Archive of Our Own

Vision loss is not a reason to stay in the hospital — at least once everyone involved has given up on fixing him — and so his mostly recovered right-hand woman has come to take him home. It’s not like his eyes were literally gouged out, blood vessels and severed nerve-ends needing to be surgically addressed. It’s not like there’s anything bio-alchemy can do, either; not that Roy would have let a philosopher’s stone near him again, but now that they’ve all been destroyed, alchemically enhanced medicine isn’t exactly what it once was.

No, now that the more minor scrapes and bruises have been addressed (the cracked ribs on the mend, the lost blood replenished, the muscles in his palms stitched together, his adrenal system back to some kind of equilibrium), it’s clear that this lingering physical reminder of what they went through to save Amestris is not enough to make up for how much of an irritant he is to medical personnel.

There’s no point even in flirting with the nurses anymore, the womanising cover so clearly and completely blown. Half the country still disbelieves the capital radio station’s reporting and even the half that does believe he and Armstrong foiled a coup attempt has suddenly had reason to pay attention to his career, to listen to gossip, to develop opinions about how fast and how aggressively he was climbing. People, he has been reliably informed, are looking closely at his supposed dates and his rumoured conquests and finding, mostly, a whole lot of flowers making their way to a bar everyone now knows is run by his foster mother. At best, he looks like a doting son with a soft spot for working girls. In the wake of the horror of the Promised Day, more people are thinking of the worst, however. And that worst — which unfortunately also has the virtue of being true — is that he’s been running a whisper network disguised as an active dating life.

So much of what he has spent years setting up is worthless now. About as much use to him as the jelly in his eye sockets. Less, even, maybe, since at least the jelly is keeping him from looking like a complete ghoul. He looks ghoulish in another way, though, now that his machinations have been laid bare — and the half of the country that disbelieves the story they spun on the radio is awfully loud, conspiracy theories about how he personally killed the führer abounding.  

The hours spent, the cover cultivated — worthless. All those sexual harassment rules so very narrowly skirted, everyone smiling indulgently at the young man who only kept it in his pants because nobody wanted him to take it out — worthless. They’re not smiling, now that they think they know it was all for show. And so what if they’re wrong about the specifics? They’re right in general, which means any amount of denial can only hurt his cause.

The nurses have been particularly frosty. His former hospital roommate says this is because there’s a difference between feeling halfway flattered and halfway irritated by unwanted attention, and feeling like one has been used.

And what does it say about him, that he’s used so many innocent women (never used them, but does it make that much difference?) to further his own ends. Used so many, many people, not least of which the woman who got her throat slit for him and then put her eyes and her shoulder at his disposal anyway. What is the difference, really, between becoming führer to fulfill a dream in which you are the one keeping everyone safe, and becoming greater than god to fulfill a dream in which you are the one who matters most? Both selfish and self-aggrandising. Both unforgivably greedy.

There’s a polite half-cough that he recognises as get off your ass now, sir, and he turns instinctively toward the sound. He’ll never see the flat look that goes with the sound again, but what’s one loss among countless more? He gets off his ass.

She still hasn’t made a sound since the cough back at the hospital, but then, even when they were teenagers — which, the horrible thought arises before he can stop it, was possibly the last time he flirted out of genuine desire rather than careful calculation — she wasn’t much of a conversationalist. In the years since then, their longest talks have been in code, over telephone and radio lines, both pretending to be something they’re not.

“I’m fine, Lieutenant,” he tries, when he gets out of the car to find her hand at his elbow.

“Of course, sir,” she says. The hand stays where it is.

“I can get into my own house, you know.”

“Naturally.”

The thought occurs to him that she’s never been inside his narrow little place before, that no one has, not in all the time he’s lived here. When they’d made the move to Central, he had furnished it with the things he needed and spent most of his time at the office, what little downtime he enjoyed spent sprawled out on the Hughes’ couch or back porch or lawn. And then Maes had died, and he’d stopped letting himself have things like downtime.  

“Make yourself at home,” he tells her, and she hums that noncommittal little hum she has, the one that tells him she is listening just in case there is some important thing encoded in what he’s saying, but she’s not actually listening. Her blouse crinkles when she reaches for things; her wide pants — no, skirt; he can just picture it, calf-length and soft, elegant cut and muted colour, loose enough to hide a gun in her garter — shushes softly against his legs whenever she passes by him.

He regrets, sharply, for just a moment, that he can’t watch her bustle around his kitchen — but there’s no version of the world where that would ever be or have been possible, so he dismisses the feeling in favour of trying to subtly impose himself in her way.

She radiates calm, as always, just gently nudges him where she wants him or redirects her own path. She smells clean, neutral. The way she always smells, so much the soldier even when out of uniform.

“What are you even doing,” he finds himself asking, plaintive, more plaintive than he’d really like, but then she’s seen and heard him at his worst; he has nothing worth hiding from her, no proud illusion to shatter.

There’s a long silence in which he imagines her looking at him, taking his measure. Deciding how honest to be. He wonders, futilely, if her hair is up or down. If there’s still a scar snaking across her throat.

Finally: “Don’t want you waking the neighbours if you bark your shin, sir.”

Another beat.

“And getting things set up for your dinner. The men and I agreed that until you can be trusted to feed yourself, you’re on strict rations.”

He squawks a little at that, but then it turns out that “strict rations” means that someone — probably Gracia — has cooked a series of stews and noodle dishes for him, all of which will be good cold and none of which require him to manage a knife. He should be offended, being treated like a child or an invalid, but instead there is something more quietly (more guiltily) upsetting about being in a position in which he needs to be cared for, rather than getting to be the one to care for others.

Oh, it isn’t as though he hasn’t ever needed the men, or Gracia, or so many other people (teenage state alchemists, partially re-embodied mass-murderers, terrorists, chimeras, foreign royalty, misanthropic medical professionals, a housewife, the deathless ancient shell of a man with so much and nothing to lose). But for a while now it hasn’t felt like he’s leading the charge, setting the chessboard for the next move, and he doesn’t want to get accustomed to this new role. To its dismantled contingency plans and its concessions to the authority of his political rivals and its fucking stews.

Although, he would have to admit, if his first and only houseguest could truly read his thoughts, as he’s often half-suspected that she can, that the old role clearly wasn’t as great as he’d cracked it up to be. The accusation the Truth had levelled at him had stung, but it had been — well, true. He’d trusted, blindly, in men who’d only been trustworthy according to some bullshit metric cryptically communicated to him by an old man with his own agenda. He’d trusted his contingencies and his double-blinds, his schemes and his whisper network. And what did all that get him? He’d completely lost the capacity to care for those who had entrusted themselves to him, much less the whole country he’d been proud enough to envision under his wing. The memory of Bradley’s implacable face as he detailed just how far from Roy’s protection the men would be, just how powerless he was to shield them from lives uprooted, ruined, lost; that, he can still see.

