This fic is a sequel to Until Tomorrow. While it isn't necessary to read that fic to understand this one, it does provide some background information and is something I will be referring back to throughout.

Chapter One: The Disappearance of Elizabeth Sawyer

Autumn arrived overnight, dredging up a fine mist that hung over the river and a familiar bite to the early morning air. Riza Hawkeye sipped her coffee with her eyes closed as she tried to recall the rapidly fading memory of last night's dream. It was the first in nearly a year that had not been a nightmare plagued by sand and fire and gunpowder and blood. Something in the cool night must have reminded her of home, for that is what she dreamed: those familiar woods where she had spent most of her life. Those woods she would never see again. She had scarcely even thought of them since the day she had left with a single trunk and the weight of eighteen years of memories slipping from her thin, freckled shoulders with every mile the train put between her and the only place she had ever known.

For one delicate moment, Riza felt fiercely protective of that girl, with her light heart and her mother's best dress. Another girl from another life. A small puff of air—not quite a sigh—escaped Riza's lips as she opened her eyes again. The moment had passed and she had a stack of reports in front of her. It was no use for Riza-the-soldier to cling to Riza-the-dreamer now that her coffee was gone and there was work to be done.

"More coffee anyone?" Jean Havoc asked a little too loudly. With one exception, the rest of the team looked up from their work. Vato Falman continued reading as though no one had spoken. One by one, the rest of them returned to their work with small shakes of the head and Havoc shrugged. "Just me then? Suit yourselves."

He pushed his chair back and stood, towering over the rest of them. Riza watched him leave with a thousand other memories fighting their way to the front of her mind. She exchanged a quick glance with Heymans Breda, and he shot her a tiny smile. For one fleeting moment, they were back at the Academy, though the scene was tinged with the kind of melancholy suited to a grey September morning.

When Havoc returned, Riza was finishing her report on the previous day's investigation of a disappearance. The case still hadn't been solved, and she had a suspicion that the Colonel would burst in sooner than later to tell them they were heading out again. She didn't mind days in the way Havoc did—the way the Colonel did—but today she hoped that she was right. She needed something to distract herself from slipping into her thoughts again. There would be plenty of time for that when she returned to an empty apartment that still did not feel like home.

Her prediction came true an hour later. The door swung open and Lieutenant Colonel Mustang stepped inside, the skirt of his coat twisting around his calves. "Hawkeye. Havoc. Come with me."

"Where are we going, boss?" Havoc asked. He was already on his feet with his coat folded over one arm.

"There's been another disappearance." Mustang's dark eyes flickered with a familiar anger that Riza had once hoped never to grow accustomed. It was far too late for that now. She removed her coat from its hook and draped it over her shoulders, never taking her own eyes from the man. There was something else in his face that was indecipherable and it troubled her.

A slight drizzle awaited them outside, casting an even heavier shadow over the Colonel's demeanor. He walked with shoulders hunched against the rain. Trailing slightly behind him, Riza and Havoc walked in silence. The turns they took through East City were familiar and Riza's heart grew heavy with dread as they approached her building. A few military police lingered at the entrance.

Elizabeth Sawyer lived three doors down from Riza. She had an easy smile and wavy, strawberry-blonde hair. Though Riza kept mostly to herself, Beth was the kind of person who would chat with anyone she met in the elevator, and so Riza stepped forward to tap her Colonel on the shoulder as he went over the report from the M.P.s.

"Sir," she said when he turned to look at her. "Beth had a cat. I know the M.P.s have been in and out, but there should at least be a mention of it in the initial report. Is there?"

Mustang frowned at the pages in his hands as he skimmed them briefly before shaking his head. "It's probably out hunting."

"It was an indoor cat," Riza said.

Roy took another glance at the report before handing it to her. "You were her friend. Maybe you'll be able to find clues I'm missing in this."

I wasn't her friend, Riza wanted to protest. A friend would have invited Beth over. A friend wouldn't have brushed her aside the second the elevator reached the lobby on what might have been Beth's last day alive. Years ago, the guilt of that realization would have crushed her. Now it was just another weight among a thousand others and all of them heavier.

She read the report all the same, looking for details. Beth's boyfriend was the one who had reported her missing. She had the day off but when he called her earlier that morning, no one had answered. She had gone out with friends the night before but she had gone home early, claiming she was tired. No one could say for certain whether she made it home or not. There was no sign of a struggle in the apartment, only a missing woman and a missing cat with no explanation.

