jlady_fics (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jlady_fics) wrote2005-10-20 02:07 am
jlady_fics) wrote2005-10-20 02:07 am
Entry tags:
The Last Survivors - Full Metal Alchemist Ficcie
The Last Survivors
Summary: When all is said and done, the ones left behind bear the pain. Bereft of purpose, Roy Mustang breaks down. Is there any hope for the injured ex-soldier? Post episode 51, some spoilers within. For the "First Night in Ishbal" challenge at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
royai_fiction
Rating: PG-13 to low-grade R for imagery of the Ishbalan aftermath (and if I have the rating wrong please tell me, I'm not used to calculating ratings)
Disclaimer: The author of this lowly fanfic owneth not Full Metal Alchemist nor any of the characters held within. It and they belong to Arakawa Hiromu.
Grammatical Disclaimer: Any bent grammar is probably intentional for stylist purposes. This is third-person-walking-close-to-first-person point of view, and I've tried to reflect that.
...
He lay there, staring into the creamy white wall.
Blood speckles on a bone-white adobe floor.
He had made Riza leave. She'd stayed by his side these long... could it already be weeks? Months? Time flew by here, in the residence outside Central City that Bradley had owned but never used.
The Fuhrer, presenting medals to the heroes before the clotted blood could even fall from under their nails.
She'd stayed there, ate there, slept with her head beside his when the nightmares grew too strong, too vivid. Discreetly held his hand through the pokings and proddings, the bandage changes, the stretching therapy of his left shoulder that always left him screaming and moaning for long after the doctors had gone.
Riza, the day she shot the child that had charged at them and the look in all their eyes when they realized the potsherd in the tiny hand was completely dull.
Ed was there sometimes, new ghosts in his eyes, and Alphonse, innocent again but relearning. At least Edward was with him, helping. And both were finally wholly human again. It had something to do with Hohenheim and a homunculus, but he couldn't quite get his mind around it.
Edward told him that made him lucky, that the exchange was too high.
He'd pretended he didn't know what the younger alchemist was implying.
The uncontrolled explosion, charging from flicking fingers. Staring in horror at the red stone on his hand.
He'd done what he'd promised. Mostly through proxies, but they'd been completely under his orders. Riza. Armstrong. Edward, once he'd been pulled down by the hair and informed that everything was to keep the Ishbal Massacre and more specifically the Rockbell Incident from ever happening again at the hands of Amestris.
War reforms.
Military reforms.
Arrangements for rebuilding Ishbal, carefully worded and managed to avoid the sort of religious issues that had caused problems in the first place.
Seeing hatred flare in red eyes not at his gun or uniform, but the stitched circles on his hands.
He had kept his promise to the dead. It would never happen the same way again. No conflict would ever be allowed to escalate that way again, become that one-sided.
Blood would never drip through a temple floor again.
The Philosopher's Stone was added to the human transmutation taboo, as was Red Water.
Kimblee, counting the day's kills as the young major and his team were trying to get the blood-stench from their noses and scrubbed their uniforms with sand to remove the unmistakable odor of burning human.
They always failed, and every day Kimblee's eyes grew brighter.
He had stepped down, renounced everything (the new government had forced him to keep the house and some other things), left the medals from Ishbal lying on a table as Riza helped him limp out after melting an emblem and ripping the attached ribbon.
That medal held no glory and never had, only the wailing and crying of the injured for the doctors who would never come to their aid, who could never come again.
For the day after the Rockbells died, the epidemic hit.
Tiny bodies in a pile.
Tiny feet with tiny shoes no parents would ever lovingly fasten again.
Tiny hands that would never hold toys again.
Tiny noses, clotted with the blood and mucus that took their lives in the night.
Armstrong, collecting bodies.
Kimblee, on the run after making a general "go boom".
And the ash pile grew and grew, for there were far too few shovels to bury the dead.
Sheska had mentioned the lack of teenagers among the Ishbalans.
He hadn't had the heart to tell her two bullets had killed a generation.
Sheska, now Winry's best friend other than the brothers Elric.
Winry Rockbell, a virtuoso with nerves and oil and steel.
Winry Rockbell, the only Ishbal War orphan without red eyes or a military parent.
Winry Rockbell, who according to Riza was supposed to be coming to see him soon.
Within hours... minutes...
He really needed Riza to get him a clock and a marked calendar.
From below the slightly open window came footsteps and the clicking noise of Sheska's heels.
"Winry!" Wait up!"
... seconds...
A photo of a smiling girl and a dog.
So normal, in a world gone insane.
But the hand that held it was bloody, and the body was growing cold.
The world was growing cold, though the sun blazed down from an unyielding sky.
And somewhere in Amestris, a girl played on a hill with her dog in the sunshine and the grass, and didn't even know her childhood was over. He was sure of it, as the gun trembled in his hand.
Footsteps downstairs, the clear voices ringing.