Visual evidence of his unfulfilled promise to them. A debt unpaid, on top of the debt for their loyalty all these years. Add to that the most recent debt, the debacle of the past year, where some of them went AWOL and some of them risked their families and their livelihoods and some of them nearly died.

Can he really become worthy of their faith again? Does he have any capacity to care and to protect, now that the illusions have all been stripped away?

“I’ll be back in the morning, sir,” says the one person whose answer he already knows, hand on his elbow again.

When did he lose track of her movements around him? He is adrift in a sea of stimuli he is woefully unequipped to read, but she is patient with his illiteracy. She waits for his acknowledgement, and when he finally manages a “Sleep well, Lieutenant,” she lets herself out. The key turns in the lock, and he doesn’t want to know who she bribed to get herself one, or whether she just went ahead and replaced his security measures herself. It’s always been reassuring, to know that she can and will do anything within her very considerable power to further the cause they’d adopted when coming to terms with having been the hands and feet of genocide.

Only, well. Her power wasn’t all that considerable after all, was it? She nearly —

He has a sudden urge to call after her, to wrench open the door and tear down the hall and never let her out of his — ha! — sight ever again.

But she’s probably safer on her own.

There are no sedatives in his system. Haven’t been, in truth, for several days, but he’s realising now that, while they were slowly cycling out of his bloodstream, he had been becoming accustomed to the sounds of the hospital. In his own bed, in his own bedroom, in his own goddamn house, every sound feels new and huge and terrifying.

The dark is so very, very dark.

And that has never been a problem before, or, at least, it hasn’t since he first stared at Riza Hawkeye’s shapely, naked back and saw upon it the answer to most of the questions he had been asking for years and some he immediately vowed to never ask again.

It would be foolish to light a flame when it won’t do any good anyway. It would be foolish to light a flame when he can’t really be certain whether there’s anything flammable nearby. It would be just the thing to cement his uselessness, burning down his home on his first night out of the hospital because he was scared of the dark.

But it grates, not being able to do anything about the darkness. Jokes about rainy days aside, he’s always been a self-starter. He’s always been able to overcome difficulty, from alchemical masters who threw him out of their laboratories to a military-industrial complex corrupt enough to gleefully orchestrate at least two attempts to create philosopher’s stones en masse. Hell, he helped fight and win against a homunculus from a dead civilisation intent upon eating god.

Here, though, alone in the dark, he’s up against something he can’t manipulate into going his way or burn into oblivion, whose rules can’t be twisted back upon themselves by any of the ways he’s twisted rules to get what he wants or what he knows is right — and, there’s a terrifying thought, when did those two become different things? Was it before or after the nightmares of Ishval began to be replaced with nightmares of artificial creatures begging for their lives in the face of his vengeful wrath? Was it before or after he saw the Truth and knew he’d see nothing else again?

Alone in the dark, Roy Mustang confronts, for the first time in as long as he can remember, that he doesn’t quite know what he’s got to fight for. Or whether he’s good enough to fight for it.

In his dreams, Maes is overtaken by a black void until he turns into nothing but a voice.

“Hello?” he keeps saying. “Roy, can you hear me?”

And no matter how loud he screams back yes, Maes just asks the same question, over and over again until he wakes up.

In what he can only assume is the morning, if the slight warmth on the side of his body facing his bedroom window is any indication, there’s a gentle alto voice humming from somewhere in the house. This is, he has to assume, for his benefit; snipers don’t have unconscious habits. His stomach flips queasily at the reminder that, right now, he has none of the power necessary to care for her in return.

The least he can do is present a not-entirely-hideous view, he thinks; a well-maintained man, able to wash and dress to the standard any review officer would find minimally acceptable, the image as much a part of him as the flames, and for much longer.

This turns out to be easier imagined than done, in his new reality.

First, he is stymied by his chest of drawers. He’s dressed in the dark many times; he knows where his underwear and socks and undershirts are, knows how to find the fronts and backs of things without looking or even really thinking about it. He knows where his spare uniform is, and where in the closet his suits are hanging. But when was the last time he wore the loose felt pants that he’d bought, once upon a time, for days spent around the house? He goes through every drawer, and although he does find a shawl-collar sweater that will be much more appropriate than anything else he has to wear on his upper body, he cannot for the life of him find the pants.

Are they in a box somewhere? Did he finally get rid of them? Are they caught between layers of other clothes, where he’ll only find them if he painstakingly goes through every single item in his admittedly paltry collection of off-duty garments?

Suit pants on, from which suit he can’t tell — and, god, what colour is the sweater even? Is he clashing, horribly? He thinks it might be yellow, or brown, or some other colour that is as far from blue as he could get (because he remembers that, remembers buying the sweater for how much it did not look like his uniform, for how it made him look soft and inoffensive and not at all dangerous but what colour was it). Does it even match any of his suits? The black, the navy, the grey — and how is it that he has never processed that all his suits have the same cut, are made from the same grade of wool, so that he has no way of differentiating between them if he can’t see the goddamn colour —

Suit pants on and possibly clashing horribly with his sweater, he makes his way to wash up, and, okay, he’s brushed his teeth and combed his hair without the benefit of mirrors many times, so that’s fine, but somehow the problem of the missing pants has frazzled him and he drops his toothbrush twice and has to think hard to remember whether he has another, and, if so, where it might be.

After he has, by a stroke of luck, located the spare without emptying the whole cabinet, something possesses him to shave. He takes the sweater off and stands there in his suit pants and his military-issue undershirt and runs a soapy hand over his stubble and cuts himself with his razor (not even his chin or his cheek; his finger where he’s pulling the skin taut) and he thinks he’s got it all but then he rinses his face and runs his hand over his jaw and it is still stubbly in patches, and his stomach is growling and he forgot to bring a towel in and somehow the soap has gotten into one of his eyes and although the damn thing can’t see anymore, apparently it can still sting like hell and —

The humming cuts off, replaced by “You’re late,” the way she’s been saying it for years. Only, this time, he’s not late on purpose, he’s late because even inside his own home, which he can navigate in the dark thank you very much, he’s as useless as he used to pretend to be on rainy days.

“Your critique is noted, Lieutenant,” he snaps, more sharply than he meant to. “Where’s my fucking coffee?”

He swears he can hear her looking at him.

He looks back, or, at least, he points his face in the direction he thinks she is. Maybe he’s staring off into the corner like a sad dog, though, who knows. He feels like clawing his skin off.

“Sir,” she finally says. “It’s much too late for coffee. If you have some now, you’ll spin in manic circles all afternoon and we’ll get nothing done.”

Her voice, at least, is coming from the direction he was looking. He didn’t hear her move (not that he would, unless she wanted him to), but he doesn’t think she’d do so just to make him feel better.

“Fine,” he says. “If you’re going to mother me about this, where’s my breakfast?”

At this, she snorts out a genuine little laugh, the kind of sound only a select group of people have ever heard and one that instantly unkinks some of the knots along his spine. It’s like there’s something in his nervous system that takes that laugh to mean things cannot possibly be so bad.

