Chapter Text
The first thing he sees is Riza. She’s gaunt and pale and her hair is almost brown from grease.
“Hey, beautiful.”
She rolls her eyes, a little flushed, “don’t suppose you can fix that, doctor?”
“Some things are incurable.”
“Look, colonel!” He turns. It’s Jean, standing, arms spread out, “Back in commission!”
Roy laughs, and reaches out for Riza’s hand.
—
Chrissy and Michaela rush forwards to hug him. They’ll learn the details, eventually. But now they just know something bad was going to happen, and that he stopped it. Claire told him on the phone.
“Oof,” he huffs, hugging them back, close.
“I have something for you,” he Roy reaches in his sheets, and pulls out a beat up plushie, “Chrissy.”
“I want you to keep it.” She says, muffled against his chest.
—
Night breeze fills the room and Roy stares out the window, at the full moon. It’s a starry night, with Central not lit up like it usually is.
“It’s a beautiful night,” She says, her cheek on his shoulder. They pushed their beds together.
“It is,” Roy says, pushing a strand of hair behind her ears. He’s going to be discharged tomorrow. She’ll stay here a little longer. “I’ll fix up the house for you, apparently Bay Street was spared in the fight, but I’m sure it’s filled with dust like the rest of the city.”
Her shoulders tense.
“Riza?” She’s quiet. “What is it?”
“You know that place is a lie, don’t you?”
He looks away.
“Roy,” she lifts their linked hands, “If we.. if we really want to do this, as grown ups, we’re going to have to stop trying to relive what happened, or what could’ve been. You can’t forge a life out of nostalgia.”
Silence.
“Do you love me?”
“Of course I love you!” Roy immediately snaps back.
“No, I mean,” she pulls away, looks at him squarely, “do you love me? As I am? Do you love and want what I can give you now or are you just waiting for things to get back to what they were? To normal?”
His first instinct is to say yes, but he can’t quite get it out. Riza’s face crumples, just a bit.
“What do you feel, when you look at me?” She asks, small. His eyes sweep over her, at the baggy hospital uniform, the bandages, her sunken, tired eyes.
“Guilt.” He says, even smaller.
“What do you feel… when you look at me?”
She’s quiet for a while.
“Loss.”
—
He’s there, a week later, in a tuxedo fresh off the tailor’s table and a bouquet of blood-red roses.
“You’re incorrigible, sir.”
“Then you should stop trying, lieutenant.”
Behind her, a few nurses are staring with wide eyes and red cheeks and giggly faces. He winks. They swoon. Riza sighs and confidently grabs the bouquet, not breaking her stride to the car. “Coming?”
A few turns in the car later she recognises where they’re going. Riza grasps his arm, “Colonel.”
“Just trust me, okay?”
They’re at Bay Street. In front of the building. They don’t enter.
“Why are we here.”
Roy extends his arm. Snaps. A flat on the second floor goes up in flames.
“Oh my god! People—”
“The whole building’s empty.”
“But—”
“Riza Hawkeye,” She turns. He goes down on one knee. Her mouth’s open slightly, eyes frozen. Roy takes out a small velvet box from his pocket and pops it open to reveal a ring with an obscenely large ruby, “will you give me the honour of loving you, as you are?”
“You snooped around my room.”
“Oh, come on.” The fire crackles beside them.
“That’s very rude, colonel.”
“There’s mud on my pants right now and my knee is killing me,” he says, “But! But I will wait as long as you need.”
Riza smiles.
“Yes.”
—
Roy Mustang’s thirty-one and he’s engaged.
—
They retire from the military. The bicameral legislature, after almost fifty years, is reinstated. Grumman’s Führer, and, after what everyone terms a pointlessly aggressive campaign, Roy’s Prime Minister, with an office at Number 6, Portingham Avenue. The very first day, he passes along the copies of a thick bill, and promises he won’t rest until it’s passed.
The Ishvalan Bill of Independence and Reparations.
The first year is a flurry of meetings and visits and late nights. He doesn’t see Riza as often as he’d like, and usually when he does, it’s for work. To exchange notes, intelligence, successes, and failures. Regardless of his status, Roy’s still an outsider, and now the face of change, and the old guard doesn’t really like change all that much.