There was a tinge in Winry's that he had never heard before, an edge that cut against his soul.
For all the pity in her eyes bare days before the fight, there were debts yet to be paid between them.
Waiting at the train station with Maes and Hawkeye, Maes standing with those bound for Ishbal for the sake of solidarity and of saying good luck. When General Grumman walked over, she straightened and saluted with all the others, only softening when the man pulled his only grandchild into his arms, to give her one last hug for luck.
He was finishing the stitching on a fifth pair of backup gloves. What had started as a childish use of alchemy at a harvest festival and as a cute trick in the academy for officer's children was now serious.
The whistles shrieked, and they marched onto the trains, marched towards Hell itself.
Winry's head entered the door long before the rest of her.
"Up to having company, sir?"
He nodded. It wasn't like he could say no, even with the weakness and the eye patch and the lack of dignity afforded by a sickbed one had lain in for too long, had stained with too much painsweat.
She was Winry, and that meant indulgence, even if she never accepted that as the way things were between them.
After all, there was no equivalent exchange for some things.
The train arrived in a dusty station. Water rationing was explained and the soldiers split into their patrol groups.
He was more than glad to see the aloof sharpshooter in his team.
In this Hell, friends were all you could possibly trust, even if they were only friends of friends and usually drove you crazy and sometimes even treated you like dirt (and in the early days of the academy, those sentiments had been more than mutual).
They knew that some five minutes later, when the next train of soldiers was attacked.
The way he and Riza had automatically drifted back to back, glove and gun at the ready, would have been funny if it hadn't saved their lives.
She walked in, sat in the chair beside him.
He should have tried to sit up. He'd managed before. With help, he'd even walked distances.
Something in his mind registered that he was physically backsliding to the days of timeless pain and fevers.
Something else registered that he didn't really care anymore.
"I would have come here sooner," she stated with the slightest edge of tears in her voice, "but I got tied up in things at Resembool."
Resembool, not home.
He was too tired to wonder why.
Being pulled out of bed that warm morning for special cleanup duty under Colonel Gran.
The Iron Blood Alchemist.
A man who liked his job far too much.
Hefting the gun he had loaded but never shot, the three bullet clip of the alchemist's gun untouched. He had always hated guns with a passion, something ingrained since childhood with his mother's tales of the legendary world before the Bright Day, but there was no way around them here, save alchemy.
Leaving Riza in the coolness of the tent beside his. Letting her have those few extra moments of the stilted peace only sleep could ever bring. Or so he told himself, for Riza was pulling a trigger in her dreams.
The shop building that the Colonel said housed traitors to Amestris, citizens defending the fighters killing their own countrymen.
He nodded. "I understand. You don't have to come."
"I needed to come."
Again, he must indulge her. She has all rights here, he has none. So he nods again and tries to smile.
For what can be exchanged for two souls and a childhood?
The stairs. The bottles on the wall, and he notices all the old remedies his mother used and the medicines of the doctor in the town where he was born.
The place smells of sweat and blood and gauze and the sweet herbs most useful for mending the human body and soul.
A smell no one could ever mistake for anything but a place of healing.
Two people, standing close enough to hold hands against the future, gaze at them from across the room.
He balks. Doctors are untouchable, he has known this from earliest childhood for without them and the first alchemists mankind would never have survived the Bright Day at all.
"Everything is falling apart. Edward and Alphonse could go off to wherever now. I've got so many apprenticeship offers my head is spinning..."
He let her vent there in the sunlit room where the lurking darkness never lifted from the corners.
And suddenly a hand reached out to cup his scarred cheek. "And I know what Basque Gran told you."
"Shoot them, or I will and the third bullet in that gun belongs to you."
His grip had remained slack as the man's eyes widened and the woman seemed ready to scream.
Something changed in her stance, she turned a certain way with an arm moving just so...
Instinct took over and two bodies were on the floor.
And then Marcoh, his sponsor when he was just beginning to study alchemy, was there, the conflicted Crystal Alchemist finally truly standing his ground.
"You weren't the only one he treated that way, at least not from what Sheska's pulled out of the military records Parliament's had her wading through. It seems to have been some sort of sport to him." Her voice was hiccupy and tears were dripping down her face. He wanted to make her stop, but he trusted his voice even less than she likely trusted hers at the moment. "Find someone who had violated this or that rule, whether it existed or not. Get one of the more humane soldiers, alone. Got rid of the troublesome civilians. Got rid of or altered the troublesome soldiers."
Her thumb was moving now, just barely ruffling the edge of the patch.
The bottle.
The stain on the floor in front of him.
The girl. The dog.
The death of childhood.
The unbalanceable exchange.
He drew the gun and was about to give the bullet to the one it belonged to when Marcoh entered, offering another way.
"Roy, you're the only one of the soldiers that didn't let Gran kill them or commit suicide later. You are the only one of his targets left."