“Get what you want from the fridge,” she directs, tone just shy of ordering him, within the chain of command by the barest of technicalities because insubordination to him specifically is an art form she has perfected, the normalcy of it a further balm to his tangled nerves. “We have some correspondence to address, so don’t dawdle.”

What he wants isn’t in the fridge, because he wants shitty commissary breakfast, dry sausages and black-burnt toast and slimy eggs and all, but he gets out one of the containers at random and is not hugely disappointed by its very wholesome contents, so breakfast, at least, is not a total loss. The day may already be looking up.

What correspondence they have to address turns out to be a letter to Havoc, and then to Breda, and then to Fulman, and then to Fuery, and then to Edward fucking Elric, and finally to Gracia Hughes, all of which she takes dictation for and then reads back for his correction, a pattern so familiar that, progressively, every muscle in his body relaxes.

It’s not all that different from propping his feet up atop a desk and closing his eyes, trusting that she’ll get it all down with a minimum of eye-rolling and that she’ll edit him ruthlessly while she’s at it. He quibbles over a phrase; she reworks it until they can both live with it. He begins a tangent; she says, “This paragraph was actually about how much you enjoy the noodles she sent over.”

He does close his eyes, then, and listens to the comforting skritch of her pen, the susurrus of her hand against the paper, the hushed glide of linen on linen when she recrosses her legs.

At some later point, when he is tired of just listening, he gets up and rummages in the cupboard where he keeps non-perishable snack foods — boxes of crackers, sealed foil packages of dried fruit and nuts — and returns to offer her something to eat.

“How thoughtful of you, Colonel,” she murmurs, and it’s clearly meant to be a little bit sarcastic, but nobody else is around. She’s let some fondness creep in, and the part of him that was horrified to find it resonated with Greed preens just a little. He can take care of her, in some small way; she lets him; she is fond of him for it.

But then, when she’s told him the workday is over and the door has closed behind her, he wonders a little at her indulgence. The two of them are unalike in many ways, although fewer than they used to pretend, but they are the same in the ways that matter for military officers, for the ambitions they had. One of these ways is that they don’t like waste. They don’t do things just because. So it’s unlike her, to be fond where he can hear it but no one else can. If there’s no strategic value, she must think he needs it. And maybe he does — maybe he needs an audible signal that something has changed, beyond the obvious.

He washes the day’s dishes slowly, carefully, as he runs through what it might be, what she’s pointing out to him in code, and almost drops the last glass when it occurs to him, and now that it has he cannot believe he did not think of it earlier: Grumman might opt to retire him. It’s the most logical option; it’s what Roy himself would do — at best, he’s not an asset, the way he is now. A liability, even, if you take into account the hidden ambitions that have all come to light.

Grumman would be smart to do away with him in this easiest and most explicable of ways, to cement his rule without having to worry about too many upstarts. Armstrong had gone back north even before being ordered to, a phenomenal image-management choice on her part even if it is also genuinely where she wants to be. But that doesn’t stop her from having her own ambitions, and she’s a damn sight (ha!) more equipped to pose a serious problem than Roy is right now. Yes, if he were in Grumman’s shoes, he’d eliminate himself to concentrate on frying that bigger fish and her considerably bigger army.

And what reason, really, would he have to oppose such a move? The men have all been given commendations and Grumman’s made clear they’ll have their choice of posts; they’ll be fine without Roy to protect them. Maes’ men, too; Maria Ross has been un-declared dead and given a medal, the other Armstrong will be coming back to military service (after a short, estate-maintaining leave) at least one rank improved. The Elrics are handling themselves well, since Edward’s retirement and Alphonse’s reembodiment, and General Armstrong’s Ishvalan is being talked about to handle Ishval, per the latest intelligence.

But Amestris — what’s left of her, crippled and confused and chaotic as she is — Roy thinks, Amestris still needs care. And for all that he’s been humbled, he’s still proud enough to think he knows what that care should look like.

The question, he supposes, is whether someone who nearly had a meltdown because he dropped his toothbrush is remotely qualified to give it.

This time, in his dreams, Maes watches Roy burn through an army of homunculi, a disappointed look on his face. When Roy finally gets to him, a stray ember has caught on his sleeve but somehow he doesn’t seem to realise that he’s dying even as the flames engulf him. And Roy can’t put them out because that’s not what he’s for.

His hands don’t shake when he unpacks first one drawer, then another, then the third, nor when he has to admit that it’s possible he got rid of the house pants and tugs up the suit pants instead. He doesn’t try shaving again, and although he definitely needs to wash his hair, he doesn’t try that, either, but at least toothbrushing passes without incident.

And yet somehow he’s still late.

His self-appointed secretary begins reading him reports even as he’s unpacking one of the noodle dishes for breakfast, and it takes him a minute but he gets into an eating rhythm where he doesn’t have to think about his hands and can focus entirely on her voice.

“You missed some,” she says drily, somewhere around the time the reports move from official policy change to military scuttlebutt.

“You’ll never give up nagging me,” he mourns. “Not even now that I finally have a good excuse.”

He hears the shuffle of papers, the rustle of fabric — uniform-grade cotton, today, rather than civilian cloths, and he briefly mourns the off-duty image they were making. Her silence stretches, which could mean she’s not deemed his conversational sally worthy of riposte, or it could mean she’s gathering her thoughts. God, but he wishes he could see the almost-invisible crinkle in her brow, the soft fall of her hair across her forehead. He’ll never escape the feel of it cascading over his hands as she didn’t quite bleed out against his chest.

“A good excuse for what?” she finally asks, too late for it to sound like a normal part of their conversation.

There are any number of things he could say in response to that: for fucking up something as inconsequential as getting all of the noodles into his mouth, for being clumsy by accident instead of on purpose, for needing her close so very badly.

Instead of any of them, he says, “Stay for dinner, Lieutenant.”

She snorts something halfway to a laugh and goes back to reading what by now is genuinely just gossip disguised as reports by her officious tone of voice, but, after she’s done, she does stay for dinner.

They haven’t had a meal alone together that didn’t have some kind of strategic value since — god, he realises, since they were living in her father’s house and he’d taken her on those stupid picnics just so they could get away from the oppressive darkness of the manor. It’s been too many kinds of dangerous, for years now, to be alone like this with her.

He shoves down the impulse to wonder which kinds of danger are still in play, and asks instead, “What’s the weather like?”

“Rainy,” she says. Her tone is smooth — Riza Hawkeye does not give away her secrets in the absence of compelling motivation — but he has known her a long time, and he’s never had to see her to know what her voice is saying.

He clears his throat and tries, “Oh? I must be hearing the space between the raindrops, then.”

“Perhaps you are. Your powers of perception never cease to amaze, Colonel.” There’s a laugh lurking there, and he decides he’d like to lure it out.

“I’ve always been renowned for them, but I try to stay humble.”