There didn't seem to be a single connecting factor between Beth and yesterday's missing woman. According to the description, Laurel Tomson had been tall and slender with straight brown hair. She was ten years older than Beth and lived on the other side of the river with her husband, who had reported her missing after she failed to come home from work.

"Havoc, I want you to bring the boyfriend in for questioning. Sergeant Jones will take you there. Hawkeye, stay with me."

Havoc saluted as he left, and Riza stood alone before Lieutenant Colonel Mustang for the first time since he had asked her to be his bodyguard three months prior. The silence that stretched between them could fill an ocean. At length, Mustang spoke again: "Tell me everything you know about Elizabeth Sawyer."

And so she did. She did not know much, just half-remembered details from superficial conversations in the hallway or the elevator. All the while, the scar tissue on her back itched and ached and she could not help but wonder if that sensation was born from shame for from all the unspoken words that hung in the air between the two of them. This was your fault, some bitter and broken part of her wanted to scream at him. This was my fault, she reminded herself, biting back all the accusations she wanted to hurl at him. He had tried to refuse, to talk her out of it with that silver tongue of his. But she had known better than to let him. It was a lesson she had learned far too late and at far too great a cost, but she had learned it nonetheless.

That indecipherable expression on Mustang's face gave way at last to one she recognized, but his sympathy only stoked the anger already blazing in her chest. She turned on her heel and went to the bedroom to see what the initial investigation might have missed. To be alone. For she knew that Roy Mustang would not follow her into a bedroom—not now, not ever again.

She opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape, the metal ringing beneath her boots. After a few attempts, she discovered that the window was easy enough to open from the outside and made a note to find a way to bar her own. The rain had made the stairs treacherous, but Riza followed them down all the same. Five floors up and even the fear of falling couldn't touch her when the fear of encountering Mustang after storming out on him already had a monopoly on her heart.

There was nothing out of the ordinary on any of the levels, and she slid down the ladder to inspect the alley. The nearby dumpster had been emptied earlier that morning, as it was every Wednesday. Any evidence that might have been left there was long gone now, and she wondered if whoever had taken Beth had been counting on that. He could have been watching her for months for all Riza knew. Defeated, she looked up at the falling rain, hoping to find something that would ease her heart. Instead, she saw a head poking out from the kitchen window of Beth's apartment.

"Find anything?" Mustang called down to her.

"No, sir," she shouted back. "Just rain."

Several minutes later, Mustang appeared on the ladder and dropped to the ground beside her. "I can make it back to headquarters by myself," he told her. "Take the rest of the day off." She started to protest but he held up a hand. "That's an order, Lieutenant. I can tell you're upset, and I need you at your best."

"With all due respect, sir, I am perfectly capable of remaining on this case," she said, anger welling up inside her once more. Dismissing her for being too emotional—who the hell did he think he was?

"Lieutenant Hawkeye, I gave you an order. Can you follow it?" His eyes bored into her and she realized this was a test. It wasn't the first time she had questioned an order, wasn't the first time she had refused to follow one, and she realized now that he needed to be sure that she didn't intend to use their history as an excuse to flout commands and endanger a mission.

Her lips twitched slightly. "You gave me another order first, if I recall correctly. Are you sure you'll be okay by yourself in this downpour?"

"I appreciate your concern, Lieutenant," he said with a half-smile of his own. "I'll take a cab back to headquarters."

"Very well, sir," she said. He was within rights to dismiss her from a case with such a personal connection, and she was afraid that arguing with him at this point would lead to an end of the carefully constructed peace they had made with each other by remaining tight-lipped on anything that had happened before she entered his command.

"If you don't make it into the office tomorrow, we'll tear East City apart to find you," he promised, and then he was gone, striding down the alley and into the downpour and leaving Riza alone with her jumbled thoughts. She looked at the fire escape that would lead up to her own apartment, and decided to take it rather than facing the crowd at the entrance that had likely grown since she had arrived.

