We've come to the end, my friends.

I know it's just a wee bit of fanfiction, and I know it's nothing liable to catch very many eyes, but writing this story has been an absolute delight and a welcome respite from a crazy few months. This past half a year or so, I've been stationed literally an ocean away from home doing research, and being so far from my friends and my family could get dreadfully lonely at times. But every time I posted a new chapter, I always woke up the next morning looking forward to reading such lovely and thoughtful comments from each of you. Writing this story gave me something to do, but it also gave me some much-needed company.

I hope, as always, that this final instalment meets your expectations. It's been so much fun, even if it has been scary and painful and sad, at times. But life can be, if nothing else, scary and painful and sad, and just as Arakawa-San's characters find their own ways out of their dark times, so, too, will you find your way out of yours.

Enjoy, and thank you.

- K.T. (Hoopy)

(also dear lord forgive me, this final chapter is looooooooooooong)

Somewhere

The wind howled, piling up snow in drifts, blinding the night with ice-white dust. He walked bent over against the cold, protecting his eyes with his arms. Trees and boulders loomed into view before vanishing, swallowed in the white. His breath billowed pale in the numbing air.

Snowflakes whirled about his head in delicate, frozen fractals, alighting on the backs of his hands; he brought a few close to his eyes. Each form seemed to encompass a billion pinprick galaxies, slow bursts of nuclear life amidst the mountain cold. At the sight, he imagined the rough sphere of the cosmos blossoming within each drift, growing as he watched, life pushing forward against the night.

The moment seemed to go on forever, even as the sky grew blacker and the snow fell thick and heavy, clumps of wet flakes drifting mindlessly down, the air moist, the ground giving way softly underfoot. All the while, he held the fractals in the palms of his hands, contemplating the infinite cascade of life and death and resurrection. Perhaps, like some tacit law of entropy and thermodynamics, the recurrences of destiny bound by the snow and the silence were cyclical, never created anew, merely extant in new forms, new worlds, new life.

He supposed the poets and the alchemists had glimpsed it; it encircled the world, and hence it encircled him. It swallowed its own tail, endlessly feeding on its own selfhood, a curve of a geometric figure, each part with the same statistical character as the whole. It was everything there was and would be. Fighting it would be like battling a pattern, or shouting against the snowstorm. The glimmer in his eyes reflected the light of the cosmos and all its tiny battles. Yet, inside the conception, the grand poem of encirclement, of recurrence and resurrection, a single life still blazed.

Her life.

She was a desolate figure, mournful and lonely on the rocks, beckoning him with her wistful song. Her eyes were the colour of raw winter mornings. Under the darkening sky, her blonde hair looked almost white. She belonged in elements as wild and freezing and beautiful as she was: the snow, the cold, the hollow pitilessness of the mountains, where her subsumption made her a part of something important, something whole.

He reached out and touched her, her life. It was, in that moment, a short life, and an infinite one. A life that had known love, and pity, and laughter. That had known pain, and grief, and fury. He presented himself to her, and she saw in him what he could not see himself .

He wanted to go home.

She took his hand.

Cold and silence. Nothing quieter than the snow. The sky screamed to deliver it, a hundred furies flying on the edge of the blizzard. But once the snow covered the ground, it hushed as still as his heart...

Elsewhere

Three Days Later

I

"You seem a man with something pressing on his mind, Master Elric."

Trapped in the dark borehole of his thoughts, Ed hadn't heard Major Miké's approach, sidling up to him with a jauntiness belayed slightly by the thick white bandage around her hand and the scorch marks on her clothes. Her face was streaked with soot. Dark umbras pulled at her eyes, making her look, if possible, even gaunter than usual.

Without waiting for an invitation, or even for Ed to acknowledge her presence, Sofia plopped down on the station platform next to him, stirring the sand, making Ed cough conspicuously. The Feldspar Alchemist seemed not to notice the sound, or the way Ed glared at her out of the corner of his eye. She watched the desert, lost in the rhythmic percussion of the wind upon the sand, the babble of voices from Dairut and the hiss of steam from the incoming trains. Her blue-purple eyes were steady on the horizon, pale face infused with a rare blush of colour as the noonday sun climbed higher in the sky. Ed didn't know why, but Sofia's thin mouth bore the semblance of a smile, just enough to show that she was enjoying her strange thoughts, whatever they may have been.

Ed scooted slightly away from her, yet stayed quiet, allowing the Major to remain lost in introspection a little while longer. After a few seconds, Ed shaded his eyes and peered across the broken waste of desert, trying to see what held the Major's attention, and not finding it.

The moment passed, and Ed crossed his arms across his knees, rested his head on the tops of his folded wrists. He wasn't really in the mood for Major Miké's - for anyone's - company. He'd squirrelled himself away in one of the unused station terminals with the express purpose of steering clear of conversation. And Ed figured part of avoiding thoughts about something was not encouraging opportunities for that something to makes itself felt... hence his hiding from the Amestrian coalition forces. From the Major.

From Mustang.

From the aftermath of the Accident.

Ed's stomach clenched. He grasped at the leg of his trousers, scratching at the fabric to avoid raking a hand through his hair.

He considered, for a moment, asking Sofia to shift herself, but Ed found he couldn't summon the energy necessary to try. He was fatigued, too tired to even eat. His right arm ached.

And he was terribly, terribly sad.

The woman at his side looked skyward. A few white clouds drifted lazily overhead, too few and far between to punctuate the high, hot sun with the respite of shade. The sky was a brilliant blue, as blue as Winry Rockbell's eyes, and the air seemed cooler, sharper - cleaner, somehow, as though the wind had wiped the world clean. The breeze played with the tailing ends of Sofia's hair, and Ed stared at her in surprise, noticing the glaringly obvious for the first time.

"You cut it off," he murmured.

Her hair shone like the sea at night, the black strands utterly white where the bright rays of the sun glanced from their surfaces. Sofia, however, just snorted. "You could teach a masterclass in misdirection, Edward," she noted ruefully, not denying the fact she'd lopped her long plait clean off, but not dropping her earlier inquiry, either. She could be as tenacious as a splinter, thought Ed, and far more irritating.

"You've done a marvellous job of avoiding everyone's company these past several days, my boy. No easy feat, considering Grumman's managed to marshal every reserve force from Eastern to Briggs."

Ed knew the truth of it: everything had happened so quickly... too quickly , some would say, as though the hand of some unknown, unseen intelligence was directing the complex dance of their lives . Ed put it down to Kimblee's ghost and the discomforting, though predictable, pleasure the bastard took in manipulating them all, watching them fall in to step to the tune of his perverse music. The Fullmetal Alchemist suspected it was situational convenience more than true compassion that had ensured Kimblee's involvement worked in their favour...

The Amestrian coalition reserves had arrived soon after the Accident, padded, Ed had noted at the time, by members of the Ishvalan clergy and regional security forces . It made a sobering sort of sense: Grumman wanted to avoid any overt demonstration of Amestrian military aggression in the region. Under the direction of the Eastern and Northern battalions, Stokes's followers had been swiftly apprehended. Stokes herself was in military custody.

No one had died. No one had sustained even serious injuries.

No one... except those involved in the Accident.

Ed hazarded a glance at the Major. If she knew what he was thinking about, she gave no indication of the fact, and Ed suspected she wouldn't thank him for bringing up that particular topic...

Instead, he muttered, "I'm waiting for a train."

"Are you expecting someone?"

Ed scowled. "Not that it's any of your business, but yeah, actually."

A sage nod. "Young Miss Rockbell?"

The scowl deepened. "Lucky guess."

"Pretty girl... blonde hair, bright eyes, carries her toolbox around like a life jacket on a particularly leaky boat?"

Ed gawped. "How...?"

"Oh, don't give me that look, Master Elric. She arrived on the last supply train from Youswell, accompanied by Master Sergeant Brosch." The Major rasped her teeth, gnawing at an errant thumbnail as she mused, "Not that I'm one to indulge rumour and hearsay, but according to the military grapevine, Winry got wind of your predicament through her Xingese connections. Evidently, she wouldn't leave Grumman's inner office until the old man promised her a berth on one of the emergency transports."

"She's here?" mouthed Ed, butterscotch eyes going wide. "Now?"

Even though his heart pounded against his ribcage and his head buzzed with a sudden rush of adrenaline, he made no motion to move. Granted, he had stowed himself on one of the unused platforms, still under construction, but he realised, abruptly, that he hadn't been keeping track of the incoming trains in the station proper. Winry was probably scouring the streets of Dairut for him at that very moment.

Ed, still, made no motion to move. His paralysis did not escape the Major's notice, and she looked down at him with an emotion Ed couldn't entirely place. In any case, her usually wry, sarcastic face wore the expression strangely, but not insincerely.

"If you'll forgive my impudence for a moment, Master Elric," said Sofia gently, "provided Miss Rockbell does have an inkling of what's been happening in Dairut, I imagine she's quite keen to see you safe and sound."

Ed said nothing, counting the grains of sand at his feet. He reached a hundred before Major Mike asked:

"Are you avoiding her for the same reason you're avoiding the rest of us, or is there an exceptional motive you've yet to make me aware of?"

"I told you, Major," murmured Ed, his voice thick, the words dark, "it's not any of your business."

Without missing a beat, she went on: "If you think back for a moment, Master Elric, the Führer himself charged me with watching over you. Our... well, our mutual friend may have made Grumman aware of the situation with Stokes, and our illustrious leader may have responded in his usual perfunctory fashion, but I have not yet been recalled to Central. I am still, technically, your escort, and so that rather does make this my business."

"Yeah, well... I don't exactly think this falls within your purview as a state alchemist." Ed blinked rapidly, tilting his head towards Dairut, so he couldn't see Sofia in his peripheries. "Why are you doing this, Major?" he asked bitterly. "I don't want it, and it's not like I've ever done anything for you."

"You have been my friend," replied Sofia quietly. "And as your friend, I'm worried about you, Edward."

Ed ignored her as he ran his hands over the floorboards of the platform, the sand-smoothed bark, feeling the blisters, the curling. It was like the paint that flaked from the side of his house, coming loose under the soft skin of his hands. He pushed harder, almost digging his fingers into the timber, the bark cracking and falling confetti-like before being lost in the sandy litter between the floorboards. Despite the baking heat, the ground felt suddenly cold under his feet. Above the awning of the disused platform, the boughs of the junipers swayed almost imperceptibly in the hot breeze, throwing crooked shadows across the ground like so many grasping fingers.

The sudden fear he felt, then, the guilt and pain, was not unlike the approaching trains. The feeling was almost nightmarish in its inevitability, as though it didn't matter how fast or how far Ed ran from it... he never managed to gap the distance. His feet had become heavy, his body slow, until he felt almost set in concrete on the tracks. It occurred to him that all he could do was wait to be destroyed, wait to be nothing more than blood and bone fragments.