The laugh is barely contained now. “I have never known you to be anything but, sir. It’s almost as though you’ve hidden all your talents, so no one would suspect you of having any.”

When she was seventeen and he was twenty-two, once he got past her discomfiture at the perturbation he was causing in the delicate ecosystem that was the Hawkeye Manor, he had discovered this dry, blisteringly sarcastic sense of humour. He’d lost many a pleasurable hour provoking her into using it for no reason other than the twinned thrills of experiencing her quick mind and knowing it had been him she’d spun it into motion for.

It had been gone, by the time they met again in Ishval, one of the things that had cemented his drive to change the world, to protect her and all the other dry, sarcastic, clever girls from being ground down by the machine of injustice. And the world has changed. But although her wit had resurrected itself (no thanks to him, he’s sure) at some point in their years together at Eastern Command, he’s more conscious than ever that for all he’s done, all the pain and struggle from which he hasn’t protected her or anyone, that change hasn’t been at all what he and Hughes had prescribed.

“I’m sorry,” he says, giving up her laughter for a lost cause. “Riza.”

“I’m not all that great at small talk, either, sir” she reassures him, although she definitely knows that’s not what he meant. “But would you like to hear about how Black Hayate is coping with my neighbour’s new puppy? She desperately wants to be his friend, but he seems unsure about whether that’s a good idea.”

He accepts the reprimand and the redirect; smiles at her and imagines she’s smiling back. “He’s too young to be so suspicious! Lieutenant, you must remind him that the friendship of a beautiful woman ought never to be taken for granted.”

And there’s the laugh after all, despite all his mistakes. She says, “She’s actually quite an ugly little thing, in the most charming way possible,” and proceeds to make him forget himself entirely in the benign domestic antics of the animal world.

He dreams in vibrant colour, the homunculi back, the men dead, Amestris sacrificed, a blood-red stone forced between his lips. His hands made into a weapon for the next conquest.

Dressing mishaps avoided and hair still unwashed, he decides that the next part of the routine he needs to master under his current limitations is the coffee.

Once the little pot is filled with grounds that smell a little stale — he’s wise enough not to try to grind fresh, and anyway, he’s never been one to indulge when doing so would waste what is already available — he adds water until it touches the tip of the finger he’s hooked inside as a measuring tool, screws the pot together, and places it on the stove.

He clicks the gas on. He contemplates clapping, turning himself into an alchemical array, but that feels overly dramatic for coffee, and in any case the scarred-over circles on his hands should be perfectly functional now that they aren’t being interrupted by swords.

He clicks his fingers and feels the flame lick out, but there’s no whoosh of gas catching. He fiddles with the knob and, no, no tell-tale hiss either.

“Did you turn off my gas?” he asks the amused silence behind him.

“I’ll trust you with it once you can turn it on yourself,” the silence replies, still sounding much too pleased with herself.

He doesn’t actually remember where the gas shut-off valve is, although when he first moved in he made sure to find out. He doesn’t think he’ll have to move the stove to get to it — maybe he’ll see if he can feel for it by following the pipes?

He’s determined to not waste the coffee, but as he leans forward to press his palm to the wall behind the stove, the pot’s handle bumps up against his chest and there’s a clang and a sploosh and the sensation of cold liquid on his chin, trickling down to soak his shirt collar.

The silence behind him might as well be at a comedy show.

He gives up on coffee for the day.

But then, the rest of the morning, he’s distracted from his correspondence, thinking instead about where the hell that gas valve is.

During lunch, he’s distracted from the otherwise truly compelling gossip that Havoc and Breda are both making a play for Rebecca Catalina, thinking instead about all of the things he might try to cook once he gets the gas on.

In the afternoon, as the soul of patience reads him Grumman’s latest policy changes in the flat tone that means she knows he’s not paying attention and she’s not calling him on it because she expects to eventually be read in on whatever’s preoccupying him, he thinks about the other possible domestic applications of flame alchemy.

When she sits down across from him over the last of the stew and half-glasses of the wine that Madam Christmas gave him two birthdays ago, he says: “Imagine a machine powered by steam that could do your dishes for you. And all you would have to do would be to ignite a small flame, and it would get started. But you would need the flame to be in a well-shielded place, because of the steam.”

“Flame alchemy at home, huh,” she replies. “Is that what you were thinking about all day? Tired of washing your dishes already?”

He protests that it’s not just that, that he’s thought of a half-dozen other ways that being able to spontaneously produce and carefully direct a flame would be helpful around the house. She critiques every idea, first on principle and then seriously, warming to the discussion.

Somewhere along the way, they finish the bottle of wine.

When the door clicks shut behind her, he sags against it for a moment, the way he’d been habituated to doing all those times they’d spent too long alone together at the Manor — his master’s only daughter, still a child in ways that felt like they should matter, too clever by half and too beautiful by far, all the reasons why he’d never allowed himself to even think about it.

It had been harder, after, not to think about it. About her. About them together. When Maes would wax eloquent about Gracia, when other officers in his class or the men in his unit had brought dates to balls and galas and casual lunches. He’d catch himself, more often than he thought was right, imagining Riza Hawkeye sending him letters, perhaps a photo of herself; stepping off the train to share his rare days off.

It had been harder still in Ishval, when she’d been a memory of innocence — hers and his, a time before flame alchemy was reduced to the weapon of war his master had dreaded it could be, before the reality of military life had sunk in. There were still good and lovely and decent things in the world, and although now his hands were too stained to ever touch her, at least, somewhere, she was still unsullied.

Until, of course, she wasn’t — she’d followed him through a door he was forced to admit he’d left ajar for her on purpose.

It was been virtually impossible to think of it since. The domestic applications of flame alchemy feel cheap and trivial in comparison to the genocidal ones. So why is he marking time here with dish-washing and dinner and the half-comfortable half-rhythms of a life he has never once allowed himself to want? Why isn’t he getting back out there? The ultimate architects of Ishval, of the crests of blood carved in every direction, of the Amestrian military’s expansionist drive — they may have been defeated.

But there still hasn’t been anything like justice. Grumman will do what is politically expedient, as always, and if part of that involves concessions to the Ishvalan refugees scattered around the country, that’s as far as it will go. But ceding territory, agricultural land, sovereignty the way Roy has increasingly come to see (fuck) as necessary; that’s not a way to consolidate power.

And with power thus consolidated, right at the moment when the people are ripe for the suggestion that the military might need some civilian oversight, there’s no guarantee that something like Ishval won’t happen again. Even without a homunculus mastermind.

It’s hard to dream when you aren’t sleeping.

At some point he decides his time might be put to better use in trying to find the gas valve so at the very least he can make himself some goddamn coffee, so he stumbles out of bed and pads into the kitchen.

And he stops on the threshold.

There is someone breathing, unevenly, like they’ve just been running or like they’re currently panicking, possibly because they have realised he is awake and don’t know, yet, that he can’t see them. There is someone in his house.

