Before October

Hey everyone! Here is chapter 7, but it is definitely more chapter 6.5. It's an interlude chapter if you like :D And just in time for October 3rd...don't forget. Our hearts are going to break again tomorrow... *Gathers the tissues*

Let's make it a celebration instead or I'll try to... I want to bake an apple pie but I would probably burn the house down in the attempt XD

Of course a huge thank you to Ace724 for her fabulous Beta work! Where would I be without you? XD

Until next time folks. Enjoy!

Chapter 7: Come and Go

Riza Hawkeye had been attempting to distract herself, although her baking efforts had failed; the mixing bowl and kitchen utensils in her hand had yet to stir the ingredients laying blandly in the bowl.

With having two incompetent house members to contend with, she had become the sole cook in the family. But she was not a housewife. She would not stoop as low as that. She sighed, staring out of the kitchen window and down the hill towards the city. In this house, her house, perched alone on its hill, she continued to mix the cake batter, wishing the thoughts of isolation away.

There were days when she would see neither her father nor his apprentice while they were locked away in the basement working on their strange alchemical research. Roy, puzzled and apprehensive, dragged the lofty volumes of books with him daily to the basement. And then he would return upstairs momentarily to collect all of the raw materials Berthold Hawkeye demanded that he retrieve. Of course, as an apprentice given free lodgings for two years this was the least that Roy could do.

So that left all of the housework to her. But not under any circumstance was Riza a housewife or an alchemist. And this she could be grateful for.

It meant that she could speak to her father any way she wished. Especially in the recent weeks. Her father had walked with an unknown grace about him, his movements fluid as opposed to his usual stooping over. He had even shaved once or twice; he was wearing the masculine banner of pride, a banner which Roy was clueless to. These subtle changes hinted that something had happened. Riza was skeptical. From the little emotion her elusive father revealed, his change in attitude may have been through a breakthrough in his research.

Riza thought that her father had discovered how to bring his theorems of flame alchemy into the real world.

Much like her, he was a bridge of secrets, veiled in a mist of impenetrable strength. The heart, and emotions, was a weakness, so he had locked that vault and thrown the key into chaos-spurned waters the day her mother had died. Yet Riza had not succumbed to that. She could still muster a laugh and smile. But her father…

He wasn't paternal – she hadn't had a birthday present from him since her mother had died.

The year after she had passed on, leaving Riza alone with her father, had been unbearable and even though she would never have abandoned him, she had been tempted. On multiple occasions. They had rarely spoken, and the air sparked with frosty electrical tension. Roy's arrival had been a break from that tension for the Hawkeyes, and for her, it was the addition of happiness to the somber house which had always been her home. It was not until Roy's arrival that she had outwardly called it "home".

That day when Roy had stumbled to her front door in the storm and rain.

Her eyes shut as the bittersweet memory flooded through her consciousness. She was no longer surrounded by the suckle honey smell of burning candles and the sweet aroma of cake batter, and there was not silence like snow falling in the present season of winter. Instead, rain was lashing downwards from the heavens. Instead, the air was cold and frigid, lights extinguished, hovel-led in darkness. Trapped inside that house, she didn't know if it was day or night; Riza was now lingering in a memory from two years ago.

Riza's past had never been a warm place.

Riza's body had started to shiver. She had been sitting on her bed, watching the seconds drag by, and only at the count of every hour, she permitted herself a gaze out of the window over to the cemetery. It was a foolish, hopeless childhood fantasy. But it was her escape from reality. If she concentrated hard enough, she could have woken up in a world where she accepted that her mother gone.

But she refused to believe this. She refused to accept how her mother's casket had been lowered into the earth. And still Riza's mother had continued to slumber, an eternal dream which the dead could not be aroused from, despite her daughter's bitter cries into the night. What was worse…was after that day Riza had slipped into silence.

As she stared at the clock, she heard the familiar squeak of stairs and of a door opening on its hinges. She froze and stilled her breathing; her eyes became fixed at her bedroom door, afraid that her father would discover her still awake. For the clock read that this time… was the exact time between midnight and dawn. Taking not a second to grieve, Berthold Hawkeye's coping mechanism was working his mind even harder, so his research time crawled into these early hours of the morning. Even he needed to sleep though, and as the hallway stilled after its temporary disturbance, Riza's eyes returned to the clock. Seconds passed. In silence.

This time was a hellish sanctuary. While she had stared at the wooden hands of the clock inching around, there was nothing else she was required to do. But that made her think.

She thought about her gaunt frame unable to support her weight. She thought about prospects, about ideals, about every trivial matter. About the future.

But who was there to talk to? Her recluse of a father? Her mother was gone...