"Edward," began Major Miké; she released a chest-deep sigh, "it's not your fault, what happened."

The train hit, and Ed clutched his knees, bracing himself for the impact. "Major-"

"It's not your fault."

"Stop saying that!" cried Ed, rounding on the other alchemist in a sudden fit of fury and frustration. "It is my fault! I was a damn idiot and I left him there to die! I should have seen it... I should have paid better attention, not given in to the stupid, stupid hope that everything was gonna be okay..."

"Hope is never stupid," murmured Sofia, eyes straining against the brightness of Dairut. "And regret, I've found, is the most useless form of guilt. It always arrives too late to do any good." She closed her eyes for a moment. "Your regret can no more undo the Lieutenant's fate than mine can undo the Accident."

The cord that bound him to the Major seemed to lay slack on the ground, expanding with the distance between them. Ed suddenly wanted to slip away into the silence and become nothing, floating unloved and alone in nowhere. It was no less than he deserved. "I killed him," whispered Ed.

"You did not kill him, young man," said Sofia, far more firmly. "The Lieutenant did what he did deliberately. He gave his life freely. If you regret it, shackle the demon of guilt in your mind, it will take you from us as surely as the Gate took poor, poor Heymans. And then his sacrifice would have been for nothing."

Ed could feel his eyes stinging, growing warm. He looked at his feet, then up into the sky, into the endless blue. His expression was heavy and hard from the lack of tears. "If I'd just stopped to think... it's the job of alchemists to question, to interrogate, to deconstruct and reconstruct. I took a lie at face value, and now... now a man's dead. Because of me." Ed buried his head in his hands. "Because of me." He let out a ravaged, ragged sound he hesitated to call a laugh. It was the only thing he could do to stifle a sob. "I heard an Ishvalan priest say once that we're just the imaginings of God. Maybe this proves it. I can't face Winry like this, Major. I can't...

"I don't deserve her."

Sofia turned to him, her face tight, every thought focused on masking her own sadness, her indigo eyes growing dim with the effort. A strange look passed over her ascetic face and for a moment, Ed thought the sauntering, sarcastic alchemist was going to burst into tears. But just as quickly, the look vanished and was replaced by utter conviction. Ed had just enough time to spy her bandaged hand in his peripheries before the Major reached out and hugged him to her fiercely.

"You are a good, kind boy, Edward Elric," insisted Sofia, pressing her cheek to the crown of his hair. "And you acted out of bravery, out of compassion, out of empathy. Because you believed, with all your heart, that there was a solution."

Ed stiffened, taken aback by the sudden physical contact. Then, slowly, stiffly, he lent into the embrace, closing his eyes. She smelled, strangely enough, of tilled soil and tomatoes.

"What do I tell her, Major?" mouthed Ed.

"Tell her the truth," said Sofia gently. "Tell her a brave man saved the world."

"And the Accident..."

"My burden, my boy. Not yours. Put it out of your mind."

"But how can she forgive us, forgive me, after what we've done?" demanded Ed desperately. "I made a promise, Sofia... I promised Al... I promised, no one else would die because of me. Because of my mistakes."

"And you don't know how you can face the woman you love," finished Sofia, quietly, "bowed under the weight of such guilt. Am I right?"

He breathed, "Yes..."

"I know, my boy. Trust me... I know." She released him, though still grasped him firmly, her hand a welcome weight on his shoulder. "I miss my mum," she said softly, with unwonted tenderness. "I miss my home. I even miss Solf, in my own funny way. I had once thought myself incapable of ever loving, or being loved in return, because my association with the nadir of humanity forfeited any right I had to the pursuit of happiness. That I was destined to go on being miserable, and lonely, and so desperately sad. When my mother died, Edward, there was a space of time where I seriously considered joining her. My guilt was so great, it eclipsed everything else. I could see nothing from under its shadow.

"But, in a way, it's like in those old hero stories," she said quietly, gazing at the desert, but not really seeing it, "the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, a wound, an inexplicable longing. Or a burning of a house," she shared a meaningful look with Ed, who shifted uncomfortably under the intensity of her scrutiny, "whatever the case may be. When any of these things happens to us, it seems we are in some way being summoned to make a transition, which, by its very definition, means leaving something behind. The paradox you face, Edward, is that loss is a path to gain."

"But I can't lose her, Major," said Ed, clutching his knees. "I'm so afraid of losing her…"

"And no doubt you're asking yourself… why love what you might lose? When it comes to love and loss, acceptance is never easy. We can't make someone see all we have to give, make them love us, or make them change. All we can do is stop wasting time. Take the risk. Live, and trust their love in us. Because fear of loss can destroy you as readily as the loss itself."

Ed found his head falling back, looking directly at the sun, his eyes narrowed to a tired, strained squint. Poor bastard, the Fullmetal Alchemist thought to himself, his gaze remaining fixed on the brilliant orb hanging in its zenith.

The sun must get pretty tired, Ed mused, of watching us make the same damn mistakes all the time.

"What do I do, Major?" he asked quietly.

"I can't tell you that, Edward."

He sighed. "Thanks."

"Do you love her?"

"Yes."

"Well, then..." The Major seemed to consider, and for a moment Ed expected her to say something meaningful and profound. Then the Feldspar Alchemist smiled again, stuck her hands deep into the pockets of her trousers, and rose to her feet in one fluid motion. She took a pensive turn about the platform before murmuring:

"Why don't you tell her that?"

Sofia nodded towards the station, over his shoulder. Puzzled, Ed pivoted on his stoop...

To find Winry Rockbell staring at him.

Edward Elric stared back.

Her expression seemed suspended between grief and joy. Seconds passed as Ed took in the sight of her, struggling to comprehend the reality that he wasn't staring at one of the heat shimmers of the desert. She looked tired and dishevelled, worn from the long journey. Leaves and dirt and grease spattered her overalls. A few strands of flyaway blonde hair had come free of her ponytail. Her cornflower-blue eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

Ed thought she had never looked more beautiful.

His mouth opened and closed; for all his alchemical knowledge, all his genius, he struggled to formulate so much as a single coherent thought.

"Hey, Win," he managed weakly, not even noticing, in that moment, that Sofia Bel Miké had slipped quietly away.

Winry's hands, one holding her toolbox, the other a patched leather suitcase, began to tremble.

Her eyes welled with tears before Ed could beg her not to cry.

"You idiot," she whispered, sniffing noisily.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, Ed had no idea how the ground between them seemed to vanish, but one moment they were apart and the next they had collided. One of Ed's hands clasped around Winry's lower back as the other tangled in her hair. With each soft touch more tears fell, tears neither of them bothered to wipe away.

Ed closed his eyes, thinking that there was nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting his face into the curve of her shoulder and filling his lungs with the scent of her.

He wanted the moment to never end, wished for it in the shy, sly way Hope managed to crawl out of a box in a children's fairytale - after everything and everyone else has escaped.

He felt as though there was nothing else in the world, nothing else that mattered, other than the single purpose of that present moment. That there was nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue.

Nothing... save the most important thing of all.

Perhaps...

Ed clutched Winry to him, with both arms, and considered: perhaps, despite the injunctions mandated by equivalent exchange, his beloved alchemy was not omniscient. No human being could ever trade the courage needed to live every moment for immunity from life's sorrows. The thought ran counter to every truth Ed held close to his heart; he had breathed the belief that there was always a deal to be made, a bargain to be struck. It was as Sofia once told him: alchemists were paradoxical creatures, bolstered by their own fragility, their dependence on aligned oppositions. The belief that, if one did the right things - was good enough, clever enough, sincere enough, worked hard enough - he would in some way be rewarded. It circumscribed the reciprocity of the world, the very science that framed his soul. He knew, of course, that what he thought and how he acted affected the quality of his life.

But something had changed - Ed hesitated to call it a shift in the paradigm. It was too intrinsic, too innate, to suggest it was some transient transmutation: Edward had simply not seen it before.

But he was not blind anymore.

Perhaps it happened when Sofia Kimblee revealed herself in the car ride through Central. Perhaps it happened when Roy Mustang's soul and his self fled from his snuffed-out eyes. Perhaps it happened when Lieutenant Breda pushed Ed out into the nothingness of the night, into everything. Perhaps it happened in the aftermath of the Accident.

In any case... Ed realised, then, that though many things were subject to his influence, many others were not. And over the last three days, Ed had struggled to see the evidence that the universe worked on a simple meritocratic system of cause and effect. Bad things happened to good people - all the time. Illness and misfortune came to those who followed their soul's desire. Obscurity came to the suffering. Death came to the brave. Ed realised the only thing he could do, the only thing he was bound to do, was to journey into a deeper intimacy with the world, to live his life without any promise of safety or guarantee of reward beyond the intrinsic value of his full participation.

He didn't know what was going to happen. But he knew, in that moment, what he had to do.

"Winry," murmured Ed, "'member what I said, before, during our last phone call... that there was something I had to tell you..."

She released a breathy little laugh. "You don't waste time, do you Edward?"

"Not for this." Suddenly, he pulled away from Winry, holding her at arm's length and trying to ignore his burning-hot face. "Winry Rockbell..." he said, his mouth tasting like sand, "I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your automail grease on my clothes. I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because of this mess in Ishval. It's not because I feel like I have to make up for something, or that I'm paying down the universe's account. I understand, now... that when you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

"Ed," Winry's blue eyes narrowed shrewdly, regarding him, Ed thought, with a leery little squint, "are you sure you're okay...?"

"Marry me."

"... pardon?"

"Winry... marry me."

She stared at him, dumbfounded. Ed felt himself wilting under her withering glare. Suddenly, there was no trace of tears, not in her eyes or in track marks on her reddening face. Her gaze was narrow, rigid, cold. Hard.

"You... moron, Edward Elric!" she seethed.

Winry pitched forward and Ed grimaced, squeezing his eyes shut, bracing himself for a knock on the head or a kick in the shins. Instead, he let out a muffled yelp as Winry moved her head close, until their noses were almost touching.

He stood frozen, from both fear and excitement. She lent in, so her forehead rested against his. She closed her eyes. "Thank you," she said in barely more than a whisper.

"For..." Ed swallowed. "For what?"

"For finally asking me." Her voice wavered, and Ed barely had time to cogitate on the reason why before she kissed him.

Slowly, inexorably, he pressed his lips to hers. The motion was soft and gentle, not chaste, perhaps, and though there were no fireworks or sparks or halos of light, Ed supposed there didn't have to be. A wave of warmth spilled out from his heart and rushed to every corner of his body: the cracks in between his toes, the crooks of his elbows, the tips of his ears. Every inch of him saturated with love.

