Parents

After a long silence, Riza discreetly touched a finger to the corner of her eye, feeling a trace of dampness there and, with a soft sigh, flicked the tear away like a bug.

Roy, perched on the edge of her bed, looked up at the sound as she lowered her hand from her face and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs, pressing them further into her chest.

"I didn't think I would react this way," she said somberly, her eyes staring straight ahead and not at him.

Roy thought about responding – I didn't think you would either – but opted instead to merely nod and stay quiet.

Even after almost three years in the military academy, Roy had yet to meet anyone who possessed the same strong collectedness and calm of Riza Hawkeye so, fittingly, the sight of her losing her gentle stoicism had unnerved him unlike anything he had ever seen.

It had been around 1AM when he left his room, the room he had once stayed in when he lived at the Hawkeye estate, to find sanctuary in the library downstairs. He had expectedly been unable to sleep so he decided that the best solution would be to pursue his former teacher's alchemy texts until he drifted off, the same way he used to when he was a student there.

However, on his way down the stairs he had heard sobbing noises coming from Riza's room and when he turned to look, he realized that she had left her door open, allowing the sounds to carry throughout the large house.

He knew he should have just kept walking and left her alone. He could ask her if she was alright in the morning.

But there was something so strange about the idea of Riza crying, like it was some kind of beautiful but tragic phenomenon, that he couldn't keep himself from walking back down the hall and leaning against her open doorframe.

The creaking of the frame under his weight caused her to look over at him, a look of terror crossing over her face as she immediately lowered her head and started trying to wipe away her tears with the sleeves of her nightgown, almost embarrassed at being caught so emotionally exposed. Before she could successfully clear away the evidence, hints of damp tracks still present on her cheeks, Roy walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her.

For a while she stood stark still, unsure of why he was there and what he was doing. They had only just started to become friends when he up and left for the military academy so the fact that he had crossed the physical barrier so quickly, and after not seeing her for almost three years, was jarring.

His grip on her was loose in case she wanted to get away but she didn't resist, only loosening up after a while when he could feel her shaking against him, her short blonde hair tickling his chest. She had started crying again but now she was crying in silence, her head down so he could not see her weep.

When she had started to calm down again, she roughly pushed him away from her with more force than he had been prepared for and turned away to wipe her face with her nightgown sleeves again, keeping him from ever really seeing her tears. Unsure if that was his cue to leave, Roy just stood where he was, watching as she climbed on top of her bed and sat in the center with her legs in front of her like a fortress, until she motioned to the edge of her bed as an invitation for him to sit down, which he did at a respectful distance away from her. She stared straight ahead and he glanced around her room, a place he had never seen before, and they had been quiet until she broke the silence with her declaration.

"He was your father," Roy offered as if that would explain everything. He knew it wasn't much but as distant and Riza and Berthold Hawkeye had been, there was still that.

"I thought I would be more relieved," she admitted, resting her chin on her bent legs. "After all these years of having to look after him and running this house and then taking care of him when he was finally too sick to do anything at all for himself, I thought I would feel . . . free. But now . . . I just feel lost."

Roy didn't know what to say. During his first two years training under Hawkeye he had barely noticed anything outside of his texts and his chalk, certainly not the shy and absent twelve-year-old girl who made all the meals and kept the house from falling into further ruin than it was already in. He sometimes wondered if his teacher even noticed how much his daughter did for them.

He had to have noticed. Even though he didn't show it, Roy always got the feeling that Hawkeye did care deeply for his daughter. His last words to him had made that clear.

It had only been when Roy was seventeen and Riza was fourteen that Roy himself could see how much she did for them. He had started seeing her around the house more, always coming into the library for a new academic text or novel, and had been able to really talk to her, finding out that she had stopped going to school in order to find work so they would have another source of income outside of the small sum of money his Aunt Chris paid Hawkeye for his teaching and he knew he could never begin to fathom how much that tore her apart.

"You don't have any plans?" he asked with a bit of disbelieve. She always had plans. She had always been the organized one to combat her father's scattered genius.

"I do have personal plans," she admitted. "But they aren't completely formed yet. First I'm going to sell this place and everything in it except for things I need," she said, looking up at the cracked ceiling above her. "We've been in debt forever so I won't make much from it. Whoever buys the land may as well just build a new house. This place has been falling apart since not long after my mother died. It took a while for the money to run out but when it did father couldn't be bothered to stifle his genius with a proper job so that's why he took on an apprentice who'd pay. How any of us have lived since then is a mystery."

Roy raised his eyebrows in shock at how blunt she was being, of course, her bitterness was probably just the result of her heightened emotional state. He hadn't known that Hawkeye had taken him on partially because he could pay but some of the money had been intended for his own living expenses, not a paycheck. He had also never heard Riza mention her mother before in any context but then again, they had never talked about anything this personal before.