He shook his head sadly, knocking her hand away weakly and grimacing as his shoulder stretched. "I'm not a victim."
"Says someone who looks like he has gone ten rounds with Rex Doloris. You had a gun to your head just as much as my parents did, and it would have been worse on Dad at least if you had resisted." The last comes out in a choked sob. "Even as it was... Damnit, he was a mindhealer! A mindhealer." Her voice trails into nothingness and choking sobs.
Things began to sink into his brain.
He lifted his hand, placed it on hers where it had fallen. She clutched at it, somehow careful of what damage still remained.
"I... almost..." he whispered, and she looked up with wide eyes. "And after... it was so hard... there was so much... a breathing illness... those older than ten or so lived... so many children..."
Her breathing started hitching.
"And there was nothing... no one... just stop the spread... couldn't risk things getting worse..."
At some point, she drew closer.
"And there weren't enough of us or enough shovels..."
His voice cracked with the tears to the point of unusablity, a mantra ripping through his mind of how he shouldn't be showing weakness and pain to her, she had enough of her own...
And then her arms were around his neck, wet sobs dampening the hollow at the base of his collarbones.
He held her as best as he could as she hiccupped that they were the last two survivors of Gran's personal atrocities, that the other civilians had been locals, that Sheska had done research...
And when she stilled a bit, he got her to lift up and asked her what she meant by "last two".
"Grandma had the dropping fever when we were in Resembool. But the symptoms weren't showing... she was gone before the assault on the Homunculi even began. Edward and Alphonse still don't know. I didn't even make it home in time for the burying." And the tears turned to another flood and all he could do was offer comfort in his own weak and ungainly way.
The week after the alchemy exam, wandering around headquarters for the mail.
Certainly his letter had reached General Mustang at the northern border by now.
Two young chaplains walked around a corner. "Major Mustang?"
He stood, saluting. "Yes."
"We regret to inform you..."
He didn't hear anything more.
It wasn't very long before Sheska came poking around herself. "Is everything... oh dear."
"Sheska?"
"Yes, sir?"
For the first time since he left his medals lying in his past, he does not correct the honorific.
"Don't worry so much. All the disasters of all the histories ever written are not going to happen tomorrow morning."
She looked shocked for a second, then smiled. "Feeling better?"
"He better be," Winry grumbled, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.
"A bit. Everything's still there, but the edge to it isn't." He was surprised. He hadn't felt this okay with the world since... since the day of the Harvest Festival when he had first played with fire.
"Passive self-destruction aborted?" Winry whispered.
"Yeah." He smirked at her. "After all, we have to look out for each other, right?"
They smiled at each other, Sheska grinning from the sidelines.
"Well, while we're here..." Sheska started.
Winry finished. "... anything need doing around here? Between you and being an assistant at the firing range..."
He felt his eyes go wide. "She told me she was still on leave."
"She's got flexible hours there, but she's been back for... well, back for a while. She walks in front of the library on her way here."
"In that case... Clean sheets, cleaner house, and a meal she doesn't have to cook would be very good."
"I think we can handle that. House first?" Sheska was already loosening her uniform's outer top.
He nodded, pulling himself to the edge of the bed and swinging his legs over. "Time to see if I can still get up." He wobbled, but his legs held his weight far better than he had hoped. "At least I can limp around. You two go take care of the house, and I'll see if I can clean me up."
Sheska started to leave. Winry fixed him in place with her gaze. "No slick surfaces or sharp objects. And you make sure there's always something stable within reach of your right hand, just in case."
"I promise."
They left.
He gingerly wandered to the closet, pulled a random pair of slacks and a uniform shirt from the bar. He looked down at the rumpled pajamas he was wearing, bloodstains mottling the soft blue cloth where his injuries had been.
Not for the first time, he wondered how long it had been since the fight.
He opened the bathroom door and smiled.
Someone, somehow, had already thought to install support bars on the walls.
...
Riza dragged herself up the hill at sunset.
It was getting to be too much. Even with the limited hours, even with counting Roy's care as paid partial leave...
She couldn't keep it up for much longer. And she wasn't abandoning Roy, no matter if all that she had liked...
No, she would admit it to herself even if she might not ever be able to admit it to him.
She wasn't abandoning him, even if all that she had loved about him faded away.
She stopped to rest for a moment, then stared at the house.
Smoke. It was rising from the chimney, but it was still smoke, coming from a building Roy might very well be alone in and his alchemy was not the sort one did during a months-long mental funk. Not and live, anyway.
She started running, throwing open the door with wide eyes and gasping as she was assaulted... by the sweet smells of cooking fowl and a pie of some sort. The air was laced with cinnamon.
She wandered in, still breathing heavily.
Winry and Sheska were in the kitchen, covered in food and smiling.
Riza stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.
"We're making dinner."
"I can see that, Winry. Where's Roy?"
"Living room," Sheska supplied as she pulled something that Riza did not recognize but that looked delicious from the oven.