It was, he supposed, the only answer he needed.

The world was not made right by their union. The guilt remained still. With a little stuttering of his heart, Edward Elric saw himself as destined, despite his highest science, to live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing like the junipers left to wilt in the sun.

But, perhaps, not wilting alone.

Not ever again.

II

"So that's it, then. Lock, stock, and leaky barrels."

He flashed his teeth in the barest hint of a smile, though there was no one present to fool with his attempt at good humour. "Yes, sir. Though I somehow suspect we'll be wading in Stokes's mire for some time yet."

"How do you reckon that, my boy?"

Roy sighed, his head falling back against the wall as he held the phone closer to his ear. His eyes still burned terribly, and he blinked rapidly in an effort to clear a sudden fuzziness. "Reconstruction has suffered a major setback," he explained wearily. He was so tired... dominated by a profound sadness, fatigue engraved on his pale face. He hadn't eaten in days, and he had no immediate desire to do so. Not, Roy thought grimly, that the man on the phone needed to know that. "The entire Mishaari Basin has been declared uninhabitable after the... after the Accident. According to Feldspar, such large volumes of steam erupted over such a short space of time, the structural support for the crust above the magma chamber was almost completely compromised. The ground surface around the ruins has collapsed inward, leaving a tectonically unstable sinkhole."

"And you're worried the entire place could blow, am I right?"

"In so many words, Führer sir. We've been forced to abandon Mishaari."

Roy could almost see Grumman stroking his moustache. "Well..." he drew out the phoneme of the word like a thoughtful sigh, "that does put a hiccough in your Al'Arshif plans, my boy. Although... something tells me Al'Arshif is not on the forefront of your thoughts at the present time, General Mustang."

Even separated by the telephone line and innumerable miles of open desert and countryside, Grumman could still read him like a book.

For several long minutes, made even longer by the metronomic quality of Grumman's breathing on the other end of the telephone, there was total silence, the kind that proceeded the most horrible sadness yet to come. It threatened, as it had done many times over many hours, to swallow him whole. Roy concentrated on the presence of his superior and thought not about the Mishaari ruins or the Accident or the figure convalescing in the ward adjacent to the phone booth.

Grief –– terrible rending grief –– echoed within the hollow cavern of his chest, sustained on its own reverberations.

"How are you, Roy?" asked Grumman gently. "How is everyone managing?"

"Sir..." Roy cast around for the right thing to say, something that would allow him to maintain some professional bearing. Finding nothing, he admitted, his words congealing in his throat like a lump of fat, "I lost one of my men."

"I know, General. And I am so sorry."

"It happened again, sir. I couldn't save him. I couldn't-" Roy felt his mouth twitch, his throat hitch. "I promised... after I lost the Brigadier-General... I promised I would protect them."

"Roy," began Grumman gruffly, "listen to me for a moment, my boy, because this is important. It's Amestris's worst kept secret that you have your eyes on the top spot, on my job."

Mustang squirmed, but he knew there'd be little point in denying it.

"General... take a bit of advice from someone who may very well one day become your predecessor. In this line of work, you must think of grief as being something like a battle. After experiencing enough of it, your body's instincts take over. When you see it closing in like an enemy squadron, you harden your insides. You prepare for the agony of a shredded heart. And when it hits, it hurts, of course, but not as badly as it might have done before, because you have locked away your weakness, and all that's left is anger and strength." The old man heaved a heavy sigh. "At least... that is what I would say to anyone with even a fraction of your empathy. But you've always been different, Roy. You don't feel things halfway, but you won't start a war by raising an army to fight. You won't bring back the dead by dying yourself."

"I care about my men, sir," he said. "As their commander, it is my responsibility to keep them safe, and I have continually failed in that responsibility."

"You think those boys don't know the risk, Mustang? They're soldiers."

"That doesn't make it better. That doesn't make it right."

A pause. "Lieutenant Breda was close to you." It was not a question.

"He was my friend," said Roy simply.

"And he was very brave, General. The Congress convened in emergency session late last night, and an unanimous motion was passed to bestow your man with highest honours, effective immediately. Major Heymans Breda."

Much good that does him now, thought Roy bitterly. He managed a weak, "Thank you, sir."

Another pause; Roy likened their exchange to reading a newspaper with the print washed into a deliquesced blur by the rain, patchwork paragraphs broken by the silence. It was usually so easy to speak with Grumman, but something seemed torn from all possible avenues of conversation.

It was his own fault, Roy acknowledged. His sadness. His pain. Grumman was a man with an entire country to run; Roy was just a soldier with a hole in the fabric of his life where before there had been the presence of a beloved friend. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't seem to sew it back up again.

For a moment, Roy forgot about the phone in his hand as the memories began to creep forward from the hidden corners of his mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows he thought long forgotten mingling with the sting of still-fresh wounds.

With Maes, he had been too late. With Heymans, he had been too lost, too blind, to his friend's intentions. And sometimes, he realised, the hardest goodbyes were the ones never said, the ones that hung in the back of his mind like a dark cloud. There was still so much to say but no one to say it to because the person he wanted most to hear it was already gone, leaving only the sorrow, the regret, a wound so deep it didn't even bleed. Like a puncture, an ache that didn't heal but just hurt.

And Roy didn't know if he wanted it to heal. That'd be too much like a final goodbye.

"Sir," he said instead, trying to ignore the catch in the words, "I want you to understand how grateful I am for your timely response. I don't know how you were made aware of the situation in Dairut, and to be perfectly frank, I don't really care. Regardless of whatever means you may have had at your disposal, the arrival of the coalition forces likely prevented many more lives from being lost."

"I only wish I had mobilised soon enough to save the life of your strategist, General," murmured Grumman. "And to prevent the Accident. Speaking of which-"

"There's been no change," relayed Roy stiffly, hoping, as always, that his superior would drop the subject, and preparing, as always, to be disappointed.

"Well... do let me know if anything does, General. Although I'm sure she'll be the first one to find out."

Grumman didn't have to specify who. "I'm sure you're right, sir."

Then: "And my granddaughter?"

Roy felt a prickle race up his spine. "Resting," he managed. He didn't realise he'd knuckled his hands until his fingers began to ache.

When Grumman spoke up again, Roy thought he sounded terribly tired, his words dropping heavily, the ripples radiating outward, like stones in still water. "Do look after her for me, Roy."

The guilt burned the back of his throat like sick and for a moment, Roy worried he was going to vomit all over the medical pavilion. Even after three days, even after the coalition forces rolled through Dairut and Stokes was taken into custody and the key thrown away, he still couldn't bear to tell the Führer the entirety of what had happened to his adjutant. A part of it came from a desire to protect Grumman from the harrowing details of the suffering of his beloved grandchild; far more came from Roy's own inability to reconcile such recollections himself. His guilt was corrosive, burning the lining of his oesophagus, and there was no escaping the acute awareness he had of the fact that he had come dangerously close to losing her, and that she had suffered every minute of the separation. It spoke less to his incompetence as a commanding officer, and rather more to the mutated monster he had made of their relationship, both professional and personal, that she found it necessary to sacrifice so much, to give so much, that she ran the risk of leaving nothing for herself.

Not even enough to ensure her own survival.

Roy knew he was walking on thin ice: the ice of what remained of the trust between officers, carrying the weight of immeasurable guilt. And knowing, with each step, the cracks were growing deeper.

He didn't realise the line had gone quiet, didn't hear the beep beep of the dead connection, until someone cleared their throat a little ways behind Roy's right shoulder, waiting, perhaps, for him to ground himself once again.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, sir," came a deep, almost masculine voice.

Roy scrubbed a hand over his face before replacing the field phone on its receiver, wishing it was someone else, anyone else, who had been tasked to talk to Grumman. "It's no worry, Feldspar," he said quietly, crossing his arms and resting against the wall. "We were finished."

Major Miké regarded him placidly, but didn't offer a comment. Instead, she recounted briefly: "I found young Edward, as you instructed me, sir."

A glimmer of something bright broke through his damask of doubt and worry. "Is he well?"

"As well as can be expected, given the circumstances, General. You were right to suspect his blaming himself for what happened. The boy takes every hurt into his heart, as though in an attempt to bleed the pain from the air. He cares so much, sir, I would even go so far as to hazard too much."

You and me both, Fullmetal, thought Roy ruefully. "Did you manage to connect him with Miss Rockbell? I was told she arrived on the last train."

"Yes, sir."

"And?"

"How do you feel about being a groomsman, General?" she deadpanned.

Roy grunted; to his credit, he gave as good as he got. "I'd say it should have happened years ago. I already rented the tux."

Major Miké smiled thinly, but maintained a respectful silence. The attempt at humour fell flat.

Roy looked up at the tall, stooped alchemist. "I find it interesting," he mused aloud, growing serious, "how both Winry Rockbell and Führer Grumman were made aware of the situation with Professor Stokes, and arrived in Dairut well before any of us had the chance to establish outside contact."

"Serendipity, sir?"

"We're alchemists, Major."

"And as such, General, perhaps there are things in this universe we cannot control, even as there are the things we can."

"Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire, Feldspar; human beings must act on reason."

"And what does your reason tell you, sir?"

"That three days ago, inside that temple, I spoke with a voice that wasn't my own. Thoughts that weren't mine." He struggled to suppress the shiver. "It was as though another man was wearing my body like a second skin. And my reason tells me that just before we arrived in Dairut, Edward said that it had been Selim Bradley who directed you to the deserts of the East. The boy once played host to Pride, and Pride devoured-"

Even the desert wind slackened for a moment, as if unwilling to blow without Sofia's permission. "It seems to me, sir," she said quietly, "that you place too little faith in fate."

Roy frowned. "And you don't?"

"To a certain degree. I truly believe we can either see the connections, celebrate them, and express gratitude for our blessings, or we can see life as a string of coincidences that have no meaning or causality. For me, I'm going to continue believing in miracles."

"And what if those miracles are orchestrated by the devil, Major Miké?"

"Even Lucifer was once loved, General. Perhaps all sacrifice and suffering is in some way redemptive."

"And in this paradigm of yours... what grace, exactly, has forgiveness?"

Her indigo eyes narrowed on him shrewdly, and Roy knew in that moment he had accomplished nothing with his tangled and tangential philosophising, his poor attempts at bewilderment. Sofia saw too much. She understood far more.

For a while, comfortable in their shared aloneness, both Roy and Sofia were reticent to vocalise their thoughts, reluctant to break the grey stillness of Dairut's medical ward. But as Major Miké's brow furrowed and smoothed, and she clicked her tongue against her teeth, Roy began to nurse his own suspicions, and indeed, her questioning felt less like genuine inquiry and more like the tailing end of an ongoing conversation, a part of something the Feldspar Alchemist had bandied back and forth inside her head.