Riza would have cried if she had any remaining strength left to. So she let the sky do it for her.

She tucked her knees into her chest and widened her focus to the winds outside. It was a tumult outside; winds moaning sporadically with bullets of rain driving its agony. It paused for a moment to prepare its next despairing breath of ruin. Every pause and break in the storm renewed the sky with a greater strength, and it pounded the earth in a flurry of mud and water. The rhythm was soothing, and soon Riza found herself surrendering to sleep – a shitty human requirement. She only had another ten minutes to go before the clock would chime, and she could steal a look out of the window. The circle would start again.

And was her fate…just some human ideal? Some false wish which could grant her "happiness"?

Nothing had prepared her for the banging which nearly rattled the frame off of her front door. There was a pause, and the banging started again. Riza's back arched and straightened, jolted awake from the unexpected noise. A superstitious side to her had been revived. Was it...her mother? She dismissed the thought as she grabbed for the covers at the end of her bed and buried her head into her pillow, where she would make her retreat. It was a storm, and the East Area was prone to the worst.

The door was thumped at again with an alarming strength. Riza allowed herself a glance out of the window, away from the clock and covers to see dark clouds massing above, anticipating and brewing their crescendo. But Riza shuddered, wondering if the dead really could manifest from their graves…Down the stairs, along the hallway, through the kitchen to the doorway. Could it be…?

Her mother was gone though...Had she come back to answer Riza's desperate cries?

Riza shuffled out of bed like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. She made no sound. Her footsteps treaded lightly on the floorboards, taking care not to usher a sound. Their closest neighbor lived with their horses a five minutes' walk along in the next ascent of the hilly outcrop massing around East City. That neighbor said "Hello," and "Goodbye," and there was the limit of their conversations with the Hawkeyes. Someone so monotone would not be the one at their door. And the father and daughter were not situated closely to the city to be of any larger help to its citizens, planned for the convenience of undisturbed study on her father's part. Nobody in East City would come to them in an emergency. Then...who could it be? There was only one possibility. Had her wish to see her mother again been answered?

No...

Riza swallowed the anxiety welling in her throat. Loose sweat dripped off her face. But she was silent. She had reached the stairs and was staring down at the ground floor from upstairs. The stairs were entombed in darkness without an ending. As Riza adjusted her footing to land on the step without applying too much pressure (for this was the creaky step), it was swallowed into the black. Everything below her knee became invisible as she squinted, agitation commanding her cautious climb down, down, down.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Was that the door or her heart? She couldn't tell. And as she entered the kitchen, a hand on the side wall to direct her way through the dark, refusing to turn the light on in the process. She had to tread carefully towards the unknown behind the door. It could be anything. Kitchen knives were stored in the drawer to her left as her hand slid over the cold stove. Riza's fingers wrapped around the handle. As the drawer moved outwards, she loosened her grip. The knocking had stopped to be replaced with a hoarse whisper.

"Berthold Hawkeye…it's happened," a voice, hollow with emotion, echoed from outside by the front door. Riza shook her head after imagining a door talking. But the voice...didn't belong to the voice of her mother. It was masculine.

It must be a dream. She had rarely had the pleasure of lucid dreaming. So she propped herself up upon the kitchen counter and watch the door with her steadfast regard. All she had to do was wait until her brain roused from deep sleep, and she would wake up, most likely slumped against the wall in her bedroom, where she would have fallen asleep waiting for the clock to ring at every passing hour.

Her head snapped around as she heard footsteps echo through the hallway. Adrenalin controlled her actions. She grabbed the drawer, pulled it open so utensils spilled over the floor, a discordant clatter of metal clashing with metal. The sound it produced rang throughout the house.

With the knife in her hands, she stood in the middle of the kitchen, her head swiveling from one door to another, her back pressed to a wall. She would not relax her guard.

Both the front door and kitchen were unresponsive, meaning that no noise came from either direction. Riza was methodical; she had clearly heard a voice at the front door, so she moved in that direction.

Apparently having listened to her movements, a voice croaked once more. Its tone was deep, a masculine voice and Riza could clearly distinguish the trembled breaths which rasped from his body. He was surely alive, but it was a voice she had not heard before.

"Berthold Hawkeye? I need your help…" And almost begrudgingly he added, "please."

Despite not asking for her help directly, Riza was disconcerted; nobody asked her for help. For she was the nothing, without even a shadow for company. But she had not spoken in a long time and had lacked the emotion to cry, to scream, to do anything. She had stood beside her father at her mother's funeral, lugubriously so to the few spectators and between them they had been unable to shed a tear. Courageous was she not. Riza Hawkeye was the remaining fragments of a pitiful soul, and beyond saving, considering that when she slept, visions of death and Hell filled her vision. Perhaps inside she was a ghost already.