"Do you want my father's old alchemy texts?" she asked nonchalantly, finally turning to look at him. "I know I'll never be able to sell them for anything."

Roy smiled in remembrance. "Because of all those notes he wrote in the margins."

Riza nodded indifferently, not sharing the fondness.

"Well, I don't think my roommate will appreciate being kicked out of the dorm so I could make room for the books but I'll definitely take them," he said jokingly.

She cracked a slight smile at the thought.

"Okay. Good," she said with stern finality.

"So where are you going to live after you leave here?" Roy wondered.

"I'll get an apartment somewhere. I started setting aside my own money when he got sick so I should be able to afford something. Then I'll have to get a new job," she explained, lowering her hands and letting her legs stretch out in front of her.

"Not going to work for the florist anymore?" Roy asked, knowing that the job had never really suited her.

Riza shook her head. "That was always just a temporary job until I could start an actual career. I don't know what I'll do though. I've kept up with my studies so I could go to college but I don't want to be a doctor or a teacher so there really isn't any point and I don't think I could realistically afford it. I could apprentice under someone but I don't know what trade I would be good at and I would need somewhere that would provide me with free housing and meals if they couldn't pay me . . ."

"You could go to the military academy," Roy offered even though he knew she would shoot down the idea. Although she didn't seem to share the same strong anti-military sentiments her father did, he just couldn't see her there. Maybe it was because deep down he could still see traces of the shy, little girl she once was in spite of the young woman before him. But at the same time, it wasn't such a ridiculous suggestion. She was very smart and organized and used to shoot targets in her spare time last he remembered. It actually seemed like the perfect place for her.

Riza didn't respond to the suggestion outside of furrowing her brows like she was deep in thought.

"What about living with your relatives?" He asked, changing the subject.

"I don't know of any relatives," she admitted, her confused look softening. "My father's parents are most likely gone and he never mentioned anyone else and I don't know anything about my mother. All I have to go on is some old jewelry, photographs, and those guns I found in the attic."

The fact that Hawkeye hadn't told his daughter anything about her family wasn't shocking. Roy was starting to wonder if they even spoke to each other more than once a week.

"What about your parents?" Riza asked, seemingly trying to get the focus away from herself. "Do you know much about them?"

"My aunt has told me everything she could," he said with a grin. "Actually . . . hang on."

Roy stood up and walked out the door in the direction of his temporary room, coming back a few seconds later holding his wallet. He opened the leather sleeve and pulled out a small picture, handing it to Riza before sitting back down in the spot he was in before.

In the picture there was a tall man in his early twenties with dark hair, light eyes and a smirking face wearing an Amestrian military uniform with his arm around a beautiful, petite girl with long, thick black hair, Xingese-looking eyes and a big, bright smile.

"Your parents," Riza said as a statement rather than a question. There was no question that they were.

"Yeah," he said with a touch of pride. "I know a lot of great stories about them. Do you want to hear about how they met?"

"All I'm saying is . . ." she paused in her sentence to hiccup loudly, her whole body shaking. "My parents didn't cross the Eastern Desert to escape oppression just to live in a country run by some mysteriously elected dictator whose political platform is all about war!"

The girl, beautiful, smart, and very, very drunk, slammed her fist down on the table much to the dismay of her less inebriated friends.

"You know we're here to celebrate you opening up your own practice, right? Not to complain about the government," her friend Mary asked, treading lightly around her.

The girl hiccupped again in response, more color glowing in her already tomato-colored cheeks.

"She gets drunk and she gets political," her other friend commented with a laugh.

"The state of this nation is no laughing matter!" the girl declared fervently with her fist in the air. "Every day we are shipping more and more young men off to the boarders to fight in wars that we don't even know the reasons for! The newspapers tell us nothing! How did Fuhrer Bradley get into power anyway?"

"Shh," Mary hissed avidly, trying to quiet her down while glancing out of the corner of her eyes. There was a slew of soldiers all gathered around the bar close on their right and the last thing they needed was for her to start offending men who could throw her like a javelin.

The girl seemed to notice where her friend was looking and turned fully towards the bar to see the soldiers all toasting someone's promotion. Mary slapped her forehead for her mistake.

"Oh hell."

The fire was rising up in the girl's eyes and her friends couldn't grab her shoulders fast enough to sit her back down.

"Hey boys!" she shouted over the cacophony of voices. "Do you know why you're fighting? Huh? Do you?"

The drunkest of the bunch shouted back racial slurs or whistled inappropriately as she stormed over to the blue-uniformed men while her friends hid their faces in shame.

"Here you are toasting the promotion of one more sad soul who has just become slightly less cannon fodder than he was before. And why are we at war with Drachma, men? One of you must have fought there but do any of you know?"