"Are you asking for my benefit, sir," she voiced aloud, "or for yours?"

Roy did little to feign surprise where there wasn't any to be found. He had been wondering the same thing.

Though he found he did not have an answer. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

"If you ever see him again," muttered Mustang, "that devil of yours, tell him... tell him thank you."

Sofia sighed. "I suspect none of us shall ever see or hear from him again, General, which is for the best, I suppose. And even if we did, he never placed any stock in the value of gratitude. Of kindness."

"If not kindness, then what?"

"Absolution, I expect."

"Then... it's equivalent exchange again."

"It always seemed to be, with him."

Roy crossed his arms, considering her. "And what about you?" he asked. "Do you feel you're owed anything, Major?"

She chuckled. "No more nor no less than any other man, General. I didn't want to come to Ishval, you know. I railed against it with every fibre of my being. But there is something about this desert that seems to possess a peculiar type of magic. It can't be claimed or owned - it is a piece of cloth carried by the wind, never held down by stones, and given a hundred names, shifting like the sand. I think the Ishvalans have it right, sir: Dairut is a place of faith, where we go to disappear into the landscape. To forget, and be forgotten. It is as though, being here, I have exhausted my own future, and are thus free of time."

"Resurrection," murmured Roy. "Rebirth."

"The Führer has given me a proposal, sir, and I intend to accept."

She was almost smiling, smiling as though something good were about to happen. Her face fell into an expression Roy had never seen before. Under her acerbic personality, under a face like cut marble sans the polish, was someone more vulnerable than he could have guessed. In an instant, he understood what it was the Major intended to do.

"You're staying," he murmured.

Sofia nodded, her bob of black hair falling in feathery curtains over her eyes. "Eastern Command has a new vacancy," she explained. "I believe, out here, I may be able to do some good. I have spoken with the Muhaddith, and it seems in light of recent circumstances, the Ishvalan clergy are in dire need of a high-ranking Amestrian representative."

Roy remembered suddenly: "Eastern Command was General Hakuro's stomping ground. Where-"

"Southern Headquarters, sir. According to Master Sergeant Brosch, the Major General requested a transfer early yesterday morning. Grumman granted it without compunction." Sofia's watchful eyes peered out at the vast tracts of desert. "Not that I count myself an expert in such things, but I understand there is a world-renowned mental institution in Aerugo. As part of the current detente, there are ongoing negotiations regarding doctor visits and the exchange of breakthrough psychiatric research. Southern Command is an integral part of those deliberations."

The Flame Alchemist looked away, drawing in the dust with the toe of his boot. "I see."

"But to answer your earlier question, sir, as to whether or not I am owed anything," said the Major, deftly changing the subject, though leaving Roy with the lingering suspicion the topic of conversation had not shifted at all: "I do not believe life mandates a fair trade in such things. But between the giving and the receiving, the black and the white, exchange and equivalence thereof, lies many shades of grey - where most of us live our lives. Not perfect, not by long chalk... but not beyond redemption. Perhaps, in that liminal space, we become like this desert. We're just creatures of pure potential, beyond the time shackling us to past pain."

Major Miké pivoted on one heel, giving the General a crisp salute, which Roy was too bemused to return. Sofia seemed not to mind.

"Excuse me, sir," she said briskly, "I should locate the officer in charge of the cleanup."

Roy's expression crumpled, something heavy sinking into the pit of his stomach. "She's still around, then."

The other alchemist pushed a breath out through her nose. "May I speak candidly, General Mustang?"

"It's not as though you've been speaking with reserve for the last ten minutes."

"Fair enough, sir."

"But by all means, Major."

"I believe you ought to make yourself scarce. I think it best your paths do not cross at this time."

Even as recently as a few days ago, he would have been affronted by the insinuation behind the words. But knowing what he knew about the Accident, Roy could recognise the simple sagacity, and, in some regard, the ironic wisdom of the Major's advice. As he was in no hurry to tempt fate any further, Roy bobbed his head in a half-hearted effort at acknowledgement.

"Give the Captain my regards, sir," called Sofia over her shoulder, emerging into the blinding white of Dairut's spartan streets, the surfaces of the roads and the buildings shimmering with the sheen of a polished mirror. So clean and smooth, Sofia Bel Miké seemed to trail reflections behind her like so many shadows. Like echoes and recursions.

Roy left the Major to her duties and, before he had the chance to talk himself out of it, pushed open the infirmary door.

Dairut's makeshift ward was predictably utilitarian, and like so many other things in Ishval, the architecture seemed inimical to creature comforts. The room was devoid of beauty. While the wallpaper was clean, the colour was, Roy thought, dim and uninspired. There were no decorations save the curtains separating the in-patient beds. The fabric had once been the kind of green intended to remind people of spring-time and hope, but it had faded so much, the hue was insipid. Unlike the rest of Ishval, the arched windows were fitted with a fine mesh screen, to keep out the flies. Even in the midst of the desert, beneath the smells of sand and sweat, Roy couldn't help but notice the miasma of disinfectant and polystyrene, something so like the surgeries of Central, the General half-expected to see Dr. Knox groaning and griping as he orbited about the room's single occupant.

Her smile, though tired, endeavoured to reach to her eyes. Roy reciprocated after a fashion, though his own smile remained limited to his mouth, unsure of what would happen next, wary of being drawn into a conversation he was not yet ready for.

"Good morning, sir," said Riza quietly, her throat dry.

Something twitched under his shirt; it took Roy a moment to realise that, despite the sweltering heat, they were goosebumps, erupting up and down his arms. "It's afternoon now, Captain," he replied, sidling up to her bedside.

Her amber eyes drifted to the window. "That was careless of me," she muttered, frowning at the noonday sun as though to scold it.

He almost smiled at the mental image. "How are you feeling?" he asked gently.

"Tired, sir," she admitted. She swallowed, and the motion seemed to pain her. "May I have a glass of water?"

Roy handed her the paper cone by her bedside. Hawkeye's once sure, steady hands were all frailty and caution, shaking gently as she reached for the drink. Roy felt a rod of ice in his chest at the sight of it. Her skin seemed ashen where she moved in the sunlight, the colours subdued, the planes and contours of her arms rendered in shades of grey. Even the blonde of her hair seemed diluted, as though her entire being had been bleached by the sun. When she was finished, Roy took the cup without a word, placing it back on the table.

"Thank you, General," she supplied dutifully. Roy gave her a stiff nod, muttered something to the effect of an acknowledgement.

There was a long stretch of awkward, but in some ways significant silence. It occurred to Roy then that he couldn't remember the last time he had been uncomfortable in Riza's presence. The only former occasions that sprang to mind were the quiet evenings spent in her company during his apprenticeship, when he was so terrified of Hawkeye Sensei inferring something illicit in their aloneness, Roy had taken a more profound interest in the hem of his trousers than the pretty girl standing next to him at the sink.

At that moment, the air between them seemed bloated with inevitability, like something about to snap with the painful recoil of gunfire. He didn't fail to see the irony.

After a while, Riza began to fiddle with the sheets, and Roy released his breath in one long, resigned sigh. He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and bowed his head, resting his chin on his chest. Outside, the white tenements, like calcified stone, whistled with a brisk wind blown through from edge of the open desert, and Roy felt suddenly tired beyond any tiredness he had ever felt before.

"The doctor said your leg might have to be reset, Captain," he began, not knowing what else to say, and finding some mainstay of consolation in the procedural predictability of routine.

"I imagine it's for the best, sir. I would rather a few weeks in hospital than permanent disfigurement."

Roy managed another stiff nod, despairing at the abrupt end of his intended avenue of conversation. He could no more steer himself from the trajectory of their discussion than he could bring the First Lieutenant back...

"Riza," he began gently, trying to keep his voice steady; he watched one blonde eyebrow rise in a surprised arch. Roy bit the bullet and admitted: "I read your report."

She regarded him as though he were a voice on the radio and not a person present at the foot of her hospital bed. It was as though the words were circulating in her mind and had not yet found their way into the world. Over the last few days, when she did deign to speak, she spoke to Roy differently than she did the other soldiers. The Flame Alchemist couldn't quite place the shift. A kind of anxiety, a hesitance, was as close as he could manage. And Roy, in a most uncharacteristic show of accession, realised he was reluctant to bring it to her attention. In a way, he didn't blame her. It was proof of sanity, he thought bitterly, that he made her uncomfortable.

"Was there something the matter with the documentation, sir?" she asked quietly.

If he were in a drastically different scene of mind, he would have laughed. Even in her condition, recovering from injuries so gruesome they made Roy nauseous just to think about, her penmenship and administrative manoeuvring had been perfect. He would have expected nothing less of her.

No... his issue did not rest in the filing of the report...

"More so with the contents of the report itself, Captain."

Light shifted in her whiskey eyes, like a glass prism, her thoughts splintering into a million different colours. "I see, sir," she murmured. Any other man would have missed the slight slight tension in the lines of her shoulders, the sudden straightening of the slope of her back, as though she was bracing herself for what was to come.

Roy found himself staring at the wall over her left shoulder, the same shoulder Envy had torn to ribbons during the Promised Day. "You did it again, Hawkeye," he breathed, his voice haggard.

She blinked. "Sir?"

The words left him, unaltered and uncontrolled, before he could manage to mangle them into some semblance of calm, collected reproach: "It's just like with Lust, Captain," he said stiffly, the words pained. He knew he must have looked so grave... Hawkeye was staring at him with evident alarm. "You lost your firmness of person, your will to fight. You wanted them to kill you."

Something strident and stubborn flashed in her features, her expression hardening. "If you had read my report, sir," she said stonily, "then you would know I acted in the interest of protecting my commanding officer."

A voice in Roy's head tried to remind him that Riza should never have to justify herself, not to him, but Roy found in that moment he had forsaken any desire to listen. "You can't give up on life... I won't allow it."

Hawkeye made a concerted effort to rise, the motion breaking down into a wincing hiss from her pained ribs. "I did what I deemed was necessary, General," she managed. "I acted in the manner I thought befitting of an Amestrian officer."

"I know, Captain," said Roy urgently, every part of him begging to be believed, "And I know that sometimes the things we carry become too much for us. We are burned down, but somehow we have to pick ourselves up and keep going."

She stiffened, looking askance at him, genuine shock making her pale, wan face go slack. "Do..." she had to take a moment to collect her thoughts: "Do you think, by consigning myself to dying, I was somehow surrendering to their interrogation?" she asked, the words low with disbelief. It took Roy a moment longer than usual to realise she had forgotten to add his honorific. He chalked it up to sheer exhaustion; under vastly different circumstances, she would have been mortified by her own indiscretion.

