Seven
The little girl that steps forward is pigtails and pink dress and stubby mittens swinging from a string around her neck. She breathes through her mouth and doesn't quite make contact with Riza's bare skin.
"I don't know," the little girl says, and the tiny black-and-white creature peering over her shoulder gives a sympathetic keen. "The damage is really bad."
"Concentrate on the soft tissues," Knox says. "We can treat the fractures, but it's no use if compartment syndrome sets in."
"Hmm," the little girl replies, lifting Riza's hand with the gentle upward pressure of two fingers beneath her wrist. She hardly needs to bend down to examine Riza's palm. "I guess I could give it a try."
"I'm sorry," Riza interjects. "But you're the doctor?"
"Oh, no," the girls says brightly. "I'm May Chang. Mr. Marcoh is the doctor. I'm just an alkahestrist."
Riza looks to Knox, who is busy sorting through unlabeled vials of some clear liquid.
"And is that some sort of alchemic medical sub-specialty?"
"Yes," comes a gruff voice from the room's edge. "It's a Xingese discipline."
Riza doesn't glance so much as slide her gaze around to the Ishvalan, hunched against the doorway.
"She's healed bullet wounds for me," he says. "She can fix your hand."
He steps back, and she tracks his retreat in silence.
"I'll give you something to knock you out for a while," Knox says, barging into view. May Chang shuffles out of the way, fanning a stretch of white broadcloth over a low table. "Just relax, Lieutenant. We'll get you fixed up."
She lies back as instructed and extends her left arm. Knox digs the needle beneath her skin as light floods the room. Lamps are hung around the bed, and she squints, shrinking against the pillow.
"What are you giving me?"
"Sedative," Knox grunts. "We're short on straight painkillers at the moment, and you won't want to be awake for this."
The injection burns up her arm, and Riza closes her eyes, unwilling to watch the room fade out.
She won't remember any of it when she wakes up, but it's still nice to dream.
Roy: his hands and face and heart, split in perfect halves. From the right side grows a new left, mismatched and grotesque and unwieldy. She reaches for him, but he doesn't reach back, twisting out, spiraling away into the abyss of her unconsciousness.
Eyes open wide, she watches the sun fade up from the west and track around to the east, again and again, the world in rapid motion around while Riza stands so still. Six days, a month, six months, a year—back and back and back further until she loses count and closes her eyes, feeling the sway of trucks and trains pulling along the narrow track of her life.
"Why do we always measure it? Everyone knows that it happened."
"Because," he replies. "Because, because, because."
Roy again, compact in battle dress uniform, holding up the opposite end of a body, wrapped and ready to join his brothers beneath the desert sand. And she doesn't even bother to ask if it's one of his men—she rolls her ankle climbing out of the hole and drops, ripping her boots off with a shriek, throwing them across the yard. With a tired look, he gathers them up and puts a hand beneath her arm and lifts, and she limps on his escort into an old stable standing empty beneath the setting sun.
She doesn't want to dream about this—she doesn't want to remember it, but she can't control this. Not a participant—her lot only to remember and observe and suffer.
"See?" Roy says, pressing along the tendon for emphasis. "Just fine. You'll survive this war yet, Hawkeye."
"Who says I want to?"
Kill record: fifty in one day. Allowed off the line early because she used up even the reserve ammo. Roy is watching her with wounded wide eyes.
"Look, if it's what Kimblee said—"
Of course it's what he said, she wants to snarl. It's only ever the truth that really hurts, in her experience.
Small mercies: she leaves Roy behind at the perfectly worst moment, and opens her eyes on Hughes's quietly packed living room. Gracia has an arm around Riza's shoulders and Havoc is holding her hand and no one will let her go home.
Hughes has stepped into the kitchen to take a call, and they are all waiting. It's been four days, and someone will have to call Fuery with whatever news—his turn at the hospital, watching over the boys.
Riza already knows. She knows, and doesn't want to hear it confirmed again, but Jean's grip is tight and Gracia's arm is heavy, and somewhere in the shadows past the hallway, Elicia is sleeping, oblivious.
"I understand," Hughes is heard to say, though they all know he means the opposite. "Thank you, sir."
They hear the click of the receiver hook, and Hughes's shuddering breath, and then he shuffles into the room, head bowed.
"They're declaring it," he says, each word a heavy weight. "Officially."
"I don't understand. It's a finite space," Riza says, anchored to his couch. No one looks up. "How could you miss someone like him?"
This is not what she says. In the memory, her mouth opens and then closes, and she can't afford even the dignity of a sob. She doesn't cry, and everyone is staring at her in expectant silence.