Blink.
"The little talk I was going to give him seems to have had the desired effect. He'll probably be miserable tomorrow; he's pushed himself too far today." Winry smiled. "He was stretched out on the couch the last time I checked."
He was exactly where the bouncy mechanic had said, scraggly black hair just poking over the armrest and bare feet sticking over the other side. And for once he was somewhat clean and somewhat decently dressed, with a cane lying on the ground within easy reach. He'd barely been out of bed since the day he'd resigned, and that had been so long ago...
She smiled, trying to hold in tears, and ruffled his hair.
His eye opened slightly and for the first time in a long time she could see the spark in it again. "Riza?"
"I'm back."
"I'm sorry. How long was I like that?"
"Roy, you were injured..."
"How long?"
"It was the end of winter when you resigned from being Fuhrer. And the weather-minded are predicting first snowfall within the next two weeks."
He started shivering despite the warmth of the fire. "I'm sorry."
"It doesn't matter." And she meant it, as she pushed him upright, slid onto the couch, and held him close from behind as his feet still dangle in the flickering light. "You survived the injuries, and you survived whatever mental thing you dropped into. I was so worried," she whispered. "I was so worried that you would never come back to us. To me."
And then he flipped around with her help and they quietly sobbed into each other's shoulders, knowing neither would look down on the other for crying and that the two young women in the other room would never tell.
Not that hiding feelings was worth the effort any more.
...
Dinner was an introduction to all the ways Roy Mustang was still not independent.
First it was the fact that his shoulder wouldn't let him use utensils in his left hand yet, at least not with more than the most basic control. That he handled with a simple shrug and a personal admittance that there were worse things in life than precut meat.
Then it was discovering his right arm had decided it had done enough work for the day and had gone out for drinks with his left shoulder. It took five minutes of Riza's momma bird impression before even he started chuckling, Sheska and Winry having already left matching slightly chewed piles of mashed tubers lying on the tablecloth.
Embarrassing, possibly.
Humiliating, certainly.
But absolutely positively hilarious.
Just as long as the Elrics never found out.
But the worst moment of the entire evening was when he stood up to head back to the living room, tilted sideways, and smacked his shoulder and head, hard, on the table and floor before anyone could get close enough to catch him.
The first thing that he noticed was the absolute throbbing agony that was his shoulder.
The second thing he noticed was the herd of drunken bull cattle that had picked his skull for a migration route.
The third thing he noticed was that he was in two much pain from the first two things to notice any possible fourth thing. Such as being carry-dragged to the living room, being laid down on a pile of assorted cushions and pillows from around the house and covered in a few loose blankets and odd sheets, which was where he came back to awareness some unknown time later.
"There's ice on the pond." It was Winry's voice, and then something large and wet and cold was being pressed against his shoulder. He shivered and tried to get away, but he was weak and easily pinned. "It will cut down on the swelling and the pain. Trust me."
"Thank you," he hissed through gritted teeth.
"No problem. You're just lucky it's cold enough for ice."
"And if it's cold enough for ice, it's too cold for you and Sheska to leave." Riza's voice was calm, the normal voice Roy had heard behind him for so many years. "There are guest rooms upstairs, take your pick. It's getting late. Very late."
"Thanks." Sheska moved towards the stairs, dragging Winry behind her.
"Goodnight!" she called out as they sprinted up the stairs.
"Were we ever that young?" Riza plopped down next to him on the floor, firelight dancing in her hair.
"Once. Back when everything was simple."
"Was it ever?" She moved closer, up onto the edge of the cushion pile, and he turned his head towards her, trying to see her better.
"I don't know. We've been fighting for so long, ever since the day we arrived in... that place." He does not want to name it now, for the fire is warm and she is here and sleep is far too close. He has no desire for a night so fine to be ruined by nightmares.
"We disliked each other back then. I thought you were a stuck-up little alchemical wannabe who was all flash and bang with nothing else behind his skill but pure flair." She smiled, leaning still closer with her hair spilling around her on the sheets.
"And you were the general's granddaughter, secure in her future and snooty about her legendary aim." He ran a tiny bit of the golden strands through weakened fingers.
"Somehow, we ended up back to back in the fight, drifting together despite it all." She drew still closer, close enough to curl up against his side.
He wrapped his right arm around her as well as he could. "We saved each other's lives for the first time that day."
"And we haven't stopped doing it since."
A heartbeat, clear in the quiet between poppings in the fireplace.
She moved, turning against him.
Another heartbeat.
And then she kissed him, on the cheek but a kiss nonetheless. "I'm not hiding what I feel anymore," she blurted, trying to rise suddenly as she realized what she'd done.
He didn't move his arm. "And neither am I." He kissed her nose, carefully and almost missing twice.
And then there was just them, the fire, and being next to each other.
And not caring who would see them in the morning light.
Edit: Changed Riza's grandfather's name now that I actually found out he is fully named in canon (the wonders of not reading the manga...).