So Riza, with her ancestry and military laurels, comforts them, makes implied promises that nothing will change, not really, just agree to this thing. And this. And this, too.
And Roy still wears his military uniform to official engagements, so they’re too distracted to notice money being cut from the military and being funneled into Ishval. It’s a delicate balance, keeping any Amestrian intervention away from Ishval while still funding the budgets Mile and Scar send him. He’d realised very early on that the hands-on approach he’d imagined would harm more than benefit, and really the only thing he could do to take a step back and make sure the money flowed. And ease a lot of bruised egos back home, make lots of promises that may or may not be kept.
“It’s a beautiful day.”
“So it is,” Riza says, braiding her hair, swiping on red lipstick. Her new uniform, “you know you’ll have to drop the whole war hero act after this, right?”
“I thought I had to drop it after I announced that there’d be a trial.”
“Nobody thought you were serious. They’re probably still expecting you to back out.”
“Well,” Roy smiles, “I do love shattering expectations. Come on.”
What goes unsaid is: if there is an after.
—
The court is in Ishval, and fully packed. Someone throws a tomato at Roy and he incinerates it without burning. It lands with a dull slosh on the ground. “Pity,” Riza says, “I like roasted tomatoes.”
Scar, the last of the Ishvalan clergy, is the judge. On trial is almost the entire ex-Amestrian military brass.
He looks odd, in white robes.
He slams the gavel.
“Let’s begin.”
—
They execute five generals, before one is declared innocent. Olivier Armstrong. Roy requests that newspapers no longer be sent to his office. Alex, too, is declared innocent, as expected. Roy requests that he be judged on the same day as Riza. His motion is granted.
Marcoh pleads guilty.
He’s executed by firing squad.
It’s a damp Ishvalan winter with comfortable days and freezing nights, when it’s their turn. At first, there was pure rage, directed at Ishval, Grumman, and Roy, in weekly cycles. But now the testimonies of the Ishvalan survivors have been committed to paper and spread wide, and all the detractors who had so much to hate to spew about the trials have shut up. Mostly. Roy, for the first time in his life, cuts a sympathetic figure, and now regularly has roses left at his doorstep, and long articles about why, he, the prime minister who started the trials in the first place, has already atoned.
“How will you plead?” Riza asks, the night before. Their trial is tomorrow. They spent the day mostly in bed, and now they’re having dinner, still in pyjamas.
It’s the first time they’ve discussed their trial.
“Innocent,” he says. He doesn’t want to judge himself. He wants to be tried, properly. “What about you?”
Riza’s eyes settle somewhere far.
“I don’t know.”
—
The sun is bright. The air is cold.
“Roy Mustang,” Scar says, “how do you plead?”
“Innocent, your honor.”
“Very well.”
His primary witness is a girl of about sixteen with half her face burned off, and her ear melted into a crushed ball.
The verdict is guilty.
“Riza Hawkeye,” Scar says, “how do you plead?”
“I—” Her blue eyes swirl. They avoid his.
“I want to hear my victims. Innocent.”
It’s a young man in a wheelchair. She shot him in the back, as he was trying to run away when he was eleven.
“This court finds you guilty of crimes of war against the people of Ishval.”
They keep them in the same cell.
“It’s the oddest thing,” Roy says, head in her lap, “I feel very.. light.”
“Me too,” She cards her fingers through her hair, and offers him a rare smile, “our guilt is the executioner’s problem now.”
They wake to the sounds of gentle clangs. Roy sits up. Blue sunlight streams from the solitary window near the ceiling.
“Scar,” he says, voice thick with sleep, “hello.”
“Hello.” A guard unlocks the door.
“You’re escorting us in person?” Riza.
“No,” Scar says, and straightens, “the people of Ishval have pardoned you for the crimes you committed during the Ishvalan genocide.”
Roy squints, “why?”
He hands them a rolled piece of paper, tied with a ribbon. “I talked... With the elders and the witnesses and a few more people. We all agree you committed unforgivable sins, but,” he says, “we also believe you two are capable of doing more good than you have done harm.”
“That’s… that’s a tall order,” Roy says, taking the scroll.
“Yes. It is,” he says, “This is your second chance. Don’t disappoint us.”
“We won’t,” Riza says, tone steel.
Roy Mustang’s thirty two and he is, finally, forgiven.
