a/n the big reveal. this one is calmer.
but, it's...well. hang with me. it'll be okay.
"Now, if you all would give me a brief moment before we leave,"
she said so so softly.
It wasn't a brief moment.
The sun set slowly, and clouds filled the dark sky.
And, still Lieutenant Hawkeye stood. Staring her past right in the face.
Being held captive and frozen stiff by its chipping roof and neglected yard,
the caving walls and busted windows.
"I ruined her." He said.
Almost to himself.
Almost as an explanation
to the young boys beside him.
It was the only words he could say to completely sum up
what had happened to them.
What had happened to her.
What had happened inside that house that day.
The memories, the weight on her shoulders,
she had crumbled quite literally.
It took a lot to make Riza Hawkeye crumble.
Edward raised an eyebrow and glanced at him from the side of his eye.
Mustang stared at the Lieutenant, standing stone
still in front of the house. Alone.
Roy's arms were crossed. Ed expected his eyebrows to be furrowed
in the angry kind of overthinking they normally were.
Instead, his face was pale and flimsy.
Edward chewed on his cheek.
"She said you didn't hurt her," he said,
stating the only reason he hadn't killed him yet.
He assumed she meant the tattoo.
He hoped she meant the tattoo.
So, he decided to be easy of his commanding officer.
Even if he almost burnt them to a crisp.
Yeah. Wait.
Maybe he didn't deserve easy,
"I don't believe her. Her dedication to you is unhealthy
and I wouldn't be surprised if it blinded her to the truth."
"Riza-" Mustang started. He swallowed and tried again,
"The Lieutenant did not lie to you. But, truly, I've nothing but hurt her."
Ed and Al were silent. They waited patiently for the Colonel to finally unravel the
mysterious cloud of a history that constantly hovered over he and the Lieutenant.
Wondering if he was truly about to give those secrets up.
But, they had come all this way.
And, they'd already been exposed
to nearly the worst of it all.
Her tattoo.
There was no going back.
Roy told what he could muster.
"Her father was my alchemy teacher. He invented flame alchemy. I studied here."
"Yeah, I caught that," Ed fought off the tinge of bitterness.
"Then I left." He said, then paused.
The Colonel weak enough for Ed to read him like a book,
he spoke against it.
"I'm sure the Lieutenant could survive on her own. I'm sure your absence didn't do her in,"
Ed said. Was he comforting him or was he insulting him? Both probably.
Mustang didn't notice either way.
"Her father refused to teach me any longer.
I would leave without flame alchemy.
And, there was a war," Roy couldn't breath.
"I left her behind with him.
And, then he did it."
Al realized before his brother, "So her father tattooed her."
Ed steeled and snapped to Mustang for confirmation.
He didn't nod. He just stared at her,
still standing. Still stone.
"But why?" Al pleaded.
"I suppose it's a clever hiding place,"
Roy said, numb.
"That's sick," Ed said.
Mustang didn't hear him.
He watched her.
He had left her alone.
With him.
That's why.
"I came back. He died the day of. She showed me that tattoo."
He said, then nearly snorted at the thought, "She said it was voluntary."
"Yeah, right," Edward grumbled.
"Afterward, she enrolled in the Academy."
Then Ed caught on.
Then Ed understood.
"Then Ishval." Ed muttered.
Roy swallowed, "After everything that happened there…"
Everything I did, he meant.
Everything he had never told Edward.
And refused to tell him even now.
She trusted him. He became a killer.
She followed him. She became a killer.
He stopped before the remaining gruesome details hit the air.
"She asked me to burn it. No more Flame Alchemists,"
he murmured, "No more human weapons."
Human weapons, Edward thought. He wondered if he would ever fall into the same fate.
If he would ever ruin Winry and Al even more than he already had.
The same way Mustang said he ruined Hawkeye.
He supposed he couldn't avoid becoming like the bastard.
Even if he tried.
What a terrible fate.
He honestly couldn't understand how the two still stood next to each other, so broken,
their shattered pieces so mixed. But, he supposed they were so deeply intertwined
that they weren't meant to separate in the first place.
They would always have each other.
They would always have the same gruesome open wounds.
It was a comforting concept
that doubled as sick and unfair.
"We should not have come here," Roy finally said.
It was the saddest and weakest Edward had ever seen his superior.
It was so unnatural, so unbalanced, so disquieting
to see the only two people he ever saw as invincible be defeated by a stupid house.