Summary: When all is said and done, the ones left behind bear the pain. Bereft of purpose, Roy Mustang breaks down. Is there any hope for the injured ex-soldier? Post episode 51, some spoilers within. For the "First Night in Ishbal" challenge at
royai_fictionRating: PG-13 to low-grade R for imagery of the Ishbalan aftermath (and if I have the rating wrong please tell me, I'm not used to calculating ratings)
Disclaimer: The author of this lowly fanfic owneth not Full Metal Alchemist nor any of the characters held within. It and they belong to Arakawa Hiromu.
Grammatical Disclaimer: Any bent grammar is probably intentional for stylist purposes. This is third-person-walking-close-to-first-person point of view, and I've tried to reflect that.
...
He lay there, staring into the creamy white wall.
Blood speckles on a bone-white adobe floor.
He had made Riza leave. She'd stayed by his side these long... could it already be weeks? Months? Time flew by here, in the residence outside Central City that Bradley had owned but never used.
The Fuhrer, presenting medals to the heroes before the clotted blood could even fall from under their nails.
She'd stayed there, ate there, slept with her head beside his when the nightmares grew too strong, too vivid. Discreetly held his hand through the pokings and proddings, the bandage changes, the stretching therapy of his left shoulder that always left him screaming and moaning for long after the doctors had gone.
Riza, the day she shot the child that had charged at them and the look in all their eyes when they realized the potsherd in the tiny hand was completely dull.
Ed was there sometimes, new ghosts in his eyes, and Alphonse, innocent again but relearning. At least Edward was with him, helping. And both were finally wholly human again. It had something to do with Hohenheim and a homunculus, but he couldn't quite get his mind around it.
Edward told him that made him lucky, that the exchange was too high.
He'd pretended he didn't know what the younger alchemist was implying.
The uncontrolled explosion, charging from flicking fingers. Staring in horror at the red stone on his hand.
He'd done what he'd promised. Mostly through proxies, but they'd been completely under his orders. Riza. Armstrong. Edward, once he'd been pulled down by the hair and informed that everything was to keep the Ishbal Massacre and more specifically the Rockbell Incident from ever happening again at the hands of Amestris.
War reforms.
Military reforms.
Arrangements for rebuilding Ishbal, carefully worded and managed to avoid the sort of religious issues that had caused problems in the first place.
Seeing hatred flare in red eyes not at his gun or uniform, but the stitched circles on his hands.
He had kept his promise to the dead. It would never happen the same way again. No conflict would ever be allowed to escalate that way again, become that one-sided.
Blood would never drip through a temple floor again.
The Philosopher's Stone was added to the human transmutation taboo, as was Red Water.
Kimblee, counting the day's kills as the young major and his team were trying to get the blood-stench from their noses and scrubbed their uniforms with sand to remove the unmistakable odor of burning human.
They always failed, and every day Kimblee's eyes grew brighter.
He had stepped down, renounced everything (the new government had forced him to keep the house and some other things), left the medals from Ishbal lying on a table as Riza helped him limp out after melting an emblem and ripping the attached ribbon.
That medal held no glory and never had, only the wailing and crying of the injured for the doctors who would never come to their aid, who could never come again.
For the day after the Rockbells died, the epidemic hit.
Tiny bodies in a pile.
Tiny feet with tiny shoes no parents would ever lovingly fasten again.
Tiny hands that would never hold toys again.
Tiny noses, clotted with the blood and mucus that took their lives in the night.
Armstrong, collecting bodies.
Kimblee, on the run after making a general "go boom".
And the ash pile grew and grew, for there were far too few shovels to bury the dead.
Sheska had mentioned the lack of teenagers among the Ishbalans.
He hadn't had the heart to tell her two bullets had killed a generation.
Sheska, now Winry's best friend other than the brothers Elric.
Winry Rockbell, a virtuoso with nerves and oil and steel.
Winry Rockbell, the only Ishbal War orphan without red eyes or a military parent.
Winry Rockbell, who according to Riza was supposed to be coming to see him soon.
Within hours... minutes...
He really needed Riza to get him a clock and a marked calendar.
From below the slightly open window came footsteps and the clicking noise of Sheska's heels.
"Winry!" Wait up!"
... seconds...
A photo of a smiling girl and a dog.
So normal, in a world gone insane.
But the hand that held it was bloody, and the body was growing cold.
The world was growing cold, though the sun blazed down from an unyielding sky.
And somewhere in Amestris, a girl played on a hill with her dog in the sunshine and the grass, and didn't even know her childhood was over. He was sure of it, as the gun trembled in his hand.
Footsteps downstairs, the clear voices ringing.
There was a tinge in Winry's that he had never heard before, an edge that cut against his soul.
For all the pity in her eyes bare days before the fight, there were debts yet to be paid between them.