"Hello? Are you okay?" The voice was followed by a weak laugh. "We can swap places if you wish. It's damn cold out here."

Here? Riza felt her hand cling tightly to her jumper, right above her heart.

She reached for the lock on her tiptoes and twisted the bolt. It was an instinctive move as Riza battled to open the door against the torrent outside. And standing huddled in a fleece soaked through carrying a bag which was naught but empty by his side, the man pulled back his hood and beamed that lack wit grin. His hair was a black mop dripping down the sides of his face, scruffy and poorly cut, while he shivered feverishly. But what surprised her most was that he couldn't have been much older than she was.

As she moved to open the door fully, the man stood where he was. He appeared to be younger than his deep voice implied; and for his age, he was short.

"This is the Hawkeye Residence I hope? I'm sorry to intrude upon you like this," he shook the rain from his hair (which was replaced with more rain a second later, making the effort pointless) as a cough which hacked through his body like his rib cage was shaking. He extended a hand bound by a sodden glove, his expression earnest and sincere. "The name is Roy Mustang."

"Did I hear you say 'Mustang'"? Riza nearly lost her footing on the ground as her father strolled into the kitchen, fully clothed with his hands intertwined behind his back. His gaze wandered absent-mindedly from the metallic utensils spilled across the floor to the knife Riza was still holding, and finally to the sodden individual who had landed on his doorstep.

"Yes, sir," Mustang bowed at Riza's father, a reverent movement which finalized with his coughing over again. "Please, sir. I know you are aware of my lineage. I'm a skilled learner and an accomplished alche-"

"You believe you hold the right to call yourself an alchemist?" Berthold mused returning a hand from behind his back to scratch his chin. "A brave notion, considering who your parents are."

"I need you to become my master, sir. I cannot go back. I'll never go back!" Rain dripped down his face, his expression neutral, and Riza caught the first look of his eyes. Frost-fire. "I'll stay and endure through any training. Nothing compares to the hell my parents forced me to call 'home'".

Instead of meeting Mustang's eye, Berthold turned to Riza, who blinked in unfamiliar surprise. The attention had turned to her. He cocked his head, ratty hair trailing down his face. "What do you think of the matter?"

She stared out of the window at the same spot she looked at every night. Even if she wished the figure of her mother would appear in front of her, and swiftly speak the words of comfort she needed to hear, Riza knew, she bloody knew that her mother was dead. She would never see her again. And yet a small part of her mind had commandeered that if she was rigorous in delivering her nightly rituals, she would be rewarded. Through the winter, through the spring, through the summer and now through the last remnants of autumn. If she looked at the clock day and night, her mother would eventually answer her silent prayers.

Riza didn't want to be alone anymore.

It had nearly been a year since her mother had been gone...

Her mother had gone.

Riza was cold. The storm was whipping frantically against the house with rain spatters targeting every part of her body. Her blonde hair was limp at her shoulders, a lifeless doll of a thing. She was so cold.

But...she was warm inside. It was like a cherry red flame had started to burn, destroying the numbness, scorching the blanket of grief that had prevented her from feeling anything. For too long.

She wanted to feel the warmth she felt inside forever. She didn't want to be a ghost constantly haunted by her past. And perhaps this man on the doorstep would be the one to save her.

"I…don't…want," she struggled for words. It seemed strange to form sentences on her tongue. She stared straight at her father. "I don't want to live like this any longer, Father."

Berthold however was examining a knife from his kitchen drawer, apparently oblivious to the presence of Riza and the young Mustang.

She instead turned to the black-haired individual. "And I don't want to swap places with you, Mr Mustang."

The memories would have continued forever. But present day Riza could smell burning and instantly snapped out of her trance. As the mixing bowl and cake batter once again commanded her line of sight instead of a younger Roy at her doorstep, her eyes narrowed. She could definitely smell fire. She was familiar to its stench all too well.

Outside of the window, parts of East City were in flames. From her place on the hill, the sight was almost romantic.

Flames...like the flames of warmth Roy had given to Riza.

"I guess this is it then. You're going to leave home soon, aren't you, dumbass?" Riza said wistfully into the still night. She pushed her baking project to the side and rolled up her sleeves to escape to her sanctuary.

"I bet you need feeding again, Dapple. I know you feel lonely sometimes too."

Won't the feeling ever go away? First her mother had left, and now Roy...

Riza wandered to the back door, and after pulling it open, she stared at East City, her eyes resting on the military campus, breathing in winter's chilling scent. "You come home and promise to stay. But then you have to go."