But this is not the memory. This is a dream.
"Let me go," Riza says. "I want to let go."
But no one is listening.
When she finally does wake up, the sun is gone and so is Knox. Everyone, in fact—the room is dark and tenant-less. What she can see, from a bed shoved into one corner, bends and waves in response to her stillness: a window frame etched out by watery moonlight, a low table with pitcher and glass, her gauze-bound and splinted right hand.
She lifts her hand, to test for pain, but the room shifts down and then back up, and she has to close her eyes to stay anchored.
Standing will obviously take extra work, so she breaks the task into barely-manageable pieces—opening and closing her eyes until she's sure they are open, shifting the thin blanket off limb by limb, sliding her feet to the bed's edge. They feel swollen, and she can see dimly that no one bothered to take off her boots.
Sitting up almost ends her. First attempt failed, she rolls onto her left and pushes up with her working hand. Nauseous, she holds herself still, face buried in the crook of her left arm, right dangling limp. She presses her feet against the floorboards.
"I would not suggest that."
Not alone. She narrows his voice to a stretch of wall far opposite. His red eyes glint—she sees a flash of another pair superimposed and shudders.
"I killed hundreds of your countrymen, and you still feign pity?" she slurs. "I'm touched."
"You're of no use broken."
She slides to the edge and pushes up, swiping at the wall for balance.
"So we're friends now?"
He scoffs.
"Allies. And that's being generous."
She hardly reaches his shoulders, but it's difficult to gauge—looking up takes all her effort. Slowly, she is sliding back down the wall.
"You still wish you'd been the one to kill him."
Frowning, flashing red. The scar tissue between his eyes is pearly white. Inscrutable.
"It's okay," she says. "I wish that too."
He doesn't rise, and she drags herself through the door, careful to set her foot flat with each step.
She had expected a tent, but this is someone's home. She stumbles into the kitchen and through another door—into a yard of cracked earth and mute chickens. A thin wire fence runs along one side from the shed and then slumps, defeated, against the house corner.
The wire cuts the pad of her finger when she pushes it down, but she can't feel the blood welling up. It makes a red smear on the greying sleeve of her sweater.
Without the wall to hold her, Riza sways and shivers, squinting to make out a series of ramshackle houses, staggered in uneven rows. Every fourth or fifth window is lit by lamplight, and there is the confused hum of presence all around.
She uses fence posts to stay upright, fighting down the incessant waves of sickness. She can't remember the name of this slum, or how she got here, or what she's headed for. All she can concentrate is the stuttered rhythm of this step and next step and next and next.
Cold, and she doesn't feel it. Empty streets and empty head and empty stomach. Lurching from post to post, insides twisting. She revisits what little she can remember—red eyes, pale face, vacant smile. Explosion.
Voices rise up on her left, and Riza follows the magnetic noise. There's a tent, and a sturdy stack of crates she can slump against. A conversation, muddled in agitation.
"—mistake to put you on the detail, and I said so from the very beginning."
"What do you want from me?" Jean rasps. "I'm sorry, alright? But I would do the exact same thing over again."
"Of course you fucking would," Breda snaps back. "You don't think. You do whatever you want, with no regard for the consequences."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"You know exactly what I mean. Right after he died? Like all you were waiting for was when they put him in the ground. But never mind the right thing—Havoc's gotta be the hero!"
"You're stepping over a line," Rebecca says, hushed in warning.
Is this still the dream? Riza sees the memory assemble itself before her, the pieces that pile up and arrange for clarity: the fresh graveside, as everyone else wandered away, and she stood there still, staring down. Jean had touched her arm.
"Come on," he'd said. "We're all going to Hughes's place."
"Not yet," she'd replied. "I'm not ready yet."
But, of course:
"Come on. That's enough, now. We need to go."
Had she gone? Had she acquiesced to the pull? Had she stumbled at being turned, had she strained her neck to keep looking, to find the imprint of his missing bones beneath the earth?
Had she stood still. Had she stayed.
There's a scuffle of noise that tips Riza forward from the memory—tin cups clattering and the scrape of feet on frozen ground.
"That's enough!" Rebecca snaps. "Both of you! Hughes can sort it out when he gets here, but until then—lay off! We're not helping anything, picking at each other like this."
Breda takes some parting shot, muffled, and Riza is almost certain she hears her own name. The tent wall explodes outward, expelling Breda and Jean. Rebecca follows, holding Jean back, as they watch Breda stomp off into the darkness.
"Deep breaths," Rebecca says, rubbing Jean's arm.