He never realized he thought them invincible.
He never realized how much he relied on that thought.
Ed shivered, and not at all because of the incoming storm.
Mustang reached into his pocket and pulled out a bundle of loose-leaf papers,
ripped and torn and crumpled and scattered. He handed the stack to Ed and his brother
without even turning to confront the fact that the notes even existed in the first place.
He didn't want to know what they said. He had wished she had told him.
But, he didn't wish to know the details, what he maybe could have fixed.
Not now. He already knew he ruined her, adding to those charges
wouldn't help their cause moving forward.
"I hope those are worth it," Mustang murmured.
It wasn't bitter. It was genuine. Riza spent her life making sacrifices for others.
Her tattoo wasn't the first. These notes weren't the last.
She cared for Edward and Alphonse. She connected with them:
they shared the burdens of a broken family, alchemic disaster,
and an unending road grasping at some kind of redemption.
She retrieved these notes for a reason.
Faced this place for a reason.
She thought it would help them.
She needed them to succeed.
She needed them to survive, for things to be different for them.
Her father may have deteriorated very quickly.
But, he was still a genius of a kind even in his days of late.
She needed her father's research,
her efforts, to do some good.
"Thanks," Ed said to the Colonel, cautiously grasping the papers in his outstretched hand.
When he took them, Roy nodded and looked to his Lieutenant.
"We need to leave." He checked his silver pocket watch.
"We'll catch the last train going back westward south
and stay at the Rockbell's if they'll receive us."
"They'd be happy to, I'm sure of it," Al tried his best to be cheery.
It seemed out of place. But, Roy sort of appreciated it,
as much as he could,
as numb as he was.
"Thank you," Roy Mustang stepped to the house,
That awful, dreadful, torturous house.
She wouldn't do this alone.
No matter how much she fought him.
He wouldn't leave her alone.
She wouldn't do this alone.
Ed needed to repay the Lieutenant.
Even repay the Colonel.
He could fix this if only for a while, he thought.
He called out as soon as the idea came to mind.
"Wait."
Mustang looked back over his shoulder.
"Burn it down," Ed said, stepping up.
"What?"
"There's nothing left here, right? Nothing left here but pain for both of you."
Ed swallowed, "Take a page from our book. Burn the house."
Mustang's face changed. Edward couldn't see exactly what it had changed into.
It had become too dark. Thunder rumbled above, a dry storm threatened the fields.
Rain would soon complete it and their chance for a dry spark would be gone.
Mustang just turned away and finished the path to his Lieutenant.
Alphonse and Ed exchanged a glance as Mustang joined Hawkeye.
They said nothing. He breathed in, she breathed out.
And, he somehow knew he had her consent.
He pulled on a glove.
There was a snap.
Suddenly, the whole house was ablaze, an intense,
powerful fire that wouldn't linger too long but hastily break down the walls
and windows of their past. Just in time for the storm to come in.
They stood there for a long time.
Superior beside his subordinate.
There was an itch between then, Edward could even feel all the way back,
watching them from the car. Mustang wanted to hold her. He could tell.
He, personally, wouldn't admit it himself. Maybe the Colonel wouldn't either.
But, Ed would want to hold Winry. He would want to hold Al if he could,
like when he was little.
Hawkeye was never the type for holding, he supposed.
Mustang would have to settle with being side-by-side.
He supposed they had always settled for that.
Guilt lingering in his gut, Edward glanced at the notes,
hoping to justify the purpose of the broken shadows standing
stoically in front of the burning past that haunted them.
Alphonse leaned closer.
"What does it say?"
The page on top was titled an appropriate, Human Transmutation, then shortly after a paragraph
of scribbles in which he could only make out: Stone. The rumors were apparently true.
He was researching into alchemy that could perhaps bring back his wife.
And, he had heard something of a stone, the same stone they were searching for.
"He didn't even code them," Ed murmured.
He should have taken that as a hint.
He should have spotted the mental deterioration,
a state so desperate he wouldn't even protect his theories on limitless alchemic power.
He should have seen it coming.
The nightmare in the lines to follow.
Berthold Hawkeye decided to combine the two ideas, human resurrection,
and a legendary, boundless stone. Equivalent exchange would never do
if he was to bring his wife back.
Edward kicked himself for being too young to understand that
when he led his brother to Truth and lost them their bodies,
and nearly all of their hope.
"I hid the notes." The Lieutenant had said to them.
