Everything had happened very quickly since she and Rebecca had arrived back at the safehouse. They'd been out later than expected, and Roy wasn't happy, but wasn't able to articulate what they'd done wrong when Rebecca had challenged him on it. There hadn't been much time to argue - although Riza suspected that was because Rebecca was winning and Roy was getting more and more fed up of being on the losing side - because Roy dropped the bomb that they were going to look for where she'd been held, and that she was going with them.
"You don't think this is a good idea, do you?" Riza asked.
Rebecca was sitting on the edge of her bed - well, the bed in the safe house, Riza didn't have anything that was actually hers. It all belonged to someone else. She'd borrowed tactical gear from her, a pair of military issued trousers and a black turtleneck, with a comfortable and sturdy pair of boots.
"We need to find the place sooner rather than later," Rebecca said. "And you're the only one that knows where it is."
"That didn't answer my question." Riza pointed out, and stared at her reflection in the small mirror. Her hair was a mess, and she frowned and looked around for something to tie it back with.
"It's been less than twenty four hours since Jean almost ran you over." Rebecca pointed out, and wordlessly handed her a hair tie. "I don't think taking you out into the field is one of Mustang's great ideas."
"Does he have great ideas?" Riza asked curiously, and she swept her long blonde hair back into a ponytail, and away from her face. "I need a haircut."
"We can go tomorrow, if you want." Rebecca said. "And he's not the worst, but I'm not the person to talk to about Mustang."
"You two don't get along, do you?" Riza felt like she'd just stated the obvious, but there was obviously a history there that Riza wasn't currently privy to. It was just another piece of the puzzle that was missing.
"We have our moments when we get on fine." Rebecca said, although Riza was skeptical about whether or not that was actually true or just something that Rebecca was saying to try to convince her. "We just both really cared - care - about you, we just didn't always agree on what was the best for you."
"I'm sure I used to be able to decide that for myself." Riza said, and tried to keep the hint of bitterness out of her voice. Now there was so much she didn't know about herself, or anything else, she wasn't sure if she'd be able to order food she liked off a menu, let alone make any life choices that wouldn't backfire on her horribly.
"Maybe, but we're both obnoxious busy bodies." Rebecca said, and Riza couldn't help but smile a little bit.
It was true of Rebecca, she'd inserted herself almost seamlessly into her life and had become her friend with so much ease that it had confirmed Riza's gut instinct that this was a person she could trust. She believed her when she claimed they'd been friends before, it was an easy thing to believe, even if she couldn't remember if it was the truth.
"Here, you'll need this." Rebecca had been rummaging through her bag while Riza had let her thoughts wander, and she pulled out a shoulder holster and passed it to her. Riza slipped it on like she'd been wearing one for years, and confidently took the guns, checked them, and holstered them.
"How do I look?" Riza asked.
"Like you." Rebecca said. "If things get bad, Jean will get you out. And Mustang will protect you no matter what. They all will."
"I know." Riza said. "I'll be okay, Rebecca."
"And if you run into trouble, just shoot it." Rebecca said. "Or punch it. Or kick it in the balls. Especially if that trouble is Mustang."
Riza smiled softly at her new - but also old - friend, and hugged her quickly. It was the first time she'd touched someone willingly since Jean had almost hit her with his car. The first time someone wasn't patching her up, or checking that she was okay, the first time she'd just hugged someone that remembered her. It was quick, but genuine, and it stopped Rebecca from babbling, which had been the point.
"I'll be fine," Riza promised. "You said it yourself, they're not going to let anything happen to me."
"But if something does…" Rebecca started.
"It won't." Riza repeated. "And anyway, I'm not allowed to die. Remember?"
"Just don't forget that, okay?" She asked.
"I'm not planning on forgetting anything again." Riza said.
If it wasn't for her hair being in a ponytail, instead of a clip, it would be exactly like before. The three of them - him, Havoc, and Hawkeye - driving to a mission location had been something they'd done thousands of times. It was as normal for him as avoiding paperwork, but over the last two years her seat had been empty. His whole life had been empty. Now she was back and it was like the colour of his world had been turned back on. Everything he'd done over the past two years had been for her, rebuilding Ishval had been for her, the thought that maybe he could redeem her in death the way he never could in life had haunted him, that her decision to give him the flames would be redeemed. It had never been about him, although people had praised (and hated) him for it. Everything had been about her. About Riza.