Waiting at the train station with Maes and Hawkeye, Maes standing with those bound for Ishbal for the sake of solidarity and of saying good luck. When General Grumman walked over, she straightened and saluted with all the others, only softening when the man pulled his only grandchild into his arms, to give her one last hug for luck.
He was finishing the stitching on a fifth pair of backup gloves. What had started as a childish use of alchemy at a harvest festival and as a cute trick in the academy for officer's children was now serious.
The whistles shrieked, and they marched onto the trains, marched towards Hell itself.
Winry's head entered the door long before the rest of her.
"Up to having company, sir?"
He nodded. It wasn't like he could say no, even with the weakness and the eye patch and the lack of dignity afforded by a sickbed one had lain in for too long, had stained with too much painsweat.
She was Winry, and that meant indulgence, even if she never accepted that as the way things were between them.
After all, there was no equivalent exchange for some things.
The train arrived in a dusty station. Water rationing was explained and the soldiers split into their patrol groups.
He was more than glad to see the aloof sharpshooter in his team.
In this Hell, friends were all you could possibly trust, even if they were only friends of friends and usually drove you crazy and sometimes even treated you like dirt (and in the early days of the academy, those sentiments had been more than mutual).
They knew that some five minutes later, when the next train of soldiers was attacked.
The way he and Riza had automatically drifted back to back, glove and gun at the ready, would have been funny if it hadn't saved their lives.
She walked in, sat in the chair beside him.
He should have tried to sit up. He'd managed before. With help, he'd even walked distances.
Something in his mind registered that he was physically backsliding to the days of timeless pain and fevers.
Something else registered that he didn't really care anymore.
"I would have come here sooner," she stated with the slightest edge of tears in her voice, "but I got tied up in things at Resembool."
Resembool, not home.
He was too tired to wonder why.
Being pulled out of bed that warm morning for special cleanup duty under Colonel Gran.
The Iron Blood Alchemist.
A man who liked his job far too much.
Hefting the gun he had loaded but never shot, the three bullet clip of the alchemist's gun untouched. He had always hated guns with a passion, something ingrained since childhood with his mother's tales of the legendary world before the Bright Day, but there was no way around them here, save alchemy.
Leaving Riza in the coolness of the tent beside his. Letting her have those few extra moments of the stilted peace only sleep could ever bring. Or so he told himself, for Riza was pulling a trigger in her dreams.
The shop building that the Colonel said housed traitors to Amestris, citizens defending the fighters killing their own countrymen.
He nodded. "I understand. You don't have to come."
"I needed to come."
Again, he must indulge her. She has all rights here, he has none. So he nods again and tries to smile.
For what can be exchanged for two souls and a childhood?
The stairs. The bottles on the wall, and he notices all the old remedies his mother used and the medicines of the doctor in the town where he was born.
The place smells of sweat and blood and gauze and the sweet herbs most useful for mending the human body and soul.
A smell no one could ever mistake for anything but a place of healing.
Two people, standing close enough to hold hands against the future, gaze at them from across the room.
He balks. Doctors are untouchable, he has known this from earliest childhood for without them and the first alchemists mankind would never have survived the Bright Day at all.
"Everything is falling apart. Edward and Alphonse could go off to wherever now. I've got so many apprenticeship offers my head is spinning..."
He let her vent there in the sunlit room where the lurking darkness never lifted from the corners.
And suddenly a hand reached out to cup his scarred cheek. "And I know what Basque Gran told you."
"Shoot them, or I will and the third bullet in that gun belongs to you."
His grip had remained slack as the man's eyes widened and the woman seemed ready to scream.
Something changed in her stance, she turned a certain way with an arm moving just so...
Instinct took over and two bodies were on the floor.
And then Marcoh, his sponsor when he was just beginning to study alchemy, was there, the conflicted Crystal Alchemist finally truly standing his ground.
"You weren't the only one he treated that way, at least not from what Sheska's pulled out of the military records Parliament's had her wading through. It seems to have been some sort of sport to him." Her voice was hiccupy and tears were dripping down her face. He wanted to make her stop, but he trusted his voice even less than she likely trusted hers at the moment. "Find someone who had violated this or that rule, whether it existed or not. Get one of the more humane soldiers, alone. Got rid of the troublesome civilians. Got rid of or altered the troublesome soldiers."
Her thumb was moving now, just barely ruffling the edge of the patch.
The bottle.
The stain on the floor in front of him.
The girl. The dog.
The death of childhood.
The unbalanceable exchange.
He drew the gun and was about to give the bullet to the one it belonged to when Marcoh entered, offering another way.
"Roy, you're the only one of the soldiers that didn't let Gran kill them or commit suicide later. You are the only one of his targets left."
He shook his head sadly, knocking her hand away weakly and grimacing as his shoulder stretched. "I'm not a victim."
