and whose motives remain a frustrating mystery. The newspapers were told to print about anarchists, to keep fear contained. For the most part, it seems to have worked.
As she expected, the streets are less empty this late, but she remembers most of the best back-alleys to avoid traffic. She seeks comfort from the rhythm of her feet hitting the pavement, the steady hum of electric lights, the hitch of her breath on each inhale.
"Get out," she whispers under her breath, syllables stuttered with each footstep. "Get this to her."
Again and again, emphasis on a different word each time, to see how the meaning changes. An order, a last request—a mutter of regret? Emotion should always be kept out of the report: first-person plural, past-tense, adjectives only when deemed absolutely essential.
"Get this to her. Get this to her."
The commanding verb itself so odd—so general, generic, a placeholder really, for something more. Give, take, hand off, provide, pass on, deliver.
A party of drunks spills onto the pavement ahead, and Riza steps down into the street to avoid their laughter and reaching hands. She pulls at her own coat, readjusting, hands tightened to fists, exhaling in a fog of annoyance.
So now she has fallen to parsing grammar and syntax—Roy was never over-careful in word choice, and part of her understands that this is just latent desperation. There is no secret, hidden message in such meaningless final words—and she had no right to expect more. They could never rely on words. Loving a man for more than a decade assures no secrets left unknown—there were times, especially towards the end, that Riza was sure she knew Roy better than he had ever known himself.
She loved him, and he isn't around to protest the assumption that he loved her back.
The streetlight above flickers, and Riza stops beneath. This intersection of streets is unknown to her—or, in the sweeping black veil between late night and early morning, it has become unfamiliar.
She knows better than to look lost on an empty street, and when she hears footsteps, she sets off, not overly-quick, in the opposite direction. Some of the larger public houses—the beer halls that double as hostels when their patrons are too drunk to find their way home—are still open, somewhere ahead or behind, and her eyes dart left and right, seeking the protective glow of neon. She wishes now that she had brought Hayate—that she had a scarf or thicker gloves or a crowd to melt into.
The footsteps are heavy: laborer's boots or military, evenly paced with hers. The echo makes it difficult to guess, but she'd put the wearer back about fifty paces. When she turns a corner, they follow and speed up.
"Hawkeye, wait!"
A thrill of fear masks recognition—gun already in hand, and she is just clicking off the safety when he moves into visual range. She is struck dumb.
"Hey, hi, long story—we need to get out of here," Jean Havoc says, breathless, shoving a black balaclava from his face. He extends a hand and grips her arm, as though to pull her back from the depths of the alley. Riza finds her voice.
"What—what are you—Jean, what the hell are you doing here?"
He flashes something close to a smile—tight and pained, and his words are somehow more twitchy than his agitated posture—delivered fast and sharp.
"That is an incredibly long story, and I promise that I will tell you every inch of, but we absolutely need to get the fuck out of here right now."
"No," she says, pulling free of his grip, dazed. She leaves the safety off. "Tell me now—what is going on? You went back north."
"Yeah," Jean sighs, "I didn't. Sorry, again—long story."
His gaze flits over everything but her, scanning the darkness behind her. She can only see him for his face and the tuft of hair sticking up from the static—he is otherwise indistinguishable from the building shadows: tactical black from toes to fingertips. Even the usual cigarette is missing, and he chews his lower lip, breathing hard through his nose.
"What the hell," Riza says, punctuating each word with a step away from him, "is going on? Were you following me? How did you even get here?"
"By train, and yes, and I swear I'll explain—please, Riza."
With obvious reluctance, he steps closer, following her retreat into the alley, still searching. A cold dread slips down her neck.
"Jean, what are you looking for?"
Behind him, the streetlight is extinguished in a shower of sparks.
"Run!" he shouts, but it's too late—something solid slams into Riza from behind, a massive weight knocking her flat and forcing the air from her lungs. Her sidearm skitters away across the pavement, and she hears the painful whump of Jean hitting the ground a few feet away. Her vision explodes with dancing lights and the red haze of impact.
Claws dig into her shoulder, and foul, humid breath washes across her face. Powerful limbs—paws, hands, feet—clamp down on her body, holding her tight. The weight is incredible, crushing her chest, while Riza thrashes uselessly. Only her head can move, and she twists her neck sideways to see—feathers and fur, two sets of glowing red eyes, and a long grey tongue that lolls between savage-looking teeth.
She can hear Jean, coughing and struggling against his own captor.
"Riza, listen—"
But the snap of fingers silences him. The night sky goes suddenly cloudless, and there are footsteps approaching, a sharp staccato of heavy boots. A voice rings out.
"Now—what sort of welcome was that?"
Bile rises in her throat, and Riza swallows it—at this angle, she will drown. She watches the boots—black, polished to military shine, laced up to bloused blue trousers. The boots stop, and there is a sweep of fabric as the man kneels.
Two white gloves, and red stitching, and her eyes are flooding from the pressure, but still she can see: salamander and flame. She won't raise her eyes any farther and that voice—that voice—speaks from only inches above her ear.
"I was waiting for you."
"Don't—" Jean says, but a second impact—flesh on flesh—crushes his protest.
One hand—she feels the drag of ignition cloth against her skin—curls sinuously under her chin and tilts her neck, forcing her to look.
And he is smiling at her, one eye whole and glinting red, the other warped and glowing white—the way his hair falls over his face sparks sickening-sweet memory, and her body struggles and bucks beneath the weight, miles ahead of her blank mind.
"Hello, Lieutenant," Roy whispers, lips twisted in a savage sneer. "Didn't you miss me?"