—
Officially, he’s on a diplomatic mission to Xing to discuss trade routes. Actually, he’s making it through the list of villages Mei sent him that spoke the dialect she’d mentioned. The letter’s three years old. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t even look at it, until he reconstructed Ishval enough to deserve it.
It’s high noon, but the fogs and altitude give everything the blue dimness of dawn. The village is called Suzhou, nestled in the Taihang range. Its population fluctuates depending on the season, the herders going into the valley during winter. In the middle of spring, it’s teeming.
It’s the second last village on the list.
“It’s beautiful,” Riza says, tugging her horse to a halt. They overlook the sharp fall, into paddy fields. Wide steps cut into the mountain, filled with water that reflects the hundred colours of the sun.
Roy can’t enjoy it.
“Let’s go,” he says, and trots his horse on. He’s travelling light; just him, Riza, Jean, Kain, his PA, and three bodyguards. This is beginning to feel pointless. He doesn’t doubt that his parents had some connection to these villages, but they were desperate enough to brave the desert on foot. Desperate people tended to not be remembered, not thirty years after their deaths.
Still. He likes crossing things off of lists.
It’s a quaint village where they draw too much attention. They being everyone other than him. It’s a nice change of pace, watching his cohort be stared at and uncomfortable in their light hair and pink skin, and him blending in with the general population. Of course, then he opens his mouth. His Xingese is rusty and, as Ling loves reminding him, provincial.
“Six teas, please,” he says, as they unload their horses and collapse into the chairs in what appears to be the town’s only teashop, “And fried sweet potatoes and dumplings.” That’s pretty much what’s reliably good in every eatery in Xing.
It’s odd. He can sense people whisper about him, and from the corner of his eye spots a young server sprinting off. Everyone else has seemed to notice too. Jean’s tenser, hand resting on the butt of the gun underneath his coat. Roy glares. Jean doesn’t react.
“Perhaps they know who you are,” Riza says, though her fingers tap away at her side, too. It’s very unlikely, that the people of Suzhon would concern themselves with Amestrian Prime Ministers.
“Don’t eat anything, sir,” Alicia, his bodyguard, says.
“You’d have me offend our hosts on a diplomatic mission?” He smiles.
She doesn’t relax.
“Oh god,” They turn. It’s a short, stout woman with wide shoulders and a thin grey braid. She’s clutching a straw hat to her breast, and her eyes look close to popping out of their sockets, “Oh my god, you look just like your mother.”
Roy stands up.
“You.. you knew her?”
She laughs wetly. “She was my sister.”
—
Her name’s Jingyi, and she has a hearty laugh and orders a round for everyone even though it’s just noon and throws her strong arm around his shoulders and he’s so, so embarrassed, but, also.
Happy.
“Tell me about her.” His words are so clunky, it’s humiliating. He should’ve spent longer trying to learn them. It’s just them, in Jingyi’s home. Everyone else is in the garden, and he can see from the corner of his eye Riza trying to feed a fussy goat some leaves.
“Oh, she was a beautiful woman,” Jingyi says, and pulls down a picture for him. It’s a photograph of two sisters that bear very little resemblance. There’s a short tomboy with close cropped hair, a straw hat, and a reed sticking out of her mouth, whom he supposes is Jingyi, and an elegant young woman with straight hair falling to her waist and a serene smile, whom he supposes—
Is his mother.
Roy touches the glass as lightly as he can. “Feng-Mian. She looks such an angel here, doesn’t she?” He nods. And then she laughs, “Well, she wasn’t! She was an absolute demon with a sword, terrorised the little lordling down in the valley to leave the girls alone. And she’d sneak out at all hours, and had half the boys in this village and the next one slicing their hands to write love confessions in blood.”
“She sounds amazing.”
“She was.”
“Why did she try to.. Run?”
Jingyi’s face softens. “When she was nineteen, she decided to go to the city. We all expected it, this village.. It was too small for her,” She says, “But then.. Then she fell in with the wrong sort. She came back, three years later, with no money, but a husband. Pregnant. They thought they could hide up in the mountains, but then we got news that soldiers were spotted up in the pass.” She looks out the window, “They said they had nothing from them here, that they’d try their luck in Amestris.”
Roy reaches out, and squeezes her arm. There’s a pause.