"Says someone who looks like he has gone ten rounds with Rex Doloris. You had a gun to your head just as much as my parents did, and it would have been worse on Dad at least if you had resisted." The last comes out in a choked sob. "Even as it was... Damnit, he was a mindhealer! A mindhealer." Her voice trails into nothingness and choking sobs.
Things began to sink into his brain.
He lifted his hand, placed it on hers where it had fallen. She clutched at it, somehow careful of what damage still remained.
"I... almost..." he whispered, and she looked up with wide eyes. "And after... it was so hard... there was so much... a breathing illness... those older than ten or so lived... so many children..."
Her breathing started hitching.
"And there was nothing... no one... just stop the spread... couldn't risk things getting worse..."
At some point, she drew closer.
"And there weren't enough of us or enough shovels..."
His voice cracked with the tears to the point of unusablity, a mantra ripping through his mind of how he shouldn't be showing weakness and pain to her, she had enough of her own...
And then her arms were around his neck, wet sobs dampening the hollow at the base of his collarbones.
He held her as best as he could as she hiccupped that they were the last two survivors of Gran's personal atrocities, that the other civilians had been locals, that Sheska had done research...
And when she stilled a bit, he got her to lift up and asked her what she meant by "last two".
"Grandma had the dropping fever when we were in Resembool. But the symptoms weren't showing... she was gone before the assault on the Homunculi even began. Edward and Alphonse still don't know. I didn't even make it home in time for the burying." And the tears turned to another flood and all he could do was offer comfort in his own weak and ungainly way.
The week after the alchemy exam, wandering around headquarters for the mail.
Certainly his letter had reached General Mustang at the northern border by now.
Two young chaplains walked around a corner. "Major Mustang?"
He stood, saluting. "Yes."
"We regret to inform you..."
He didn't hear anything more.
It wasn't very long before Sheska came poking around herself. "Is everything... oh dear."
"Sheska?"
"Yes, sir?"
For the first time since he left his medals lying in his past, he does not correct the honorific.
"Don't worry so much. All the disasters of all the histories ever written are not going to happen tomorrow morning."
She looked shocked for a second, then smiled. "Feeling better?"
"He better be," Winry grumbled, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.
"A bit. Everything's still there, but the edge to it isn't." He was surprised. He hadn't felt this okay with the world since... since the day of the Harvest Festival when he had first played with fire.
"Passive self-destruction aborted?" Winry whispered.
"Yeah." He smirked at her. "After all, we have to look out for each other, right?"
They smiled at each other, Sheska grinning from the sidelines.
"Well, while we're here..." Sheska started.
Winry finished. "... anything need doing around here? Between you and being an assistant at the firing range..."
He felt his eyes go wide. "She told me she was still on leave."
"She's got flexible hours there, but she's been back for... well, back for a while. She walks in front of the library on her way here."
"In that case... Clean sheets, cleaner house, and a meal she doesn't have to cook would be very good."
"I think we can handle that. House first?" Sheska was already loosening her uniform's outer top.
He nodded, pulling himself to the edge of the bed and swinging his legs over. "Time to see if I can still get up." He wobbled, but his legs held his weight far better than he had hoped. "At least I can limp around. You two go take care of the house, and I'll see if I can clean me up."
Sheska started to leave. Winry fixed him in place with her gaze. "No slick surfaces or sharp objects. And you make sure there's always something stable within reach of your right hand, just in case."
"I promise."
They left.
He gingerly wandered to the closet, pulled a random pair of slacks and a uniform shirt from the bar. He looked down at the rumpled pajamas he was wearing, bloodstains mottling the soft blue cloth where his injuries had been.
Not for the first time, he wondered how long it had been since the fight.
He opened the bathroom door and smiled.
Someone, somehow, had already thought to install support bars on the walls.
...
Riza dragged herself up the hill at sunset.
It was getting to be too much. Even with the limited hours, even with counting Roy's care as paid partial leave...
She couldn't keep it up for much longer. And she wasn't abandoning Roy, no matter if all that she had liked...
No, she would admit it to herself even if she might not ever be able to admit it to him.
She wasn't abandoning him, even if all that she had loved about him faded away.
She stopped to rest for a moment, then stared at the house.
Smoke. It was rising from the chimney, but it was still smoke, coming from a building Roy might very well be alone in and his alchemy was not the sort one did during a months-long mental funk. Not and live, anyway.
She started running, throwing open the door with wide eyes and gasping as she was assaulted... by the sweet smells of cooking fowl and a pie of some sort. The air was laced with cinnamon.
She wandered in, still breathing heavily.
Winry and Sheska were in the kitchen, covered in food and smiling.
Riza stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.
"We're making dinner."
"I can see that, Winry. Where's Roy?"
"Living room," Sheska supplied as she pulled something that Riza did not recognize but that looked delicious from the oven.
Blink.
"The little talk I was going to give him seems to have had the desired effect. He'll probably be miserable tomorrow; he's pushed himself too far today." Winry smiled. "He was stretched out on the couch the last time I checked."