Before anyone could even attempt to answer her, she snapped her legs together and brought her hand up to her forehead in a salute although the effect was lessened somewhat by how slobbering drunk she was.

"Sir, who is this celebration for!" she said loudly and clearly to no one in particularly.

"That would be me," said one of the men, raising his hand. He had shaggy dark hair and light green eyes and was grinning at her with amusement.

"What is your rank, soldier? Right now, I am your commanding officer!" she demanded, storming over to him and getting right up in his face, a position that required her to stand on the tips of her toes to even get in the vicinity.

"Sir, I just got promoted to sergeant, sir!" he said with exaggerated professionalism to the humor of his comrades.

The girl slowly eased back onto her heels with a smile.

"Ah, an enlisted man," she said enthusiastically. "This is what I'm talking about!" she shouted, back to addressing everyone and no one. "Here we have this handsome young man, probably comes from a farming family or something equally as dreadful, and he thinks, 'well, I don't want to spend my life raising cattle so I may as well join the army! I can't afford the academy so I'll just enlist! Drachman soldiers, be prepared!' The army is the government so it's an appealing thing to resort to for people with no other choice – hey, have a hand in making this country great - but what they don't know is why they're even killing for this eye-patch wearing tyrant who just seems like such a nice guy during his speeches. Well, I didn't vote for him!"

The looks on the men's faces were a mix ranging from horror to anger to sadness but none of them tried to refute her claims. She was only slightly taller than five feet, weighed about 100 pounds and was clearly not of Amestrian descent but commanded more drunken power than any of the soldiers could have guessed just by looking at her.

She turned back to the soldier whose party it was.

"So what do you have to say for yourself, sergeant?" she asked with the same challenging tone.

A self-assured smirk spread across his face.

"You think I'm handsome?"

Abruptly, the color drained from the girl's countenance and her mouth fell open in an attempt at a clever response.

"I, ah . . ."

"There's this new restaurant that just opened on Lawrence Street around the corner that I've been meaning to check out. Would you like to go to dinner with me tomorrow night?"

The girl continued to stare at him dumbly for a second before nodding in numb shock.

"Great!" he said happily. "I'll pick you up at seven. My name is David Mustang," he said, sticking out his hand.

"I'm Ren. Ren Zhou," she said with a surprisingly firm handshake.

The handshake went on for an uncomfortably long time until he raised an eyebrow at her and carefully eased out of her grip.

"Oh right! My address!" she shouted, grabbing a napkin off the bar and frantically looking around for something to write with.

"Hey," he said softly, interrupting her search, and she looked up at him to see him holding out a pencil for her.

She sheepishly took the pencil from him and tried to steady her hand long enough to write out her full address and shakily signing her name underneath. She looked at it closely, deciding that it was a bit wobbly but legible, and handed it to him.

"Alright, Ren, I'll see you tomorrow at seven," David said, tucking the napkin into his uniform jacket. "Don't forget," he said grinning, noting how drunk she was.

"Right. I'll write it down," she said slowly, still trying to process what had just happened. "David Mustang. Dinner. Tomorrow. Seven. Bye."

As she turned to go back to her table, David grabbed her arm and pulled her back towards him so he could whisper in her ear.

"By the way, you were right. My parents work on a farm," he whispered with a laugh.

She looked up at him with a dubious expression.

"I'm a vet specializing in farm animals," she said humbled, never ashamed of her job until then.

David flashed her a huge smile as she waved weakly at him and walked away to gradually lower herself into her chair, her friends watching her with inquisitive expressions.

"So what just happened?" Mary asked.

Ren looked up at them slowly and confused.

"I have a date tomorrow with an Amestrian soldier."

Riza smiled and handed the photo back to Roy.

"That's amazing," she said without a trance of facetiousness.

"I know," Roy agreed, slipping the picture back into his wallet. "As the story goes, right afterwards he called Aunt Chris and told her he had met the woman he was going to marry and that, 'there was something so endearing about the way she insulted the government.'"

Riza continued smiling as she looked back in her straight ahead direction and Roy realized just how little she really did smile.

"Mr. Mustang?" she asked finally after a moment of reflection. Roy flinched at the formal title. It had never sat right with him and seemed even stranger to him now that she was a few weeks shy of eighteen and he would be twenty-one in half a year. The age difference between them didn't feel like anything anymore and he had a feeling the formal title had been a request of her father.

"Yes?"

"The reason you joined the military . . . it wasn't because of your father, was it?" she asked, turning her head towards him.

Roy shook his head, his messy hair growing messier.

"No."

"Then why did you?"

Roy's lips turned up a bit at the corners as he looked into her curious amber eyes.

"Ask me that again tomorrow."