“Did she ever discuss names?”
“Yes,” Jingyi says, “she had her heart set on Zhang-li, for a boy.”
—
There’s a small shrine, at the outskirts of the village. A list of names, carved into stone. His fingers run through it, until he sees it. Feng-Mian.
He lights a candle, drags it over her name, like his aunt had told him. He melts some of the hardened wax on the floor and secures his candle it, and kneels.
“Hello, Mummy,” Roy says, in Xingese, “It’s—” Inhale, exhale. “It’s Zhang-li.”
—
Riza’s waiting for him outside.
“Your aunt seems nice.”
“She is.”
There’s another woman waiting, when they reach home. She has thick frizzy curls and glasses that make her eyes look comically huge, and she’s tall and spindly with a soft purple dress.
“You DO look like her!” His eyes hunt for Jingyin. She’s nodding beside her. “Oh!” The woman says, immediately grasping his face, and squishing his cheeks.
“Aunti—”
“Oh, let Baozhai enjoy this moment,” She says, wrapping her arm around the woman’s waist, “She let the kiddies go home early just to see you.”
“He’s so cute,” She says, finally letting his cheeks go, which he grumpily rubs, “I made lunch!”
“Food!” Havoc says, barreling past him.
Baozhai’s thethre school teacher, and shares the house and the farm with her aunt. They met in the capital, and he gathers she was engaged to be married against her will and ran off with hiser aunt.
“We’re close friends,” Jingyin says.
“Yes, we are,” Bao says, winking over her tea cup.
“Mhm,” Says Riza.
Roy senses something has happened, but he can’t exactly pinpoint what.
They leave two days later, horses weighed down with bags of produce and dumplings, two women waving at them and Roy waving right back, with promises to visit.
“Was it what you expected?”
“No,” he says, “It was beyond whatever I dared to hope.”
Roy Mustang’s thirty four, and he knows he has roots.
—
Almost overnight, it seemed, everyone started publishing papers. Bradley had a tight control on media, and papers were less censored and more nonexistent. Now, though.
“I’m cheating on you.”
“With?” Riza slides a press-hot copy of The Daily Report across their breakfast table.
“Havoc.”
Roy nearly chokes on his toast. PRIME MINISTER’S FIANCÉE SPOTTED ON A DATE WITH HEAD OF SECURITY, and it’s a photo of Riza and Havoc getting coffee together, Havoc smiling his thousand-watt smile, Riza deadpan.
“We’d save them headline space,” He says, “First lady is so much smoother than Prime Minister’s Fiancée’”
“I won’t be First Lady,” She says, sipping coffee, “You’re not Führer.”
“Details, details.”
—
They get married in June.
Grumman offers them Brenthan Hall but he wants to invite as few people as possible, and that place demands massive celebrations. They pick Sopron. The still sleepy town has a beautiful Church with a green, sunny hill perfect for a marquee, and it only takes a week or so of alchemy to fix up the old house.
The seating chart is the biggest pain. They each tackle it for an hour a day, and still it takes a month. They arrange all the Elrics together, with Izumi and her husband, right next to their table, which has Jingyin, Madam, Bao, Claire and her family, Grumman, Rebecca, and her as yet unknown date. Rest.. is a crapshoot.
“Maybe we can shift the Armstrongs here.”
Riza tuts.
“No, they have a… feud with the Machialli’s.”
“They can sit with Kain and Havoc.”
“The whole family wouldn’t fit.”
“Mrs. Bradley?”
“No,” Riza says, “And then there’s the matter of Ling.”
Roy groans.
“Is it too late to rescind the invite?”
She slaps his arm.
“You know I’m right! He comes with an army!”
“He’s a close friend.”
“He’s the emperor of Xing whose cohort is going to get offended the second they see Mei sitting closer to us than them. This whole thing is a diplomatic disaster waiting to happen.”
“We could elope.”
“No. Claire would cry. She’s been bugging me about the wedding since I told her we got engaged.”
“Well, then,” Riza says, matter-of-fact, “I suppose an international incident is just something we will have to risk.”
—
They end up just attaching two extra tables to the Elrics’ seats and letting the Armstrongs sit closest to the bar.
—
“I look stupid.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Brother!” Al smacks Ed’s shoulder. “You look great, Roy,” he says, a tone so excessively sincere it would come off as mocking on anyone else.