Hawkeye always at least appeared highly intelligent.
He knew she was a sharpshooter, one of the best Amestris had to offer.
The skill appears effortless, based on luck, just an aim and a pull.
But, Ed knew that her brain was quickly and subconsciously calculating multiple
intricate and multilayered trajectory equations simultaneously every time she looked through her scope.
So, Ed was sure that, even as a young girl, Hawkeye was a cut above the company.
Meaning she could understand, at least in broad strokes, what she was looking at.
After all, Edward was only eleven, maybe younger, when he began researching to bring his mother back.
He was praised as a prodigy in his craft later on. But, Ed wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility
that Hawkeye was somewhat of one too.
Perhaps she even then understood that life could not be brought back through alchemy,
that alchemy was not and would never be an all powerful art.
But, the back of the second page revealed that a young Riza Hawkeye
did not have to comprehend the most complex theories of alchemy.
Perhaps she did.
But, she didn't have to.
Not to simply read and register the sentence at the bottom.
Equivalent exchange utilizing full life sacrifice.
"Does that say what I think it does…?"
Sacrifice Riza
Edward's eyes shot open, so wide he felt his eyelids would tear.
This was absurd. Impossible.
Of course. She was scared. She had just lost her mother, and her father was plotting against her.
She was petrified. So the very intelligent girl, the cut above the company,
did what she could to save her father and save herself.
She stole his notes and stashed them away,
and prayed he would simply forget
his progress and resume his work on flame alchemy.
"Oh dear…" Alphonse quivered.
"We're not reading these. We're not using these," Ed decided.
Edward and Alphonse would not understand just how close Berthold Hawkeye
had come to the truth about the Philosopher's Stone, about limitless alchemic power
until they met Dr. Tim Marcoh.
But, in that moment, Ed quickly and subconsciously accounted the idea
to Berthold Hawkeye's insanity, the same that left the treacherous notes decoded,
the same that led him to brand his own daughter years later.
He squashed the pages in his metal hand.
Rage coursing through his body like incinerating electricity.
He had to do something.
If Hawkeye's father believed murder was the route to the Philosopher's Stone,
he was clearly crazy and the notes were rendered useless.
Not to mention that anyone who even considered
sacrificing an innocent child, much less one like the Lieutenant,
did not deserve respect, attention,
or even simple consideration
in life or death.
"We have to destroy these."
"We should give them back. " Al said, most definitely more rationally,
"We should let the Lieutenant decide."
But, Ed was too busy staring at the blaze and the shadows of his superior officers.
Mustang had given in and now braced his Lieutenant, his dear childhood friend,
closely to his chest, his face buried in her shoulder.
Her arms were tentatively wrapped around him.
She hid as deeply as possible into his chest underneath his black coat.
She was broken.
No, they couldn't let these continue to exist.
"We have to burn these too."
Rain began to drizzle from the sky.
Ed bolted toward the fire.
He didn't have much time now before the drizzle turned to a pour,
and the pour quenched the house aflame.
"Brother, wait!" Al called after him.
Roy raised his head from Riza's shoulder in a snap,
initially realizing the fact that he had been caught.
But, the bond between the Colonel and his First Lieutenant
was not the most pressing or important or relevant matter at the moment.
Formalities could burn in the fire for all he cared.
They needed to leave.
The needed to return from this,
unscathed and unwearied.
He had to hold her as tight as he could.
Apply pressure. Stop the bleeding.
It was Riza that called after the boy quietly, concerned.
"Edward?" she said. But, Ed did not turn back.
"Fullmetal." Mustang reluctantly let go of Riza,
called out as Alphonse raced after his brother,
his armor clomping through the mud.
Ed stopped in front of the fire, took one last look
at the crumpled notes in his hand.
Then he threw them as hard as he could,
right into the middle of the flames.
The three were speechless as he looked up at the sky,
the rain beginning to shower.
He turned and headed toward the car.
They needed to leave.
This place needed to burn,
alone and with their backs turned.
"We should get going. I'll call Winry from the train station."
None of them spoke for the rest of the night.
But, no one argued. It was time to leave.
It was time to move on from the past. Press forward.
Was that even possible? For even just one of the four?
It was never a certain thing.
But, they would sure as hell try to make it so.
They would sure as hell try.
oh hang in there. the next chapter is my favorite.
a happy chapter. talk to meeee. you've done great so far.
let me know how you're feeling.
reviews, follows.