By the time Riza hauled herself through her bedroom window, she was exhausted in a way she hadn't expected. She stripped away her rain-soaked uniform and donned a pair of warm, dry pajamas. Though lunchtime had come and gone, her appetite had yet to arrive and so she made herself a pot of tea instead and sat on the sofa with the mug warming her hands and her knees tucked up to her chest. Even though she was under orders to take the rest of the day off, she couldn't help but try to piece together a connection between the two missing women. Both had disappeared without leaving a trace or a witness, but that was simply the mark of a skilled kidnapper. It was unlikely that there were two in East City at one time, but not impossible. With her eyes closed, she tried to recall the report she had read in Beth's apartment and the report she had written that morning.

The answer she needed, however, was not in either of the reports, but in a conversation she had all-but forgotten. Riza slopped tea down her pajama shirt in her haste to get to the phone when she remembered. She gave the operator her code and a moment later, she heard Mustang's voice.

"I thought I told you to take the day off," he said, a note of concern behind his exasperation.

"I remembered something that might be important," she said.

A pause. "Go on."

"Last week, I met Beth in the elevator on my way home. She told me she was supposed to have met her boyfriend for dinner but he was staying late at the office. Apparently this had been going on for some time and she was starting to suspect him of having an affair with his boss: an older, married woman by the name of Tomson." Riza hesitated for a moment before continuing, "Havoc didn't find the boyfriend, did he?"

"There was no one home when he arrived," Mustang said. "Thank you, Hawkeye. I'll send someone to see if he went into work today."

The line went dead and Riza hung up her phone. The rain provided a welcome respite from silence that would otherwise have overwhelmed her. She finished the tea that hadn't spilled and carried the mug to the kitchen to refill it before going to her bedroom to change into a clean top.

Instead of returning to her sofa, she settled cross-legged onto the bed with a dusty photo album. She took a sip from the mug on her nightstand before opening it. The first pictures were mostly of her mother, and they were the ones she was looking for. Emily Hawkeye in the early years of her marriage was as familiar as Riza's own reflection, and the biggest difference between the two of them these days was how desperately unhappy Riza looked when there was no one around to see her. Her mother had been happy up to the end, always full of laughter and love so infectious that no one who had known her ever had an unkind word to say about her. For one small moment, she felt tears burning in the corners of her eyes and she rubbed them away before they could fall. Emily Hawkeye was dead and buried and not even alchemy could change that.

Lightning flashed outside Riza's window, accompanied by rain that came down heavier than it had all day. A few seconds later, thunder crashed and Riza flinched hard. Shaking, she got up from the bed and went to the kitchen to fill her mug again. She was halfway there when she dropped it and the ceramic shattered on the floor. Cursing, she swept up the pieces and threw them away. Once, she would have left them in a neat pile and asked Roy Mustang to fix it, and he would have presented the repaired mug with a flourish. Now, she didn't even bother to call and remind him to take a cab home, and she knew he wouldn't call to see how she was holding up.

Back in her room, with the rest of the tea forgotten and slowly growing cold, she made her way through the rest of her mother's life, closing the book before she could reach the long stretch of empty pages and a single photo from 1902's harvest festival that she couldn't bear to look at anymore.

When she returned the album to its shelf, she hesitated before taking the book next to it. Riza knelt on the floor and let the treasury of plays fall open in her lap, as it always did, to a page marked with a dried inflorescence of lilacs. For a moment, the storm on the page and the storm outside converged in a single storm inside of her and she ripped the dried flowers from the page with the intention of crushing them and throwing them out, but something in the delicate purple petals stopped her. They had meant something to her once—had meant everything. Beneath the scar tissue now, she could feel the phantom pain from her tattoo and she remembered that those same flowers she had been so intent on destroying only a moment before had given her courage in the painful days and weeks that had followed her father's careful embedding of his research into her skin.

With trembling fingers, she returned the flowers to their page and the book to its shelf but she did not rise from the floor. She was trapped in another memory: the rest of last week's conversation with Elizabeth Sawyer and a question she had never answered. Have you ever been in love, Riza?

Shaking, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled toward the bed. Have you ever been in love? It was a question she had answered before: with laughter, with lies, with a shot of vodka and a refusal to elaborate. Now she wasn't entirely certain how to answer a question like that. The girl with thin, freckled shoulders and her mother's best dress had been in love, but Riza Hawkeye could not remember how to be that girl anymore, even though she had kept her dress and her book with the flowers and her photo album. Love was a thing that got good people killed. It had killed her mother, it had killed whatever had once been good in her, and it might very well have killed Beth by now. Love, she decided as she dragged the covers up to her chin, was a thing best left untouched.