He clicks — make a light; make a flame; even if you can’t see anything you can scare them — and the breathing changes: hitches, then evens out immediately into near-silence. A soldier, then. A soldier, what, waking up? Then the breathing — from a nightmare?

“Stumbling around barefoot with fire in the middle of the night is among the stupidest things you’ve ever done, sir,” says the soldier who has just awoken from a nightmare in his front room.

“How long did you think you could go without me finding out?” he replies. “Ambushing a soldier who’s managing a new physical condition is also pretty stupid, Lieutenant.”

There’s a long silence and then, “You’re right, of course. I — I’m sorry, Colonel.”

“Help me solve the coffee problem,” he offers. He doesn’t want to hear the guilt in her voice, has dedicated years of his life to eradicating those precise tones from her vocal repertoire.  “Then we’ll be even.”

The metal-on-leather scuff of her gun making its way into her holster is a sound he’d know anywhere. It means “all clear”; it means “safety”; it means she’s been sleeping at his biggest window with her firearm in her hand and it means that maybe he’s not the only one feeling unsettled and uncertain by all the changes this strange new status quo has brought.

So, okay. They can do this together: pretend like they are coping, pretend like finding a gas valve blind with a sighted person contributing environmental observations but only when asked is a normal thing for a man and a woman — a colonel and a lieutenant — two people who very nearly died less than a month ago and who definitely still have the scent of each other’s blood embedded in their nostrils — to be doing at some ungodly hour of the morning.

But by the time the sun rises, they can drink bitter-strong, burnt-hot coffee together, too. It feels like a victory.

They don’t talk about the fact that she’s been leaving every day to get news and paperwork and to replenish their supplies of food, only to creep back in after he’s asleep to re-establish the perimeter.

But he thinks about it, especially when she pushes her chair back after dinner is over and tells him the dishes had better be done by the time she gets back. He thinks about how simultaneously safe and vulnerable it makes him feel. He thinks about how it makes him feel like they are holed up in a bunker or a trench, waiting for the enemy to strike or for orders to come to advance.

And he thinks about how he doesn’t quite know who the enemy is, actually. Not anymore.

This time last year, he would have known — his vision of the future stemmed in no small part from a desire to punish everyone who had ever set foot in the conference rooms where strategy for the Ishval front was being decided. Sure, they had talked about the military in general, identified democratic civilian rule as the only way Amestris could move forward, but Roy’s own motivation was all mixed-up love and vengeance.

A month ago, the enemy had been a homunculus from the ancient past and his vast spiderweb of influence. By the time they’d found out about the creature, of course, the problem had been acute — less a marathon through a labyrinth than a sprint through an obstacle course — and the solution had been “destroy him before he destroys us,” as military a strategy as you could get.

In a way, Roy thinks, the military brass who were the enemy he’d thought he was fighting for so long had turned out to be irrelevant. It had been the homunculus behind it all! But the fight against that homunculus had further entrenched the military in the hearts and minds of Amestrian citizens — if anything, that renewed trust is a clearer and more present danger than any of its earlier incarnations.

Is the enemy now the last of the old corruption, then, those not directly employed by the homunculus but who nevertheless went along with the cost-benefit analysis of genocide, of constant military expansion, of military rule writ large, the ones benefitting most now from Amestris’ belief in their necessity? The ones Grumman might not catch, or might not even be interested in catching — a man who has been military all his life, who did not say “no” to genocide loudly enough to find himself murdered, if he ever said “no” at all?

Roy, of course, had only said “no” to genocide once it was over. But, then, he’s always known he was the enemy. State alchemist. Soldier — all of them easily still the enemy, even if they were manipulated into their atrocities.

And what about the everyday Amestrian citizens who bankrolled and cheered for blood? Who happily stepped in, took over farmland once its previous stewards had been blown to pieces or burnt alive, sent into exile and scattered to the winds? Do civilians get a pass for falling for military propaganda?

Can you trust civilians to do better, if they are given the power?

When his bunker-mate comes back, he asks her that last one, and she says, in that slow, steady way of hers, the way that means she’s thinking carefully about what she’s saying even as she says it, that every word has been weighed and pondered —

She says, “Democracy isn’t perfect, sir. It’s just better.”

And then, “Although I think you would be hard-pressed to make Führer Grumman believe that.”

He doesn’t dare ask what Grumman doesn’t believe. He has a sinking feeling that he knows.

In their plans for the future, there was always a firing squad for him. After they’d gotten high enough in the military government to dismantle it, after everyone had been brought to justice, after Ishval was being rebuilt and all the border skirmishes to the north and west and south had been pacified with carefully negotiated trade agreements and non-aggression pacts, Roy Mustang would consent to die for what he’d done.

He dreams Maes Hughes goes first — not part of the plan, not after Alicia had been born — and he dreams that he can’t stop it.

He dreams that, when his turn comes, it’s a cold-eyed sniper pulling the trigger; a single handgun levelled at his temple as she calls him a coward and a deserter, derelict in his duty.

He showers and it’s a relief to be clean, a relief that it was not actually all that difficult; he’s been showering with his eyes closed for years, it turns out, and never realised it until now. A shocking lapse of self-awareness, but, then. Like democracy, Roy thinks, he is hardly perfect. It is unfortunately an open question as to whether he is in any way better than what came before him.

Rather than pursuing that line of thought, once he’s dressed, he makes coffee. Warm-voiced, which in his experience means warm-eyed, too, his loyal sniper thanks him from the kitchen table where, maddeningly, she was already sitting by the time he got up. It’s not great coffee, because it turns out that measuring by eye does not translate easily to measuring by touch, but it’s hot, and it’s something he can do for her.

As he works, he feels the old familiar weight of her eyes, the steady, appraising gaze she’s had trained on him more times than not since their first meeting.

What is she seeing, now, when she looks at him? Is it the same man she gave up everything to follow? Is it a man even worth following, anymore?

They’ve taken care of each other through worse than blindness; they’ve needed each other, and relied on each other, and been all the things to each other that they could be within the boundaries of the path they’d laid out for themselves. But the thought nags at him, that, now, with his decisiveness complicated by all he’s learned in the past year, he’s cast them both adrift.

Normally, by now, she’d be pushing him. Demanding he stand up and fight. Carrying his weight on her shoulders, heedless of her reopening wounds, and directing his aim with deadly accuracy.

So why isn’t she?

Rather than face her, he makes her an egg by holding the pan in one hand and heating it with flame bursts from the other, trying to judge doneness by sound alone. The first one burns, but the second feels right when he gingerly pokes it.

“Still on household flame alchemy?” she asks. Her tone says I am assessing your well-being based on your answer. Maybe that’s all it is; maybe she’s not pushing because she still hasn’t seen satisfying evidence that he’s adjusting well enough.

“Trying to be useful,” he corrects.

After breakfast, she tells him that he’s been scheduled for the evaluations that will determine his fitness to return to duty: mental, alchemical, physical. There’s also some kind of moral fitness criterion, a values test Grumman’s having cobbled together by a very select working group that the most unwaveringly moral war criminal he knows admits includes herself.