"Easy for you to say," he replies, coughing. Riza is just prescient enough to shift behind the crates, but they cross to the other side of the path. Jean slumps against the lamppost, and he pulls Rebecca just close enough to rest his forehead on her shoulder. "Tell me I did the right thing."
Rebecca plants a little kiss on the crown of his head.
"I can't tell you that," she says. "Even if I knew it. And anyway, what kind of woman would I be, if I just did everything you told me?"
"The marrying kind," Jean sighs, and she runs her hands through his hair, smiling. "Still up for it?"
"Thought we weren't talking about that until we were ready."
"Now," Jean says, and his voice is muffled by her skin. "How's now?"
"Are you being serious?"
He pulls back and looks up—eye contact's important with him. Something Riza had never gotten used to.
"This is it for me. Whatever happens—after this, I'm out."
There is a red spot on Riza's knee—growing beneath her left hand, and she wipes at it a few times before remembering the broken skin of her left forefinger.
"Jean," Rebecca says softly. "What the hell are you going to do if you're not a soldier?"
He's quiet for a long moment.
"Anything else," he sighs, head falling forward. "Anything else."
Rebecca's hand cradles his neck, and Riza leaves them behind—quiet as she guesses she has to be, she half-crawls back behind the tent. She should keep going, all the way back to where she first woke up, but then she sees a quiet white truck tucked into an alley between two barns, and she stops, hands limp on either side.
They'll look for her. They'll be expecting her to be right where they left her, and they'll be upset when she isn't there. Always upset, when she fails to follow the line, when she ducks the order or goes off script or just sits there, numb, trapped between arms and hands, until finally she finds enough voice to ask permission to go home.
The truck's door sits ajar, and Riza is careful to leave no trace of blood as she opens it and climbs inside and closes the door just cracked, to let the moonlight filter in. The frost will hide her footprints.
The blanket has been left, and someone's coat to serve as pillow, and as soon as Riza slides down to the floor, the frozen weight of sleep presses between her shoulder-blades. She lies on her stomach, face towards her left—too afraid now to closely examine what might remain of her throbbing right.
Even sedated, sleep is slow to arrive, but Riza does not worry. It will come for her, as it always does.
The hum of noise fades and rises and fades again—voices and the buzz of electric lights and the crunch of footsteps moving through the night. Moonlight reveals to her a thin coat of soot on the floor of the truck, right beneath her open hand. Debris from another life, she thinks, dragging her fingertip through the particles of ash.
Circle first, then another circle inside. Two triangles, one inverted, tangled together, with the third inside upright. Earth and air, cradling flame. She remembers the words, mouthing along with his academic chant, holding the blanket to her chest and following the dip of his pen across the paper.
"Cuantum," she whispers, and, "idissolubilis qualitas reverto."
She never learned the meaning—doesn't know Xerxian but for the whisper of his lips above her back. She learned only what they taught: her father by accident or eavesdrop, and Roy by excitement and inclusion.
Her blood-blackened fingertip is an imperfect brush, but the circle is complete. The air above it shimmers and feels somehow alive. Finger to hand to arm to shoulder to heart—Riza breathes in, and there is something new about it. A second sense—or sixth—of connection between her skin and the circle, between the quiet vibration of atoms in molecules. If she moves now, something will move with her, against, in response.
Her eyes close, and she dreams, and she forgets.
She wakes again when the sedation has worn off, when every muscle is stiff and her hand screams with searing pain. There is sunlight falling over her outstretched arm, and a fine sparkling sheen of fresh snow drifting in through the half-opened door.
"Hawkeye!"
Her head is still foggy, but she remembers—Mebdo and Scar and the truck from East City. Her absence has been noted, and the echoes carry on between the rows of thin shanty walls.
"Riza, where are you?"
She doesn't respond. She turns onto her back and stares at the truck ceiling, left hand resting over her heart, breathing in air so cold it burns. The transmutation circle on her left is broken, smeared by her movement and the dusting of snow swept inside by the wind.
Two pairs of footsteps cross in front of the door and stop, and her little sliver of light wavers.
"I hope she didn't go far. It's so cold."
"She's fine. You'll see. Lieutenant can take care of herself."
"Edward? Alphonse?"
Her voice comes out a sandpaper whisper, so she pulls herself up and pushes open the door.
"Lieutenant!" Alphonse says, reaching out a hand as Riza swings her feet over the bumper and stands, unsteady from the cold. "We've been looking for you. Are you alright?"
Edward is watching her, guarded, braced for recrimination. That cut above his eye has opened again, and he looks over-tired. She doesn't care if he's too old for it—if she's stepping over some invisible line. She pulls him against her chest, one-armed, hugging tight.
"I'm fine," Riza says. "I'll be alright now."