Roy watched Hawkeye for a few quiet moments, trying to untangle the meaning behind her words, the beating of his heart and her stare constant things. He could see the dark circles under her eyes and a blush high on her cheeks, whereas the sun and the sky beyond the window were clear and pale. The perpendicular lines, the harsh oblique angles, between her body and the brightness felt strangely standardised, the moments falling away with the cadence of sand in an hourglass. When he thought of time, he inevitably thought of Riza Hawkeye and the uncanny certainty with which he could anticipate revisiting the same places, crossing and recrossing the lines of their lives like footsteps braiding together in the dust.

For a moment, despite the enmity raditating from his subordinate, he felt close to something he could not quite describe.

"I did not give up because of the torture!" she hissed abruptly. Her hands had fisted in her sheets. "So long as I was alive, the Risen had a means by which to control you, General. The decision to end my life was purely strategic!"

A high-pitched whine sounded in Roy's ears, making him sway with a sudden wave of dizziness. "Strategic..." he parroted. "Strategy had nothing to do with it! It was short-sighted! It was stupid, Captain Hawkeye! You lost faith in us... you lost faith in me––"

"How dare you." He had never heard her quite so angry, her words dangerously soft.

Roy froze. "I beg your pardon?"

Her lip curled. "You heard me perfectly well... sir," she added the honorific entirely as an afterthought. "General... one of my fellow officers, and one of my best friends, is dead. He gave his life in order to save yours, to save everyone in Amestris. I ask you, sir, please... don't dishonour his sacrifice by suggesting either of us acted with anything save the safety of our commander and our country in mind." She squeezed her eyes shut. "To imply anything else invites weakness, and I assure you, sir, Heymans's sacrifice took a measure of courage you couldn't begin to imagine. Do not insult his memory by suggesting otherwise.

"And as for me... this wasn't the first time I've come close to death, General Mustang, but it is the first time I've been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible prospect of saying goodbye to someone you love..."

Roy felt as though his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the sheer weight behind her words. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, coupled with her devotion, her love, as surely as any unified diametric. It was almost alchemical in its incontrovertibility.

He felt something trickle down his face and he wiped it away irritably. When he looked at the back of his hand, he found trails of wet carving paths through the thin film of dust on his skin.

Rain in Ishval, he marvelled.

"Riza," he began quietly. "There is something you failed to take into account... to kill you and me, there would only ever have to be one bullet."

"Sir––"

"I can't afford to lose you."

Perhaps, this was what they had always been, whether it was for a each other or for their cause –– the readiness to give and not ask for anything in return, the unquestioning willingness to lose everything, even if that loss was something as precious as life itself. He had known this woman as the rest of the world had not, and the pain of living without her was far more than a mere penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her, having grown up with her. What once was life, he thought, was always life, and he knew her image would preside in his mind as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose in his dark, guilt-ridden world. And tucked inside the moments of his great sadness –– his feeling of being punctured, scorched and stricken –– were moments of the brightest, most swollen and strident happiness he had ever known. One moment there would be a wall of joy so tall it could not be scaled; the next, he felt as though he was falling into a pit of despair that had no bottom. He realised –– as, he suspected, Riza did, too –– that he could not have one without the other, that their great capacity to love and be happy could be experienced only with the great risk of having their happiness taken from them –– to teeter, eternally, on the edge of loss.

"I can't lose you," he repeated, bereft, suddenly, of anything else to say.

"For that, sir," she murmured, "I am so, so sorry."

"Sorry..."

She rubbed at her tangled blonde hair like it was a bother to her, her voice coming out like she was speaking through a mouthful of glass, blood pooling between the words: "Your despair has always been my deepest fear, though I tried for years to save you from it. There were nights where all I dreamed of was the Promised Day, tailing you under the streets of Central... like following a walking corpse, always blind. Don't you see, sir? It is what I fear the most in all the world, the thought of what my loyalty might make of you –– dead on the inside, lost in your own prison of hatred. Somewhere from which I can't save you. Your weakness is my failure... I have failed you General..."

Unable to wait any longer, Roy bundled her into his arms. She stiffened and made to lurch out of his grip, but before Roy could recoil from her in horror at his own gross breach of personal and professional etiquette, her head tucked under his chin, and he felt her weight settle against him. He held her tight as her words spilled out of her without prior composition, only this time, she made no effort to choke them off:

"And when this is over, sir," she whispered hoarsely as he wrapped his arms around her; she couldn't keep herself from weeping brokenly, "you can help me in finding a way to forgive myself."

Tortured by her tears, he clasped her tighter and rubbed his jaw against her temple, his voice a ravaged whisper: "I'm sorry," he told her. He cupped her face between his palms, tipping it up and gazing into her eyes, his thumbs moving over her wet cheeks. "I'm sorry." Slowly, he bent his head, covering her mouth with his. "I'm so damned sorry."

As they came together, he found himself wishing he could tell her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat on a fraying swing in her father's yard. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. To talk to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he knew, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them. He could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, for Maes and Heymans, and for his own lost self, for all the pain and suffering he had caused, and all the while, his grief not changing a thing.

Nevertheless, over all those years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss Riza Hawkeye.

And there was a redemption of some kind, he believed, with all his being, in such complete fulfilment, of a desire so long deferred...

III

"I hate this fucking country," she muttered to herself.

The desert of Ishval was covered in rolling hills and ruins, a vast, undulating sea of white siltstone. Wind skimmed the dunes, raising a fine haze of sand from the rosebush and juniper, and the sun beat down on her head mercilessly. Sweat rolled off her nose, stinging her eyes, making her hair stiff with salt. Her wool uniform clung to her oppresively, the material simmering and stiff. Every breath tasted like dirt, and her tongue felt coated in fur, her lips chapped and dry.

She longed, something fiercely, for the mountains.

Ishval, to her, was like stepping on the goddamn moon. She had no way of knowing what anything meant, no way of translating the landscape. On the mountainside, at least, she could anticipate an avalanche or a blizzard from the changes in the wind, a shift in the snow drifts, like tells that betrayed any attempted deception. But Ishval told her nothing about itself, on any level, not in the way even the most desolate stretch of Briggs told her about the gails that had blown over it, or the snows that had or had yet to fall. Ishval was a waterless void, as empty and endless to her as the space between the stars. The desert was a different world, with a different order she didn't understand. Not because it wasn't beautiful –– not grand and magnificent like Briggs, perhaps, but strident in its brushstrokes of bright colour. No... Ishval confounded her because, as she ran her eyes over the rocks and dirt, she had no way of knowing what the tiny alterations in the colours meant.

It was a mistake new recruits often made, thought Olivier Mira Armstrong, in the Northern winters, that the coldness of the Briggs mountains was somehow seasonal, that with the spring warmth it would transform, become as green as they were. They were mistaken. Even in the summer there was no softening of the chill. It had never bothered General Armstrong; she knew she was, above all things, a creature of consistency, even bereft of the consolation of ordinary people who strive for even an inkling of happiness in their work. Her service was done without a smile; fast, efficient, mechanical. There was no greenery at all, no change in the colour of her fortress. It was a clean life. A monochromatic life, and in many ways, the simplicity of it was inimical to camouflage. Things did not remain hidden for long on the mountain.

But she didn't speak the language of Ishval. What secrets she was meant to interpret from the rolling dunes, the heat and high, white sun... she couldn't say.

She sat under a juniper tree, in the meagre shade cast by the branches, crouching in the leaf litter, and watched the Ishvalan people amble through the streets of Dairut. A few of the teenagers, she noted, were missing limbs. Several of the elders were without an eye, or an ear, or scarred, or leaning heavily on their canes. There was, she realised quickly, a distinct lack of young men and women... the age of those who had fought in the uprising.

Death was always more tragic when it came to the very young, and yet the ancient clung to life with equal desperation. It was much like the desert itself... things tended to endure. The sand just soaked up the suffering. Perhaps it was because she herself was so far away from home, but the thought suddenly made her feel very lonely.

Though her commission in the most inhospitable region in Amestris brought her further away from other people –– though her duty demanded her placement far outside the world's sight –– she had yet to develop a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended. Despite the solitude of her station, she believed she had all the company she would ever need, thanks to her underlings.

Recent years, and recent circumstances, had tested her conviction to its outermost capacity.

Ishval made her realise that though she craved solitude, she hated loneliness.

She had always believed every single person was a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with their own variant notions of what was beautiful and what was acceptable, what was right. Though Olivier knew people had a tendency to interpret fortuitous resemblances as actual likenessness, she suspected the self deception merely enabled some to live with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast distances between them and the rest of the world.

She took a deep breath; gradually, she managed to get control of her breathing. Her heart beat more steadily, and the pounding of the waves inside her subsided slowly. The stillness of the simmering afternoon fell across her like a dusky reflection. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun.

"Ishvalan security forces have secured the last of Stokes's followers. The Council has agreed to surrender the suspects to the Amestrian military police for prosecution, including the Ishvalan citizens."

General Armstrong cracked open an eye, glaring at her company. "I didn't expect your people to so readily acquiesce to the extradition order," she grumbled.

A grunt. "Ours is a cooperative law enforcement process, General."

"That's well as may be, but the consensus in the Congress is that the autonomous region of Ishval does not have any obligation to surrender an alleged criminal to a foreign state, because one principle of soverignty is that every state has legal authority over the people within its borders."

"A certain tall, grey-haired officer was keen to point out that the crimes committed took place approximately two kilometres outside of Ishvalan territory, so even if the Grand Cleric were so inclined, any claim we made for the lawful return of any individual pursuant becomes null and void."

Olivier humphed. "Sounds like this officer knows his international treaties."

"You could have just requested Stokes's return to Amestris, General Armstrong."

"Truthfully, sayyidi," she said drily, "I couldn't risk the Ishvalan Council saying no."

The Muhaddith crossed his arms and looked daggers at her, his expression shrouded in shadow. He kept the hood of his chasuble up to hide his face from the nosier soldiers, wary of his being recognised. General Armstrong had been asked by Führer Grumman to personally oversee the operation in Dairut on account of her familiarity with Scar's true identity.

And, of course, for other reasons...

"Was there something else you wanted to say, sayyidi?" asked Olivier, mindful of the usually-taciturn man's stubborn presence at her side.

He said a great deal with his silence. There was something in his red eyes, perhaps. Something in the tilt of his head, a kind of quiet defiance. He was older than most of the Briggsmen, but he wore the same expression. And somewhere, buried far beneath, was a kind of sadness akin to resignation in everything he said and did.

The General sighed. "What?" she snapped irritably.

There was a patient forebearance in his gaze, and rather than soothe, it made Olivier long to hit him with something heavy. Like a tank.