The thought freezes his blood — not the evaluations; he can fake his way through anything he can’t legitimately pass, but values-testing soldiers and civilian administrators sounds both logical (necessary, even) and upsettingly like the kind of thing Bradley could have, would have overseen. Did oversee, if in a less blatant way, via promotions and perks handed out to those who consented most willingly to what Roy is happy to call “evil.”

Is the enemy Grumman, after all? Grumman has been his ally, a good man beneath all the layers of self-preserving strategy. But — but Roy has been wrong before, about who was a good man, about who fit into his vision of the future, and he was struck blind for it. Grumman is also, he recalls, an expert at hiding in plain sight. What is he overlooking, now that all those other blindnesses have been made plain?

The question plagues him for the rest of the day.

His stand-in evaluator critiques his form as he moves through his calisthenics for the first time in a month, rifling through a newspaper to read him while he’s in motion.

At lunch, she puts the salt shaker down in a different position than usual, but he is focused on the rasping drag of her sleeve against the wood of the table so he doesn’t notice until he knocks it over when he goes to reach for his water glass. She’s much too meticulous to have done it by accident, and she doesn’t apologise, and she doesn’t help him clean it up; all together, as much as an admission of guilt.

She pulls the same trick at dinner, but he’s wise to her now and cautious, not trusting that the terrain is the same as the last time. He listens for what she’s doing every time she moves, for where she’s doing it, not just the fact of motion. He’s rewarded for his care by a small, satisfied sound that, once upon a time, he’d spent days upon days trying to provoke. So: he can still learn. Can still improve on his blind spots, once he knows what they are.

But what are they?

He finally asks her, as she passes by the bedroom door on her way to wash up for the night. Point me in the direction of the enemy.

“Oh,” she says. She keeps going to the bathroom. He hears her brush her teeth, wash her face. Pat some kind of cream onto her skin. When she pads back to him, she settles on the bed beside his knee — close enough for close, far enough for safety, the distance as perfectly calibrated as it always has to be, with them.

“Does there need to be an enemy?” she asks.

Before he can answer, she keeps going — “The dream was to change things, and things have changed. The worst of the rot is gone. Grumman won’t stay in power forever, and I think he’s tickled by the idea that he might be the last führer of Amestris. You can come back to work and have your pick of assignments — you can tell him you want to work on transition to a civilian government, for when he retires, and I think he’d let you.”

He blinks at her. Her voice is tentative; she’s not certain of these things she’s saying, but she wants them to be true, and it occurs to him that she almost died a month ago. That if he had died — and he almost has, this past year, too many times — she would have been close behind him.

That maybe it’s his turn to —

“We never really talked about after,” she says. The rustle of the bedclothes, the dip in the mattress as she shifts her weight. Her voice changes as her chin settles somewhere; she must have drawn up her knees, wrapped an arm around her shins. He knows this is so because he has heard that change so many times over so many phone calls and has asked what caused it, has never gotten to see it but knows, knows regardless.

“I don’t think we ever really believed it would come. But now I think — I think it has. I think the world has changed enough that we can make those final steps. I can’t stop thinking that the world has changed enough that we’ve changed, too. Is there a Riza Hawkeye, now, after everything, who could be at peace? What might she be like? What would it take for me to meet her? Who would I be betraying if I did?”

And then, before he can answer her, her feet thud softly to the floor and her hand is on his knee, leverage to push herself to standing as plausible deniability for the intimacy of it. She asks, “Is there a Roy Mustang who could be at peace?”

Before he can think about how he might possibly answer any of those questions — before he can reach out his hand and ask her to stay — the door is snicking closed behind her.

It takes him a long time to sleep, imagining he can hear her breathing down the hall, turning over the possibilities in his mind

But when he does, he dreams of Maes, riotous with life and colour, talking about what they’ll do when they retire.

And when he wakes, his face and his pillow are wet with tears.

He’s a coward and she’s a saint, so they don’t talk about it.

Instead, after slightly-better coffee and much-better eggs, they prepare for the physical evaluation.

She puts her fingers on his wrist and he jogs in place. She presses on his back as he stretches. They do the kind of partnered bodyweight exercises they’ve been doing for years as she tracks time and listens critically to his breathing.

Sometime after lunch, he has the thought that it’s…well, it’s strange that they aren’t leaving the house to go jogging in the park. Come to think of it, it’s strange that nobody has come to visit since he left the hospital room he couldn’t kick them out of. It’s strange that she hasn’t been making him take walks or get his own groceries or navigate his neighbourhood flower market one sense down.

It’s strangest of all that she’s sleeping with her firearm at the most vulnerable entry-point of his house.

Her fingers are on his pulse again, warm and firm, and he thinks: maybe Riza Hawkeye, for all her talk of peace, doesn’t actually know how not to be at war, or feel safe enough to try it.

After dinner, she makes him listen to the radio.

The little household unit that came with the place has never worked all that well, likely an antenna problem that a qualified technician or a thoughtful alchemist could fix, but apparently the static it produces is just right for auditory testing.

“Now?” she enquires from where she’s fiddling with the knob.

He listens. “Maybe three words out of that sentence: catch, only, street.”

There’s a hm. She’s got Fuery’s portable on her, headset on with one ear exposed so she can hear the announcer’s dulcet tones without interference and validate his guesswork.

She’s also got the results of his last physical spread out on the kitchen counter in front of her. A slight rustle, the soft slide of her fingers running down the page; the quick skitter of her pencil. Then the static worsens, just a little.

“Now?” she says, implacable.

They’ve been doing this for what feels like hours — and it’s stupid, how light-based his time sense apparently was, how he still doesn’t understand how time works in the darkness — but although he feels like he’s hearing more and more every time, her vocalisations have been purposefully opaque.

“It might be nice to get some feedback,” he suggests.

She levels him with a stare; he can feel it. “None of those words were in the broadcast.”

She makes him do three more before she relents, only to brutally inform him that there is no discernible improvement to his hearing score.

He dreams the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire. He’s holding the gun, shooting up a building full of baby homunculi.

Beside him, Maes says, “Well, it won’t bring me back, but it sure does a body good to hear those little screams, eh, Roy?”

After breakfast’s failed attempt at eggs scrambled rather than fried, his unrelenting taskmaster makes him stand in the centre of the room and balance on one foot, then the other.

He reaches for something she is holding just out of his range, then she moves and he does it again, then she moves and he does it again, until finally she’s satisfied that he’s not going to fall over. And then she makes him touch his nose before reaching out to her and repeats the whole circle. And then she moves randomly, to ensure he isn’t just pattern-recognising. “This one’s hard to cheat,” she says when he complains.

She makes him put his hands on hers, moves her fingers, makes him repeat the motion with his own hands. Then hips. Then knees, then ankles, back up to elbows and to shoulders.

“Proprioception’s improved,” she says, when the torture is over. “Get yourself a glass of water.”