He was exactly where the bouncy mechanic had said, scraggly black hair just poking over the armrest and bare feet sticking over the other side. And for once he was somewhat clean and somewhat decently dressed, with a cane lying on the ground within easy reach. He'd barely been out of bed since the day he'd resigned, and that had been so long ago...
She smiled, trying to hold in tears, and ruffled his hair.
His eye opened slightly and for the first time in a long time she could see the spark in it again. "Riza?"
"I'm back."
"I'm sorry. How long was I like that?"
"Roy, you were injured..."
"How long?"
"It was the end of winter when you resigned from being Fuhrer. And the weather-minded are predicting first snowfall within the next two weeks."
He started shivering despite the warmth of the fire. "I'm sorry."
"It doesn't matter." And she meant it, as she pushed him upright, slid onto the couch, and held him close from behind as his feet still dangle in the flickering light. "You survived the injuries, and you survived whatever mental thing you dropped into. I was so worried," she whispered. "I was so worried that you would never come back to us. To me."
And then he flipped around with her help and they quietly sobbed into each other's shoulders, knowing neither would look down on the other for crying and that the two young women in the other room would never tell.
Not that hiding feelings was worth the effort any more.
...
Dinner was an introduction to all the ways Roy Mustang was still not independent.
First it was the fact that his shoulder wouldn't let him use utensils in his left hand yet, at least not with more than the most basic control. That he handled with a simple shrug and a personal admittance that there were worse things in life than precut meat.
Then it was discovering his right arm had decided it had done enough work for the day and had gone out for drinks with his left shoulder. It took five minutes of Riza's momma bird impression before even he started chuckling, Sheska and Winry having already left matching slightly chewed piles of mashed tubers lying on the tablecloth.
Embarrassing, possibly.
Humiliating, certainly.
But absolutely positively hilarious.
Just as long as the Elrics never found out.
But the worst moment of the entire evening was when he stood up to head back to the living room, tilted sideways, and smacked his shoulder and head, hard, on the table and floor before anyone could get close enough to catch him.
The first thing that he noticed was the absolute throbbing agony that was his shoulder.
The second thing he noticed was the herd of drunken bull cattle that had picked his skull for a migration route.
The third thing he noticed was that he was in two much pain from the first two things to notice any possible fourth thing. Such as being carry-dragged to the living room, being laid down on a pile of assorted cushions and pillows from around the house and covered in a few loose blankets and odd sheets, which was where he came back to awareness some unknown time later.
"There's ice on the pond." It was Winry's voice, and then something large and wet and cold was being pressed against his shoulder. He shivered and tried to get away, but he was weak and easily pinned. "It will cut down on the swelling and the pain. Trust me."
"Thank you," he hissed through gritted teeth.
"No problem. You're just lucky it's cold enough for ice."
"And if it's cold enough for ice, it's too cold for you and Sheska to leave." Riza's voice was calm, the normal voice Roy had heard behind him for so many years. "There are guest rooms upstairs, take your pick. It's getting late. Very late."
"Thanks." Sheska moved towards the stairs, dragging Winry behind her.
"Goodnight!" she called out as they sprinted up the stairs.
"Were we ever that young?" Riza plopped down next to him on the floor, firelight dancing in her hair.
"Once. Back when everything was simple."
"Was it ever?" She moved closer, up onto the edge of the cushion pile, and he turned his head towards her, trying to see her better.
"I don't know. We've been fighting for so long, ever since the day we arrived in... that place." He does not want to name it now, for the fire is warm and she is here and sleep is far too close. He has no desire for a night so fine to be ruined by nightmares.
"We disliked each other back then. I thought you were a stuck-up little alchemical wannabe who was all flash and bang with nothing else behind his skill but pure flair." She smiled, leaning still closer with her hair spilling around her on the sheets.
"And you were the general's granddaughter, secure in her future and snooty about her legendary aim." He ran a tiny bit of the golden strands through weakened fingers.
"Somehow, we ended up back to back in the fight, drifting together despite it all." She drew still closer, close enough to curl up against his side.
He wrapped his right arm around her as well as he could. "We saved each other's lives for the first time that day."
"And we haven't stopped doing it since."
A heartbeat, clear in the quiet between poppings in the fireplace.
She moved, turning against him.
Another heartbeat.
And then she kissed him, on the cheek but a kiss nonetheless. "I'm not hiding what I feel anymore," she blurted, trying to rise suddenly as she realized what she'd done.
He didn't move his arm. "And neither am I." He kissed her nose, carefully and almost missing twice.
And then there was just them, the fire, and being next to each other.
And not caring who would see them in the morning light.
Edit: Changed Riza's grandfather's name now that I actually found out he is fully named in canon (the wonders of not reading the manga...).
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And of course I had to give them a sweet moment after all they've been through... and all they still have to go through. Hawkeye's still got to deal with a Mustang who could reinjure himself at any moment.