"He's conscious," said Scar quietly.

Armstrong's body went rigid. She imagined her eyes burning like frozen nodes of incandescent gas. "Grand," she muttered. "What do you expect me to do about it?"

"I was informed by Lieutenant Falman that he has refused skin grafts, and will not allow himself to be seen by a doctor."

"That's his decision, sayyidi."

Scar's head snapped around, and the expression on his face, the sockets of his eyes like cups of molten brass spilling down his cheeks, was sudden;y dark and dangerous. In those brief flashes of anger, Olivier thought he looked far more like his old self. "His wounds induced metabolic and inflammatory alterations that predispose him to complications, General," growled the Muhaddith. "If the wounds grow infected, he could die. He is fortunate he did not die in the first place."

"He made his decision!" snapped Olivier. "I won't strip the man of his dignity any further by crying over him like some wretched war widow!"

"You would forsake him..."

"The law of this world is that the strongest survive, Scar!"

"There is no strength to be gained from allowing our friends to come to harm, General Armstrong. Only weakness. A truly evolved being is one who values others more than he values himself, and who values love more than he values the physical world and what is in it."

"Then do you suggest it's strength that drove him to risk sacrificing his life to save that of a criminal? Of Stokes?"

Animosity burned in his red eyes, and Olivier could tell she was likely the root cause of the problem. "He did more than save Stokes's life," he said lowly. "He saved the life of Captain Hawkeye, as well."

"Oh yes," snarled Olivier, anger dripping from her words like poison. "Mustang's pet dog. Just another casualty in that man's goddamn crusade, isn't it?"

Scar blinked at her; it was strange, seeing such an innocently bemused expression on his brutal features. Something softened in his eyes that somehow only managed to make Olivier even more furious. If it was pity on his face, Armstrong had half a mind to run him through with her sabre, the consequences be damned.

"It is the Flame Alchemist," murmured the Muhaddith. Dust swirled between them in the late afternoon air like they were standing in some ancient library with old books being pulled from high shelves. "You hold him responsible..."

Olivier knew some catastrophic moments invited clarity, exploded in split moments: smashing a hand through a windowpane and then finding the blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the floor; falling out a window and breaking some bones and scraping some skin; stepping on the wrong patch of ice and sinking under the weight of a mountain pack into the freezing blackness. Scar's observation struck her with that same sense of sudden disaster.

"It's not enough that he has to drag his own people into ruin," she hissed savagely, her hands balling to fists. "It's not enough that he has to pull innocents into his interminable war. That inveterate loner chooses to spend his existence with people whose individual lives must seem to him to hold all the gravity and value of a goddamn mayfly's! Even when, for once, he seems to truly value one of his subordinates, their association runs its course and ends in exactly the same way as all the others: with tragedy!"

Olivier knew the world she encountered in her military experience was one in which she was continually faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of which inevitably meant the sacrifice of others.

But Mustang's world did not mandate sacrifice. It mandated slaughter. The simple fact of involvement was akin to a death knell. The Flame Alchemist had, in his desperate bid for power, taken the life of Brigadier-General Hughes. He had taken the life of Lieutenant Breda.

He had very nearly taken the life of her most beloved officer.

"When he pushed Captain Hawkeye and Professor Stokes free of the geyser," murmured Scar, with a gentleness Olivier had not expected of him, "he was not thinking about General Mustang. He understood then, as he does now, that his Truth rested in an act of courage, that it was, in some way, defiance and sacrifice and pain, something that cannot be won without giving away something else in return."

"He's a fool if he believes that," said Olivier bitterly, swatting beads of sweat from her brow to give her taut muscles something to do. "A goddamn fool."

"He is no more a fool than you or I, General. Or anyone else who has ever sought to give their existence meaning."

"I will not accept that." Olivier glared out at the desert, feeling strangely disconcerted –– not that she would ever admit that to the likes of Scar. Even so, she could almost feel the heat from the intensity of the Muhaddith's eyes on the side of her face. He smelled strange, too: grainy and sharp and saccharine, like hot sand.

She grit out through clenched teeth: "I will not accept self-destruction as the only means by which a man can give his life value."

"I do not think it was self-destruction that motivated him."

"Then what? What can possibly be worth this?"

He peered at her sidelong as he got the measure of her intent, but did not say any more for some time. His eyes were a bright brown-red, like the claret-coloured sky after a sandstorm. They were very striking, highly intelligent eyes that seemed to see through barriers as though they didn't exist, rendering them to something like the crumbling stone laying ash-like on the ground underfoot, the dust mantling every surface. And there it would remain until the wind carried it away or the rain washed the world clean. Which, Olivier supposed, being Ishval, might not happen for a long, long time.

"With respect, General Armstrong," he said quietly, "I think you already know the answer to that question."

Olivier scowled. "Do I?" she muttered.

"It is what drove Captain Hawkeye to save her commanding officer, and what allowed Lieutenant Breda to face his death with dignity and grace. It is the reason why I love your adjutant as much as I did my own brother, and why I cannot bear to see him in pain and unhappy."

"I'm his commander, sayyidi, not his shrink. If you're looking for someone to guide him in a little healthy soul searching, you've come to the wrong woman."

"It is not him who will be doing the searching," said the Muhaddith gravely, in a way that gave Olivier pause as she tried to work out how best to counter. For such a stubborn, silent type, Scar had the uncanny –– and rather irritating –– knack of knowing exactly what to say, voicing aloud thoughts she couldn't seem to orientate even inside her own head.

Buccaneer used to do something ostensibly similar; in his absence, Olivier's instincts had grown dull, and now she could no more avoid the implications granted providence by Scar's unwonted insight and intuition than she could the forthcoming conversation with a certain subordinate officer.

What a pathetic, hypocritical creature she was, Olivier thought bitterly. Though she touted survival of the fittest as her creed, and indeed, the tacit law of kill or be killed governed every facet of life in the Briggs mountains, and though she knew a weakness had presented itself, she couldn't seem to cut it out, to let it go.

To let him go.

She was tempted to blame Mustang again, his peculiar brand of duty that managed to be both brave and brutally destructive, but she knew a part of this was her own doing. It would have been easy to attribute her own losses to the pernicious martyrdom Mustang inspired in others. Blame him for the shadows of ruin he trailed behind him through the desert. And perhaps that was the seed of it, but from that one little seed had grown the bulb of a flowering plant. And Olivier knew, all her muddled motivations crystallising at once into a single, sharply focused thought, that she was the one who nurtured it, let it wrap around her neck, choking the air right out of her like the yellow orchid vines snarled across the railway tracks.

That she had, in some way, stumbled into a desert of her own creation.

She knew why the Accident had happened. She knew why it was her man gravely wounded, and not Hawkeye or that bitch Stokes.

She knew, and the consequence of her knowledge was enough to take her breath away.

"He's awake, you say?" she murmured.

"Yes."

"I had better debrief him, then. The sooner I'm out of this godforsaken desert, the better."

The Muhaddith have a solemn nod, the barest bob of his head. As General Armstrong stalked out from under her shade, she spared a single glance over her shoulder, only to find the massive Ishvalan standing with his arms crossed, his alkehestric tattoos twitching, glaring his perennial glare. Already, no doubt, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, alone in his indecipherable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of their tragedy.

The streets around her man's office, which had once thronged with life, stood empty. Gone were the food vendors and the women in their bright clothes selling hand made goods from carts and baskets. Gone were the children who played amongst the crowds with their games and laughter. Gone were the stores with their windows of fine clothing or delicacies. Even in the afternoon, all Olivier had was the dusty street and the wind for company.

She did not knock on the door, and like all homes in Ishval, it was not locked. She marshalled her resolve and pushed herself into the small, spartan space.

The dark room seemed a place without consequence. Olivier felt the air move like cool water, the aroma of paper and dry stone hanging low in the air. With each movement something new came to her eyes, a tiny fragment more of the plain furniture and messy desktop took form, as though they were waiting for her to make them real.

She found him sitting at his desk, staring at nothing, long arms hanging limply at his sides, barefoot and bare-armed.

"Major Miles," Armstrong greeted him gruffly.

Her adjutant turned to look at her, bleary-eyed and unshaven. He looked lean and hungry, swathed shoulder to shin in bandages under the fabric of his shirt. His white hair had been shaved down to the scalp. His red eyes seemed dull, shadowed by his dirty, dim little corner.

"Hello, sir," he murmured. "It's..." he swallowed thickly, "it's good to see you."

Olivier grunted something noncommittal, stepping up to her bent, broken adjutant.

According to the report of one Major Miké, Professor Stokes had lured Captain Hawkeye into an area of unstable geothermal activity. The ground had erupted, sending a tall column of boiling-hot steam into the air.

Riza Hawkeye, and, incidentally, Professor Stokes, had suffered only superficial injuries.

Someone had pushed them out of the way.

An Accident, Major Miké had told Armstrong. A terrible, terrible Accident.

Olivier's blue eyes narrowed. She made a sound midway between a sigh and a snort.

She touched Miles's shirt lightly, little more than a brush of her fingertips. The cotton felt starchy, stiff. Suppuration had crusted yellow on the fabric. Armstrong made a small noise of disapproval.

"When's the last time someone changed your bandages, Major?"

"They haven't."

"Excuse me?"

"I've been doing it myself."

Olivier humphed. "Well," she muttered, taking in the state of her adjutant, "you've done a shit job of it."

Miles continued to trace the abrasions in the siltstone walls. "I don't have a mirror in here, sir," he said softly.

Olivier glared at the back of his head. She unbuttoned her uniform jacket, took it off, folded it slowly and deliberately before placing it against the wall. As she rolled up the cuffs of her shirt, she considered berating him for failing to look after himself. She considered marching right back through the door and dragging a doctor in to see him. She considered ordering him to ask for help.

But she didn't.

If Miles wanted anyone's assistance he would have sought it himself. He was not a slave to vanity, nor did he suffer any messianic tendencies.

He just didn't care anymore. About himself. About whether he lived or died. About anything, really, she suspected.

A part of Olivier could understand that. Could empathise, even, if she were one given to indulging such sentiments. But she also knew the endurance of pain did not necessarily equate to a desire to end one's life. Miles's time on the mountain would have glaciated such latent, dark desires. In a place like Briggs, suicide summed to an unnecessary and detrimental gap in a regiment, a sharp, man-shaped absence where before there had been an able body. No, Olivier affirmed. Miles's stubborn, silent suffering was not his avenue of escape. It just happened to be the only means by which he could force everyone else to look away from his shame. He did not want to die; he wanted to hide.

And Briggsmen do not hide.

Olivier kicked the leg of Miles's chair, almost sending him tumbling out of it.

"Shirt off," she said gruffly.