And then it’s “Let’s try those scrambled eggs again,” because apparently preparing for his alchemical evaluation is going to consist entirely of egg-based culinary experimentation.

He understands it; eggs are cheap and plentiful, and as he burns (literally, sometimes) through a dozen in the course of the afternoon, he can feel his intuitive sense of direction and intensity coming more easily. There are things his body knows how to do without seeing them; he just has to convince his mind of that.

“Your poached egg, madam,” he tells her the first time, and she snorts.

“Is that what you call it? I didn’t realise I was eating at such an experimental restaurant.”

The next one comes out, he thinks, a little better. “Is the poached egg to the lady’s liking?”

Apparently not; she declares her intent to tell all her friends to boycott his establishment.

Then: “I have a poached egg for a Miss Riza?”

And: “Your respectful tone is at odds with the way you’ve treated this poor egg.”

On attempt twelve, he’s sweating, but the egg is — as far as he can tell without biting into it himself — both edible and properly cooked. He sets it down in front of her and grins. “I made you a poached egg.”

He can hear her answering smile when she says, “It looks delicious.”

It’s a relief, after wasting so many of those eggs, to be able to perfectly heat up one of Gracia’s stews without really even thinking about it.

“I’m thinking omelettes for breakfast,” his live-in food critic says into hers. “I got some mushrooms the last time I went out.”

“Your wish is my command,” Roy says, and means it.

He dreams, nonsensically, of egg-shaped homunculi crying out as he burns them and cooing when he gets them cooked just right. Maes refuses to eat any of them; he disapproves, he says, of cruelty to such adorable little lifeforms.

“I need to finish them!” Roy protests, and Maes says, “But what would happen if you didn’t?”

Omelettes are just different enough from scrambled eggs that he makes a hash of the first one, but Hawkeye puts her hand consolingly on his forearm and says, “We’ve eaten worse,” and he laughs louder than he can remember laughing in a long time.

She joins him, and they stand there in the kitchen, laughing, until her forehead is resting on his shoulder and he’s put the pan down to cover the hand still on his forearm with his own.

For a bright, horribly enticing moment, he wants this vision of the future so badly his teeth ache with it: the most important part of his day making her smile, making her laugh, taking her weight when she leans against him.

Alchemist, be thou for one specific person, the most selfless person you know, who deserves to be held and cooked for and cared for.

Who murdered civilians in Ishval and has been following another murderer all this time on the strength of his promise to change the structure of the world so murderers won’t be manufactured like they used to be.

Alchemist, be thou for one specific person, the most selfless person you know, who deserves to see the downfall of the world that turned her into a monster.

“I’m not making you eat this,” he says.

“Okay,” she replies, and goes to sit back down at the table without making a sound.

Psychological evaluations are the hardest to prepare for: you don’t want to come across like you’ve read the questions beforehand, but you absolutely want to read the questions beforehand.

“Are you having nightmares?”

He tells her about Maes slipping into darkness. About Ishval full of life, full of death; about bodies stacked like so much firewood. About her own body lying trembling and blood-soaked in his arms.

After each one, it’s the follow-up questions: how does that make you feel, would you agree or disagree with the following statement, can you stop thinking about the dream after you’ve woken, has the dream recurred.

They break for a late lunch, leftover omelette and toast and cheese, stories about how Black Hayate is apparently doing with Rebecca’s neighbour’s new dog, now that they’re is no longer pretending she’s going home every night.

“Ready for the next set?” she asks, once he’s washed up.

“Hit me,” he drawls, but the next set is bad.

“Have you thought about retirement?”

Yes, he has.

“Can you describe the thoughts you’ve been having?”

Yes, he can.

“Please describe them, then. Try to be as detailed in your description as the thoughts themselves have been.”

He levels a look at her that he hopes still says what it used to; surely milky pupils don’t make that much of a difference.

“Do you want to be saying these things out loud for the first time to an evaluator?” She’s asking the question genuinely, which means he’s free to answer: no, he doesn’t, but he also doesn’t want to say them aloud at all.

She hmms. “Will saying it aloud make it feel more real?”

“No,” he tells her. “But it will make it feel…less possible. Like we’re holding a wake for the life we could have had together, if we were different people, or if the world were a different place.”

Her breath catches in her throat — a sound he’s heard from her so rarely he could probably count the instances on the fingers of one hand — and then she says, quietly, “But we’re not different people.”

“So,” he agrees. “Even though the world has changed, none of the thoughts I’ve had about retirement are worth listening to.”

He’s come closer, to telling her how he feels about her, what he would want if he allowed himself any personal wants at all, but it still makes him feel raw, exhausted, to admit it. To burden her with it.

That evening, she goes out after dinner, ostensibly to change over clothes and do some small errands, and she doesn’t come back until he’s already gone to bed.

He dreams that they have a small house in the countryside, and that no matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop the house from trying to kill Riza. It’s a little on the nose, as dreams go, but when he wakes into the endless darkness he admits to himself that she’s been on the top of the list of people he’s wanted to protect for a long time now — which just means she’s also on the top of the list of people he’s comprehensively failed, for all his scheming.

He makes an omelette (“much better than yesterday’s, sir”) and coffee (“actually quite drinkable, sir”). He does his calisthenics with her fingers on his wrist (“heart rate a little high for the exertion level, sir”) and neatly avoids the traps she’s laid for him by slightly rearranging the kitchen furniture (“that’s proprioception well covered, sir”).

And then she holds something up in front of his face and says, “What colour is this image, Colonel?”

“I can’t see,” he tells her.

She shuffles something thicker than paper — they must be cards, he realises — and asks him, “What colour is this one?”

“I can’t see,” he repeats.

After three more cards, she places something down in front of him. “Please connect the two dots using the shortest possible path.” She’s gentle, placing the pencil between his fingers.

“I can’t see,” he says again.

After the tablework, it’s distance work; he sits on the chair and she stands by the window and asks him to read the words on whatever it is she’s holding — could be an ornately engraved statue of a tortoise, for all he knows.

And, each time, he simply says, “I can’t see.”

“It’s clear, Colonel Mustang,” she tells him once she’s gone through all the test materials, “that you are visually impaired.”

“You don’t say,” he deadpans, and he swears he can feel the heat of her glare, flash-bright, before she returns to her functionary mask.

“With said visual impairment, how do you propose you would read troop movements on the battlefield?”

He shrugs. “My brain isn’t broken, Lieutenant. I have subordinates whose eyes work just fine, and I can take all their reporting into consideration when I make decisions. I’m already accustomed to working strategy remotely, so line of sight isn’t essential.”

“How do you propose you would read classified reports?”

“Lieutenant, if you would read my file, you could save us a lot of time. I have always worked with an aide whose security clearance was at least as high as mine. If it doesn’t tax your imagination too much, you could extrapolate from there.”

She puts her pencil down audibly. “Sir, the evaluators have ultimate decisional power over whether you’re declared fit for duty, and sarcasm looks defensive.”