Except, while he was honouring her memory, he'd missed the fact that she was still alive.
Something had slipped past him, past all of them, and Roy had found himself in a place beyond anger and guilt. He was torn between holding her tightly, and admitting every feeling he'd ever had towards her. Every moment of annoyance, of frustration, of lust, and love. Every secret longing he'd kept from her, he wanted her to know, to erase the regrets that had haunted him just as much as her loss. He also wanted her to leave, to disappear, to go with Rebecca somewhere and be safe, but away from him. He didn't deserve to have her around. He'd failed her once, and he knew he'd do it again and again.
Havoc pulled the car over, "This is where we ran into each other." He explained, and the three of them got out of the car, and were shortly joined by Breda and Fuery.
Riza led the way, like so many times before, and they all followed dutifully, and silently. The alleyways got filthier the further they walked, and Riza sometimes stopped to look around before taking them off in a different direction. She'd ran this path in the pouring rain, scared and alone, with no memory of him or her friends. No memory of her life. She'd ran on instinct, just to get away from whatever hell she'd been in.
Now he was asking her to go back, more than that, he'd asked her to lead them there. She was so calm, so focused, and so much like Riza that it would be so easy to let himself forget that she didn't remember them. Not that he would let himself forget that. Her memory loss was just as much his failure as her captivity, she'd had her sense of self, her reality, her very essence stripped from her because he'd believed that she was dead.
What were people if not their memories, after all?
He'd believed them when they said she'd died in the after explosion. A munition that hadn't gone off during the fight with Father, that had taken out the medical tent she'd been taken to. He shouldn't have believed them when they said there was no way of retrieving a body. He shouldn't have believed anything he'd been told.
If he hadn't believed, then she wouldn't have been lost. Roy honestly believed that.
The warehouse looked normal from the outside, which surprised Riza. She couldn't remember what it looked like as she'd ran from it, in fact, everything before she ran into Jean's car felt hazy before it settled into blank nothingness with the occasional moment of memory thrown in seemingly at random. Inside, she knew, it would be a different story.
"This is it."
Jean had positioned himself in front of her as they entered the building, and Riza suspected that Rebecca might've had something to do with it, but it meant that she couldn't see anything as they crossed the threshold into the darkness.
"Fuery, can you do something about the lights?" Jean asked, and he stood there protecting her until the lights flooded the building.
The building didn't look like a warehouse on the inside. It looked more like a hospital. Or a science lab. The smell of antiseptic and bleach filled her nostrils, and the white walls were obnoxiously bright with the light shining on them. Riza knew these walls. She knew the smell. She could remember voices, and screaming, and the desperation as she ran, and fought her way out. Riza took a deep breath.
"Follow me." She said.
If they were going to argue, they stopped at the sight of her drawing one of her guns. She pointed it down at the ground as she walked through the laboratory. Whoever had left, had done so in a hurry, as there were random papers littering the floor. Riza ignored them, and kept walking. They didn't ask where she was leading them, which was good, because Riza didn't want to say the words that were dancing around her head. She didn't want to talk about experimentation, or men in lab coats injecting her with god only knows what, or what happened when she wouldn't cooperate.
Riza never cooperated.
The door to the examination room was open, and Riza stepped into it, followed by the rest of the team. There was an examination table in the centre of the room, with straps to hold the 'patient' down, and a bright light suspended from the ceiling above it. The room was filled with medical equipment, some of it was spilled on the floor, and there was blood splatter on the walls but there wasn't a body on the ground. That was a pity.
"I think the blood was me." Riza admitted, breaking the tense silence that had fallen over them. "I think - I'm not sure - but I think they had me here when I escaped. I fought whoever was here and ran." The details were hazy, so very hazy, but she remembered blood and bright lights.
"Hawkeye - " Jean started to say something, but she waved him off.
"Lets just keep going. See if we can find some information, I think the office is this way."
Riza didn't look at their faces as she left the room. She didn't want to see their pity, or their horror, at part of what she went through. She'd shown them, and that was enough. If they were her friends, if they knew her better than she knew herself right now, they'd respect that.