But he’s wrong, of course. His collar’s too tight and his buttons strain too much, he thought it would be sexy at first, but in the mirror he just looks fat, and old, and his hair’s too thin, and the blazer pinches his shoulders and—
“She’s going to shoot you if you back out,” Havoc says, lighting a cigarette, “so really, what’s the point in thinking about how you look?”
“You’re right. You’re right.”
A beat.
“What if she realises how stupid I look and leaves me?”
Havoc groans.
“Roy, be serious,” Claire chimes in, “she would’ve left you when you got that stupid bowl cut in the academy, if she cared about you looking stupid.”
He stares at his reflection, at his slicked back hair, and considers.
“You’re right,” he says, a little bit comforted, “I’ve looked way worse.”
“You certainly have!”
“Brother.”
The church is filled with Tiger Lilies and Hydrangeas, and Roy stands at the altar, fidgeting. He absolutely cannot touch his hair, because it took him two hours to gel it down to the perfect level of dishevel, and a single strand more out of place would ruin the whole look. Claire’s beside him, in a tux, his best man.
There’s an empty space between her and Havoc.
The doors open. The band plays.
Riza’s radiant, with Grumman walking her down the aisle, her hair falling over her shoulders, she’s smiling, Roy’s eyes feel a little warm, she’s wearing—
Blue.
Blue satin.
Blue satin with uneven panels he remembers stitching in the dead of the night.
“Oh, god,” he can’t help but choke out, knuckles pressed to his lips, holding back a sob.
“Hello.”
“You. Is that,” Roy inhales, shuddering, “Is that?”
“Al transmuted it bigger for me.”
The boy bashedly waves.
Roy manages to collect himself somehow, still shaking, and the priest goes, “We are gathered here today—”
—
He cries at Claire’s speech. He cries the whole of their first dance, and when Jingyin and Bao gift him his mother’s old comb, because combs are a traditional Xingese present given to newlyweds, and when Chrissy shyly walks up to Riza and calls her ‘aunt’, and when Gracia comes up to him and gives him a cigar that Maes had been saving for his wedding.
At night, he holds Riza close, and they’re too tired and too drunk to do anything else, and she whispers ‘I love you’ into his bare shoulder and, finally, she cries too.
—
The job is, mostly, paperwork and crises. And visits. Lots, and lots of visits. Mostly bargaining with people he despises to get what he wants; reparations for Isvhal, funding for schools, reconstruction of houses. For all their kind words for the victims and statues for the heroes and strong admonitions against the Homunculi, the wealthy shut their purses tight when it comes to actually fixing the damage.
And sometimes, even though it’s the last year of his term and he should be used to it, Roy just feels like a useless fool, playing at Prime Minister, a puppet dictated by a dozen strings with invisible masters. Today’s one of those days. He’s on the phone with a senator, and this close to ripping it out with the cord and tossing it out the window when the door opens and Riza strides in.
“Mr. Wagner,” He smiles, acidic, “we have run out of time,” and slams the receiver.
“It’ll only take a moment.” Riza says.
He whines. “But I missed you so much.”
“Two moments, then.”
“Five.”
She smiles. “Alright.”
He takes her hands, “I’m glad at least one person in this world who is pleased with me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, “You pleased a lot of women in this country when you shaved that thing off your lip.”
“I was only aiming to please one.”
She does look happy. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes brighter than usual.
“Riza?”
“Don’t overreact,” she says, “but I’m pregnant.”
A pause.
He overreacts.
—
“—a national holiday. I can declare today a national holiday! I—”
“No.”
—
Riza wants to keep it under wraps, so he tries the best he can, but apparently he overcompensates because Claire pulls him aside and sits him down and lectures him for five minutes over the importance of communication in a relationship, and how passive-aggressiveness kills love, and how wonderful Riza is, and how marriage isn’t a fling and you have to work for it, Roy, it’s not a teenage summer romance that just happens on its own, it’s an active choice you have to make over and over again—and doesn’t let him get a word in edgewise until he blurts out, “she’s pregnant and I’m trying to hide it!”