He knows this, of course; he says so.

He leans his elbows on the table and his head on his hands and he says, “What are we doing here, Lieutenant?”

Her fingers ghost along his forearm; he hears the shush of her sleeve as she pulls back, the slight creak of the kitchen chair as she settles her weight against it. “We’re moving forward on the path you set,” she says, finally.

And then: “Would you like to stop?”

She’s aiming for neutral and she’d have landed there for anyone else’s ears, but he’s been parsing all her microtones for too long to be fooled. She doesn’t know what answer he’s going to give, and this perturbs her, frightens her, even. That he’s becoming someone she can’t predict, or that he’s losing his way and she might actually have to take both their lives — he can’t tell which it is, but he can tell that the consternation feathering the edges of her words is his fault, and his responsibility.

“Let’s finish the exercises,” he says gently, which answers only half the question she was asking but is, right now, as much as he can give. “I promise I’ll hold my temper this time.”

He makes a show of sitting on his hands and pretends he doesn’t hear the small, almost inaudible sigh of her relief.

His evaluations are scheduled to start in the early afternoon; this means that in just a few hours, he’ll be leaving the bunker for the first time since his lieutenant shoved him into it and barricaded the door behind them, after nine days that feel like ninety, or like nine hours, depending on the moment.

Unready and unnerved about it, he collapses at the side of her camp bed, leans back against the mattress so the back of his head is resting against her upper arm. It must be some small hour of the morning, but he can feel her wakefulness, not in reaction to his arrival by her side but as if she, too, is having trouble sleeping.

“Do you think I’m making a mistake?”

She’s so still that he almost wonders if she heard him.

“Do you?” she asks, finally. Her voice is the kind of level that means she’s trying not to unduly influence his opinion.

“I don’t know,” he says. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

Her hand comes up to card gently through his hair, as if to say go on — a new word, in the well-known language of their bodies, but one he has no trouble understanding.

“Maes was right,” he admits, into her welcoming silence. “He thought we could make the world better, and we have. I just…I’ve always figured that we couldn’t. That the best we could do would be to protect people, to prevent or neutralise harm, to balance out the evil we were part of. But Maes always thought we could reduce the total amount of evil in the world.”

“And we did,” she murmurs. “Quite significantly.”

He nods. “Which means there’s less to protect people from. People all over Amestris have been demonstrating that they’re willing and able to protect the ones they love, and we just didn’t pay enough attention — they did it even with the chokehold Bradley and the senior staff had on this country’s soul, and I doubt they’re stopping now”

“So, what do they need you for?”

She’s always been the one who knew him best, who could say what he was thinking before he consciously thought it, and now is no exception.

“So, what do they need me for,” he confirms. “And did they ever need me to begin with — maybe the point was to eliminate the things that people needed protecting from, and we weren’t the only ones who could do that, in the end. We played such a small part in the whole story — it wasn’t even our plan that was deployed, that day! I wonder if all that’s left is for us to be part of cleaning up the last of the evil that remains. Do I need to become führer, for that? Do I need to become führer, for that?”

Roy Mustang, protector-in-chief. It has been sounding more and more, these past few days, like what Ling Yao was talking about when he left. Roy, too, is being greedy, yes; greedy and wrathful and proud, gluttonous and lustful for the power to care — to be Amestris’ Madam Christmas, in some sense, as if the whole country were an orphan who needed taking in. His many sins surely disqualify him, the blindness most of all — he has been thinking this, and he tells her so.

“But then I remember,” he says, “that I killed all those people in Ishval. I had a vision for atonement but I still couldn’t see the truth of what we were. What Amestris was. It’s not enough to say my vision was imperfect and slink off to lick my wounds. There’re still debts that I owe blood for! How can I pay them if I allow myself to be retired?”

“We killed all those people in Ishval,” she reminds him quietly. Her hand is still in his hair.

“Yes, and I promised you that we would get justice for it!”

The sound of his own voice takes him somewhat aback; raw, honest, guilt-ridden and terrified and heart-broken at how he’s failed — himself, and the Ishvalan survivors, and Amestris, and her. “Wasn’t fighting for my own rise through the ranks what kept me blind, last time? Wasn’t I wrong about the evil plaguing this country? Didn’t all my plans fall to ruin because I deluded myself that I was clever enough to have figured it out?”

She shifts behind him. The arm he’s been resting his head on slides around his shoulder, down over his chest, and the hand on his head presses tight; her face is in his hair now but her voice is not so muffled that he can’t hear the guilt in it, too.

Terrified, raw and honest; heart-broken at how she’s failed — herself, and the Ishvalan survivors, and Amestris, and, incredibly, him. “I was the one who promised to keep you on the right path. I was the one who was responsible for seeing it, if ever you couldn’t.”

“Riza,” he protests, but she just clings to him more tightly. He brings up one hand, then the other, to grip her forearm.

“If you won’t blame me,” she whispers, fierce and perfect and always, always more than he deserves, “then you can’t blame yourself, either. Neither of us knew. Both of us were too sure of our own understanding. Maybe we could have prevented things coming right up to the edge on the Promised Day, but we didn’t, and now we have to live with the consequences. So I need you to stop thinking about how we could have avoided them and start thinking about what we’re going to do about them now.”

“Riza,” he says again.

“What’s the best path to ensure we transition to a civilian government, soon, and cut off the military’s power? It’s still the only option that makes sense to me, but I’m not — I don’t know how we’re supposed to get there. I’ll follow you, however the path may twist and turn, but I need you to pick the direction we take from the crossroads, Roy.”

He’s taken so much from this woman over the years they’ve known each other. He’s used her — her talents and her strength and her goddamn stubbornness. Her belief in him and, even still, in his capacity for vision.

Blind and in the darkness, he closes his eyes and envisions her precious face, the weary smile that was the last thing he ever saw. His greed to protect both her and the country, his wrath at everyone who’s harmed them — when he looks inside himself like this, they fill up every corner of his being, still.

If she needs him, he cannot abandon her. He made her a promise: that they would atone for what they had done by using their weapons against themselves, burning and sniping, strategizing and scheming, leaving nothing to chance or the possibility that someone else might fix things if they sat by long enough. The mistake would be to go back on that promise before the work is finished, he understands.

There was once a Riza Hawkeye who could be at peace, and the path to meet her once again was always going to be a long one, and filled with every kind of danger. That Amestris was built for violence doesn’t change his belief, sustained by all the people fighting still to care for others, that there is a version of his country that is peaceful, too. And if anyone deserves to see it come to life, it is the woman who is — after everything — still walking beside him.

Alchemist, be thou for Riza and Amestris both.

“Let’s see how much of a pain we can make ourselves in Grumman’s ass, Lieutenant,” he says. “He tends to make helpful concessions when cornered — we can get him to retire within three years. I almost guarantee it.”

“Sir,” she says. He stays there, lets her cry (silent, self-contained) into his hair.