A kinetoscope flicker, a spark of panic, flashed briefly in Miles's red eyes. Good, affirmed Olivier. "Sir..."

With an effort the General bit back her impatience. "That was an order, not a request. I won't ask you again."

Olivier went to her kit bag, starting unpacking the necessary first aid materials: fresh bandages, swabs, a tin of silver sulfadiazine. When she turned back to Miles, he hadn't moved. In the half shadow, his eyes were as empty as the bloody desert sky. He tried to fix his tongue in a protest, but she bore down on him, her lip curling.

"You insubordinate little––"

"I can't, sir."

"What?" she snarled, the word cracking like a whip.

"I can't," he repeated, his voice pitched at his usual low dulcet but devoid of any emotion –– flat and featureless, the words so glassy everything seemed to slide off them. "It's stuck."

"It's stuck."

"I can't lift my arms that much yet, General."

Olivier said nothing. Instead, she gave his dirty shirt a tiny tug with a thumb and forefinger. It held fast to his back, his injuries having wept through the dressing, tacking to his clothes. Pulling the shirt off himself risked the removal of the tenuous film of scabs. Olivier set aside her medical supplies.

"Reach as far as you can, Major," she ordered brusquely.

Slowly, like lifting the handle of a rusty pump, Miles raised his arms, until he was pointing his fingers straight in front of him. Though he soon began to tremble with the effort, his face betrayed nothing: none of the pain, none of the shame Armstrong knew was there, simmering just below her adjutant's placid surface. Were she any other woman, Olivier would have found his uncanny quiet unnerving. As it was, the lack of small talk and mindless jibber jabber presented a welcome respite. With the silence, she could focus.

She grunted, "Hold still." Save the involuntarily quiver, Miles didn't budge.

Placing the rest of her supplies on his desk, Olivier situated herself between his outstretched arms. She reached over his shoulders until she had a grip on the hem of his shirt, just above the seat of his trousers. Her nose puckered. In such close proximity, he smelled dreadful, like blood and sweat, the sourness of stale bandages. Either he hadn't let them bathe him, or the medical staff in Dairut were as useless as every other goosestepping moron in Amestris's godforsaken excuse for a military. When the General secured her grip, the fabric crunched. It had hardened to the consistency of cardboard, rigid with dry fluids.

Olivier almost started when Miles rested his chin on her shoulder, cheek against her neck. She felt his heart beating through his thin chest, too sedate, too slow; heard his breath shush the small hairs behind her ear.

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. All she could see was the top of his head, a fine eider of white hair where before there had been a tail. "Something the matter, Major?"

A quiet, "No, sir." She felt the words ghost across her throat.

With no explanation forthcoming, and Olivier growing increasingly keen to distance herself from the rankness of Miles's clothes, she gave a tiny, noncommittal shrug: suit yourself.

She pulled his shirt up, rolling it off his skin. She felt Miles seize under her hands, opening and closing his mouth mutely. He didn't so much as whimper.

Olivier removed the disgusting article of clothing with as much care as she could muster, with far more gentleness than her cracked, calloused hands seemed capable. Miles's bandages, once white, were closer to yellow, brown. Some red. The wrappings had come loose; most fell away with the removal of the shirt.

Even by Olivier's standards, the injury was devastating. Her adjutant's entire left side was mottled and raw, the flesh a glistening white. The burns radiated out from the space adjacent to his spine, curling under his arm, constellating his ribs. The scars would mar him forever. Olivier could still smell a lingering waft of smoulder, could still feel the heat of them so close to her clenched hands. As angry as the injury looked, Miles's cheek against her throat had gone clammy and cold. She could feel him digging his chin into her collar bone, burying his head there. She ignored it.

She was glad to be rid of the shirt, balling it up and tossing it into one corner. Retreating until she was leaning against his desk, Olivier got her first good look at him. He didn't meet her eye, staring at the window instead, even though the drapes were pulled shut.

Miles was no muscle-bound behemoth like many of the soldiers Briggs tended to attract. At times, standing beside Buccaneer, he had seemed almost slight. He had always been lithe and strong, as tough as gristle. Hair as white as the mountain snow, pulled into a severe tail. Sharp sideburns. Sharp eyes. Sharp cheekbones. Everything about the Major seemed honed to a fine edge, as though a hand on his face would come away bleeding.

That man was long gone.

Olivier sighed; the sound slipped out before she could bite it back. Miles was sick, thin; she could count every one of his ribs. His shoulders jutted to two bony points, clavicles pushing prominently against his skin. His arms hung limply at his sides, exhausted from holding them erect. With his white hair shorn aggressively short, she could trace every curve of his skull.

"You've lost weight, Major," mentioned Olivier, voice rough and low.

"I hadn't noticed, sir."

She peered around his pokey office. The thin drapes were dusted in sand, as though they hadn't been opened in days. His cane rested against one wall, likewise neglected. His last meal lay untouched by his bed. It would attract flies soon, she noted distastefully.

"Falman tells me you're not eating."

"Falman should tend to his own knitting, sir."

Under different circumstances, the General would have agreed. Instead, she grunted, "You barely sleep. You rarely speak, and when you do, only in monosyllables."

"I have nothing to say, sir."

"You seem to have plenty to say to me."

Finally, his head swivelled to face her, the movement glacially slow, pulling at the fine scabs on his deltoids. "You're my commanding officer."

"And if I wasn't?"

His tone didn't change: "If you weren't my commanding officer, General Armstrong, I would be dead."

She furrowed her eyebrows, taking the tin of sulfadiazine in hand. The cream was cold on her fingertips. She stepped behind him, appraising the damage. "Melodrama doesn't suit you, Miles," she muttered.

"No." He hissed when she dabbed the ointment on the worst of his burns, but didn't cry out.

"I'm pleased we agree."

"No, General," he said softly; the pain he refused to show in his burnt and broken body leeched into his words: "I was actually contradicting you."

Wouldn't be the first time, Olivier thought ruefully. Finishing the delicate work, she reached around Miles for the roll of fresh bandages. Abruptly, his hand found her arm.

He didn't grab it. He didn't have the strength; his grip was frail, and the General could have shrugged him off with ease. But then a memory surfaced, an infant Catherine Elle latching onto Olivier's pinky finger with surprisingly martial resolve. Miles's touch reminded her of her baby sister's: the grasp of one helpless, afraid of slipping away.

"If you were not my commanding officer," he managed, "then I would have been taken to one of Bradley's concentration camps and shot."

Her face fought a grimace. A lance of pain, an arthritic ache like wounds in wet weather, cut a ragged neural route through her head. Another memory made itself known, perhaps one that had never really disappeared in the first place: darkness and dread, the smell of lanolin, the press of dirty fingernails. It seemed to sustain itself on its own cruel reincarnations, resurrected in many forms, on many nights.

"I made a judgement call," she said stonily. "That's why I command Briggs, Major: I am able to make the difficult decisions."

"Not like that," he murmured. "Never like that."

"It's a waste of your time and mine cogitating on it now." She steeled herself. "Now, I'll attribute your persistent grip on my arm to your fatigue and injuries, Major, because if you were in any lucid frame of mind, you would know better than to ever lay a hand on me."

Miles didn't seem to hear her. His grip tightened in insistence. "I buried it until I no longer remembered there was anything to bury. I couldn't put a name to it. But... held in its creases was its ability to change everything, organically, forever."

He was rambling. His eyes held the glazed intensity of inebriation or shell shock. "Major..."

"It left permanent wrinkles in the fabric of our souls."

"Major Miles!"

"Every night, I laid awake with your memories flooding through my eyes, with the hope to be with you when sleep arrived. I just want to sleep, Olivier... I want to sleep."

He sobbed then, a stuttering intake of breath that seemed to tear at his larynx like the neck of a broken bottle.

She swallowed her dismay, throttled it until it suffocated, because it was all she could do to keep the panic from leaving her as a scream.

But the anger remained, flaring like a grease fire. Olivier ground her teeth. The sound was almost bestial, a snarling, stubborn frustration. She dragged Miles into a standing position by his shoulders, her hands epaulets over collar bone and muscle. Looking into his eyes was like peering through something transparent, staring at the back of his skull through windows of rose-tinted glass. She clutched him, all the while telling herself it wasn't to keep him from slipping away.

Merely to shake some goddamn sense into his skull.

"Listen to me, you selfish prick," she hissed in his face, close enough for their noses to touch. Their eyes locked: red and blue, fire and ice. A unified diametric, a tacit law of equilibrium they could not escape: "People die all the time. That's what people do. We are killers. We prey on the weak. We live on things that once lived themselves. Ishval, Briggs, the portal of goddamn Truth, it doesn't matter. We're out here, unaided, alone, by virtue of our own strength. And it's not perfect, Major Miles. It's survival of the most adequate; it doesn't matter whether or not we're the fittest. All that matters is that we beat the alternative. That we survive, and our enemies do not."

"If you regret, even for an instant, the world will pass you by and the future will leave you behind. I will leave you behind. You can't buy back opportunity, Major. Ever. Time takes no pity on any heart or any soul." She snapped, "And neither do I."

Miles hunched his shoulders. He stared at the space near her ear, a reaching in his eyes, as though considering something profound, trying to pull it back with the intensity of his focus.

"Pity," he murmured; finally, he lifted his head to her. Their breaths mingled. She was close enough to feel the heat radiating from his wounds. "There must be something terribly wrong with this world if I find virtue lurking behind such a monstrous thing."

Miles began to chuckle, softly at first, his face turned to her shoulder. Then out loud, his head rolling away from her to the soft recesses of the ceiling, laughing into the dark, red eyes bright and full of something she couldn't name. She faced his narrow throat, cabled and exposed. Achingly vulnerable.

"I gave myself to you sooner, General, than I ever did to any other being," he whispered hoarsely. "Do you know why? Because when you saw me spitting blood you told me to swallow it; because, when I screamed, you let me run my voice ragged; because I wept, and you saw redemption where all others saw pain; because you are the only human being who has never pitied me."

Olivier tried to release him then, alarmed, giving a startled, stifled, "Miles…" before her adjutant gripped her hand and held it tightly, clutched it until her knuckles began to grind together.

His face, once so empty, so desolate, had gone rigid with such a severity of expression Olivier felt suddenly ill at ease, the switch ricocheting with the jar of a violent car crash; she imagined she felt the whiplash.

"I am going to say a mad thing to you, Olivier Mira Armstrong," he breathed: "I loved you all at once, and with everything I am. You are all the strength I will ever draw from this world."

His eyes, unblinking, the pupil reduced to a pinpoint, were a colour crimson Olivier had only ever seen before in the fires of Central Command, Major Kimblee's grotesque explosions, the surface of the Philosopher's Stone...