She doesn’t tell anyone a thing, but the extra pastry baskets ear-marked for the First Lady that begin arriving at Portingham very quickly tip off Edward (who spent much of the last year doing midnight runs to bakeries) after a couple visits and he, of course, as has been proven repeatedly, cannot keep his mouth shut even if his life depended on it.
They make it to ten weeks before it starts appearing in the papers. Riza touches his arm and assures him it took longer than she expected, and that she’s proud.
—
Rebecca Jingyin Mustang is born four kilos and two hundred grams, red and screeching like something from the Earth’s depths. Riza lies barely awake and panting, damp blond hair sticking to her skin and pillow, and the doctor quickly confirms they’re both healthy.
Roy’s transfixed, by the scrunched up red face, the fat little fists, the wisps of black hair. Theirs. His. His vision quickly blurs.
“Riza,” he whispers, carefully kneeling beside her, “look. Our baby.”
She holds her close to her chest, half-laughing, half-sobbing, “she has your nose.” Roy buries his nose in her hair and murmurs she does, she does.
—
“Have you packed your medication?”
“Yes.”
“And Batty-Catty?”
“Yes.”
“And extra underwear?”
“Ma!” Rebecca stomps her foot, red. She can’t believe her own mother would embarrass her like that, right in front of her friend Yuriy!
“Listen to your mother, Red,” Roy says, and then leans down and whispers, “Because I once forgot to pack my underwear and it was awful.”
“I’m eight now, I know how to pack, thanks very much,” she says, tightening her strap around her shoulder. She insisted on carrying her bag, and it’s comically oversized. Roy’s already snapped half a dozen pictures of his daughter in her little frock and long braid and pink suitcase and the determined expression of a wilderness explorer, and she’s mad at him.
“Yes, you’re very grown up now,” Ed says, “Too bad your parents don’t see it.” Rebecca beams at him.
“Laying it on a bit thick, Rockbell.”
He sheepishly smiles, “Riza, I have no idea what you mean.”
Al thunders down the steps, carrying two giggling children in his arms, “All set! I found them! They were hiding in the closet!”
“Daddyyy, I don’t want to gooooo,” Trisha whines, though she reaches for Ed.
“You like Central better, don’t you?”
“Mm-hm,” the six year old says, “Auntie Claire gives me all the pastries.”
Roy sticks his tongue out at Ed. Ed snarls.
“O-kay, then!” Al says, inserting himself between them, swinging Jian by his feet like he preferred. Al propped the boy down on his feet and then looked at all four children, hands on his hips, “Are we packed? Clothes? Toys? Medications?” A pause, “Underwear?”
Black Hayate slowly walks to the kids and they descend, peppering her with kisses and pats, letting her lick their faces. They all have her pups running around in their homes.
—
Roy can’t figure out exactly how the tradition started but for three years now, ever since Jian, the youngest, started school, summer vacations are spent like this: for the first two weeks, the kids stay at Central, and mostly spend their days sleeping at Number 6 and running around the city. For the next two weeks, they go to Rush Valley, and stay with Ed and Winry. Finally, they go to Xing, to the Chang village. It’s close to Suzhou. Mei often takes Rebecca to see her grand-aunts.
Rebecca, though she looks exactly like him, acts more and more like Riza every day. There’s something about her posture, the set of her eyes. She has no interest in alchemy, and prefers thick fiction novels, horror and murder mysteries, which Roy packs into a separate bag.
Yuriy and Trisha have no inclination towards alchemy, either. They do love tinkering around with machines, and Roy often finds them unscrewing various appliances.
Jiang Chang likes Alkahestry, but only because it lets him heal the little injured critters he finds around the village. Nothing too startlingly advanced for his age. Nothing prodigious.
Though the boys won’t say it, Roy knows that they, like him, are grateful.
Rebecca waves at them through the rear window, and both of them stand at the door and wave back until the van disappears over the horizon. They were supposed to leave in the afternoon, but between late mornings and lost toys and last minute snacks and lost homework, it’s already twilight and the sky is a swirl of reds and oranges and purples.
“Do you want some tea?” Roy asks, his head fitting into the curve of Riza’s neck and shoulder like a puzzle piece, “I think the kids spared some of Claire’s cookies.”
“Tea sounds nice,” Riza says, squeezing his butt, “I can think of something better, though.”
Roy Mustang’s forty-four and—
And he finally comes home from war, to his happy ending.