There were rooms she ignored. Holding cells she didn't want to go into, or anywhere near, and Breda and Fuery went off after a quick word from Mustang to search them without her.
The office was up a flight of stairs, and it would've looked like any other office in the world if it wasn't for the chair in front of the desk, with straps designed to hold down whoever was made to sit in it. Riza had been here a few times, she thought, but she couldn't remember why or who talked to her. Just that she'd been tied into that chair.
Riza rubbed her wrists at the memory, the ghost of pressure lingered there like a physical manifestation of the memory. She holstered her gun, and went to the desk with the intention of searching through it to find anything that would explain who had done this, or why. She'd settle for anything at this point, just to understand what had happened to her. Riza wasn't looking at Roy when she heard the snap, the snap that for some reason in her head meant both fire and Mustang.
The chair in the middle of the room was on fire, and Roy's anger was all over his face. Anger at this room? At the fact that she'd been tied there? At everything this building represented? Riza was fairly sure it was all of those things, and more. Tomorrow, the gesture might be understandable. Maybe after talking it over with Rebecca, she'd understand him a bit better, but right now his anger was just getting in the way of her finding out the details of what had happened to her. "Please put that out." Riza said, calmly. "I don't want the whole building to go up before it's been searched."
The fire was out almost as quickly as it begun, and Riza nodded before she went back to searching through the desk. Jean didn't say a word to either of them.
In the end, there were boxes full of random papers, photos, and other evidence. Not just from the office, but from all over the building where they'd slipped out of files in the rush to empty the place. They must have known that it wouldn't be long before someone went looking, after she'd escaped. Breda and Fuery had taken it back to the office to be sorted, and Jean had driven her and Roy back to the safe house.
"I'm going back to Rebecca's to fill her in. You two play nice." Jean warned them, before he left them alone. The Elric's had left hours ago for their hotel, Hayate was the only other person in the building, and he was sleeping in one of the battered armchairs.
Riza flopped onto the sofa, and as an afterthought she removed the guns and placed them on the coffee table. Thoughts were rushing through her head, and she placed her head in her hands and tried to sort through it all. There were no answers, not really. Only more questions than she had before, and she already thought she had more than she could deal with.
"I'm sorry." Roy said, awkwardly, from the doorway, and she looked up at him questioningly. "For the fire."
"Oh. That." Riza said. "It's fine. It was a horrible chair."
"Did they…" Roy seemed unable to ask the question, which caused Riza to sigh.
"Tie me to it?" She asked. "Yes. I don't remember why."
"Then I take it back. I'm not sorry I set it on fire." He said, and sat down next to her. It surprised her, to have him so close. Unlike Rebecca, who didn't want to leave her alone, Roy had barely been in the same room as her since she'd been here. Riza was sure he had his reasons, even though she doubted she'd ever know what they were.
"We'll figure out what happened to you." Roy said it like it was a promise, or a vow, and somehow Riza knew he was sincere. That he would, in fact, do whatever it took to find out what happened to her. She knew that he'd go all over the country, and beyond, if it would explain what had happened. It wasn't what she wanted though. Or rather, she wanted her life back more than she wanted to find out what took it away.
"I just want my life back." She admitted. "It's not that I don't want to find out what happened. But I just want my life back. I want somewhere to live that isn't a musty safe house, I want my own money, a job, my friends. I want to remember. I just… I want my life back."
Roy put his arm around her shoulders without uttering a word, there was nothing he could say that would comfort her, but she leaned into his touch and felt warm and importantly, she felt safe. They sat like that for a while, in silence because for whatever reason, Riza didn't need him to speak to understand that he was sorry about so many things.
"If you want, I have a spare room." Roy said, quietly. "You left me most of your stuff in your will, and it's still boxed up at mine. Your things will be there, and you'll be welcome."
"You have my stuff?" She asked, surprised.
"You left it to me."
"We must have been close." For her to leave him almost everything she owned, she must have trusted him. He must have meant more to her than she could remember.
He sighed against her hair, unspoken confirmation that there was something there, a friendship that went unspoken, and she could leave it there for now and ask about it later. "If you don't mind. Then it'd be nice to stay, at least until I get my feet under me."
"I don't mind at all."