His words detonated memories intense enough to blot the fact that they were not hers –– or, at least, not hers alone. And his face, straining after hers, yearning, earnest, ignited a sudden unhappiness so immense it took her several long moments to see that his expression had changed, a tenderness tempering the severe contours of his face.

"You…" Olivier murmured. The word slipped away before she could secure her grip on it.

"You paid my price," said Miles, "that night in Fort Briggs. The Truth… He showed me. I know, now. That you're right... it's not about survival of the fittest at all."

She wondered why her eyes were burning until she saw the tears in his.

"Terror, fear, strength… the things that govern our lives, Olivier, might make us kill, but love will make us die. We die for love. For you. Our commander. Our Queen. Buccaneer understood. Breda understood. They were willing to give up everything for love, even their lives. And don't you see, that's a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival."

"You're a goddamn fool, Miles." She dropped her head.

He dropped his, too, whispering, "And it is worth my pain. It is worth my anguish. But it is not worth yours…" and put his hand gently on the back of her neck, touched his forehead to hers.

"That is not your decision to make," she said with miserable, exhausted anger. "I protect my men."

"Yes." He squeezed. "And that is why this is all so sad, Olivier.

"Because you love us, too. When you shouldn't. You shouldn't… it is weakness. It is suffering… it––"

She was very careful with him, taking pains to avoid his burns. She cupped his face, thumbs tracing small circles in his temples as she pulled him closer. He tasted like the desert, like sand. Like salt. It didn't take him long to respond. He had always been adept at occupying her blind spots, filling the space beside her like a shadow; that's what made him so good at what he did. This new closeness, or perhaps the denouement of a closeness so old neither one of them could remember a time when it did not exist, did not dull the potency of his instincts.

He seemed to have very little interest in obeying their chain of command; she had pulled the trigger, but he was the proverbial recoil, and she felt him in every muscle. His teeth grazed her lip, sending a fierce jolt down into her abdomen. The space left in his wake did not remain empty for long. His fingers raked through her scalp and, through the haze, she could see a few strands of yellow plastered to his forehead, tacked there by their sweat. Gold against bronze. Metallurgy. Alchemy. Perhaps a science with no name at all.

His breath began to rise in sharp knells, gasping. He shifted his weight forward until she found herself stumbling back, almost pulling him over with her. Still, he reached behind to the small of her back, latching her to him. The cold swell between his stomach and hers collapsed. A distance breached. The other hand slipped between them to pull at the buttons of her shirt.

The sun broke through the ragged tails of the shades and she realised, abruptly, how gorgeous he was: there, holding her, fixed in the landscape of his desert, red and white and gold and so beautifully alive. They were as distorted as all their careful distances, their edges eroded until they blurred and intermingled. Their separations masked by the dappled light and the taste of him.

New days, she thought, as he chased after her, teasing and biting and tasting. The stars changing, the snows blowing cold on a distant mountain; but in that moment there was just them, silently machinating towards the joint of flesh and flesh, while the ground stayed still enough to dance, unmindful of what happened above it.

IV

Shadows stretched across Mishaari, reaching up the walls of the crater like fingers as the faintest motes of starlight began to twinkle. In the north, a bank of dark clouds was building above the ridge of the mountains, the tops of the silstone buttes fading in the misty half-light. The last pigmented bands of sunset gilded the sides of the ruins in burnished gold.

At Jean Havoc's feet, the hill sloped suddenly away, and for a moment, he imagined leaping off, falcon-winged, to soar over the dunes, following the setting sun to its painted horizon. The sky burned scarlet, then amethyst, emblazoning the enormity of the desert firmament, before darkening to obsidian at the edges of the world. As the night deepened, light from Dairut's distant fires blinked more frequently until the canopy at his back, burning between the dark waves of sand, sparked with benign embers under the star-speckled sky.

"I have slipped the surly bonds of earth," murmured Vato Falman at his side, high cheekbones throwing shadows like tear tracks down his gaunt face. "And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds..."

The Second Lieutenant reached down and rubbed Kain's skinny back, the Master Sergeant releasing a violent hiccough, teetering precariously on his crutches. The boy's silent weeping was worse than violent sobs or screaming. His beetle-black eyes welled up with a sadness his young years should not possess. They showed his soul, aged by years of gritty work in the military machine, where he was no more than a cog made of flesh and blood - and all the more expendable for it. The silence of his sobbing was eerie, like he had wasn't entirely sure what sounds to make, like a baby drawing his first breath.

When the words hadn't come, the tears did. The mourning was supposed to be something dignified and stoic, but Maria Ross cried like a child, noisily, with running snot and choking sobs. She was not ashamed of it. Jean pressed close to her, and he felt her short black hair prickle his ear as her head fell against his shoulder.

Falman intoned, his words thick with grief: "I have done a hundred things you have not dreamed of –– wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence. I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung my eager craft through the footless halls of air."

Jean couldn't really see anything through the stinging in his eyes, rubbed raw by sand and tears, but he felt Ross's presence at his side, her lips trembling and her body heaving with emotion.

"Up, up the long, delirious burning blue, I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace where never lark, or even eagle flew."

"What a bunch of poetic bull," muttered Jean, but his voice wasn't angry. It was hollow, tired, thick and limpid with his tears.

He felt Maria take his hand, holding on tightly. He suddenly found himself dreading the moment when he would have to let her go. Her deep brown eyes looked like pieces of coloured glass in the red light of sunset. She leaned into his touch, desperate for the contact. Jean felt smooth and still –– desperately numb –– a fly drowning in amber. They remained like that for an endless moment, hung in time like the sun from the sky, waiting and watching each other.

"And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

For a long time, nobody moved and nobody spoke. The silence beat on their faces and backs. Then, Fuery sniffed, swiping his hand across his eyes, letting out a weak, wet sob. Falman, without thinking, pulled the boy against him, draping an arm across his narrow, trembling shoulders. It probably didn't occur to Vato, Jean realised, that it was the first time the Second Lieutenant had ever touched the younger man in kindness.

"If I have one hope," said Ross mutely, her words little more than a whisper, husky with profound sadness, "it's that, if there is a God, He sat over the dark nothing and wrote us into His story, and put us with the sunset and the desert as though to say the beauty of it means we matter, and we can create within it even as He has created us."

"And one of the greatest acts of creation you can do is to find someone who is secretly lonely and be a friend to them, if only for a day," managed Kain; his words were near unintelligible beneath his tears. "But he was our friend for years."

"I will miss him," murmured Vato. He pulled Kain closer, letting the boy weep into his shoulder.

For a while, they stood together in the dry, crackling heat, watching the way the sky at sunset resembled a sheet of fire, and looking out over the overwhelming emptiness and severity of the open desert. Quietly, Vato and Kain turned to go, the former helping the latter hobble along on his crutches, supporting him in their precarious descent down the slopes of the basin, back towards the town glimmering at their backs.

Jean and Maria remained. Above them, the sky turned to a light, dusky purple littered with silver stars. As the light ebbed, so too did the warmth of the day, until all that was left was the chill of twilight and the promise of the cold desert night.

Jean prodded the folds of his consciousness for sadness, but the crystal had particulated to chalky powder, had blown thin on the wind, leaving only a sharp, serrated pain, like crushed glass cutting up his insides.

"When I look back at myself at age twenty," he said suddenly; though he had consigned himself to silence, once the words started, he didn't think he'd be able to stop them: "what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend, no mates I could open up to. No clue what I wanted to do, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes, I'd go a week without talking to anybody."

Ross's hands worked across each other like little crabs, crawled around herself to hug her shoulders.

"I 'member doing one of those huge war game exercises back in the Academy," Havoc went on quietly, not really caring if Ross was listening or not, "all of Eastern... some of the Northern forces, too. We were just wandering through this busted-up town, and for some reason, instead of my maneuvers, all I could think about was all the horror that kept our world working. The Eastern Rebellion had just wrapped up, the massacre, and when I heard about all those people dyin', all that death and destruction, and knowing I was doing my part to keep the wheel turnin'... I figured, if I was gonna live with myself, I would have to rip my own heart out and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything I'd ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. I just threw myself into the games and tried not to think about it. But the whole time, as everyone was shootin' blanks and yelling, I yearned for something different.

"It made me so sad, and for a while I just crouched in the rubble, hugging my gun like a goddamn safety blanket, people shoutin' at me, telling me to shift my arse. But I couldn't move. I felt like I was caught between two poles of hypocrisy, Ross. That I'd somehow sacrificed my right to think of myself as a good person, my right to think my life as being worth anything. I just hid for a while, wind all hot and gritty, dust everywhere... and, suddenly..." Havoc sighed, the sound dissipating into the desert air, "out of that mess, emerged this beautiful boy with the greenest eyes I'd ever seen, holding his hand out to help me to my feet. It's really hard to recall the day you become friends with special people. But... I 'member meeting Heymans."

Wordlessly, Maria held her arms open in invitation. Jean flung himself into her embrace with a strangled sob. He buried his face into the crook of Ross's shoulder and they stood there like that for a while, Jean wracked with the force of unvoiced cries and Maria holding him, heart aching for her friend, for the magnitude of his loss.

"I miss him, Maria," Jean moaned. "I miss him."

"I know, my dear," she whispered hoarsely. "I miss him, too."

"What do I do, now?"

"You live, Jean Havoc. Just live. Live... and be happy. That's all he wanted. That's all he asked for."

He pulled apart from Ross, his expression chasing after hers. "What if I can't?" he asked desperately, breathlessly.

"You can, Jean."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because he loved you. And he believed we are here to make the world a better place. That though we don't always deserve the cards we're dealt, good or bad, we are nevertheless judged by how we play our hands. Those of us with a bum deal that makes it harder to do good –– we just have to work a little more is all." She smiled a small, sad smile. "He was a strategist, Jean, who understood, in the end, that there is no strategy. There's just our muddling through, doing the best we can."

She pitched forward on the balls of her feet, stood on her tip toes, and gave Jean a gentle kiss on the cheek, where the tears fell heavy and fast.

"We should go, Lieutenant," she said quietly. "It's getting chilly out here."

Havoc looked up, into the nighttime sky, where the stars tangled across their own boundaries, until the start of their constellated designs were lost. Laid out above him, mapped island of moments in an ocean of past and future time.

"Yeah," murmured Jean. "Yeah. Let's go home."

Maria Ross took his hand. They began their climb down the crater slope.

Under a sky of perfect midnight velvet, under stars so brilliant they drew the eyes heavenward, the lyrics of an old soldier shanty lifted softly in Jean Havoc's mind.

As the light twinkled and the unheard music played, his steps fell lightly over the rutted path.

Towards his friends. Towards home.

The End