The Deal

Breathlessness and stillness and her chest aching to expand with fresh air, Riza Hawkeye landed face-first on desert ground. There was only heat and dirt and an ache in her core which spread to her left knee. A jagged rock dug into her shoulder, and dust settled in her open mouth, dry as the desert she landed in. 

Finally, she could inhale. 

When she gingerly sat up there was nothing but dirt and sky, similar to the farthest reaches of Eastern Amestris. Of Ishval. There were no clouds, and based on the time of year, potential location, and position of the sun it was about four o’clock in the evening. Sparse trees littered the horizon, small and bristly. There was nothing else in sight. Just her, alone. 

(Now more alone than ever before - wicked humor and razor wit gone like the breeze caressing her hot face - )

Sweat was already dripping down her temples and back. She removed her military jacket, draped it over her head and shoulders, and started walking West in hopes of civilization. Dirt crunched under her boots, and little bugs flittered and bounced along with her. She mused to herself that any company was good company.

Waking up in a strange location wasn’t something she typically experienced on her day-to-day. Normally, Riza had a pretty standard routine: wake up alone in her bed, make breakfast with two cups of coffee and eat with Roy when he showed up to walk with her to the office, work on paperwork for eight hours, break up fights and keep jokes from getting too inappropriate, eat dinner alone or with Black Hayate, and go to sleep alone. Simple. Neat. Boring. 

Everything stopped being boring when Roy and the Elric brothers died. 

After the Promised Day, everything in her life became dull and frantically busy all at once. Color faded but the problems persisted - alchemists left and right were committing acts of atrocities, people were rioting in the streets after certain secrets got out about the massacres, and they didn’t have Roy or the boys. Death was all around her, again, like Ishval ( - everything tied to Ishval, everything - ), and the man she promised to protect was . . . anyways, it was hard to process. Life was hard to process.

Riza was fortunate that her grandfather was elected Fuhrer. He let her stay with Team Mustang so she at least had people she could lean on while at work, even if there was no joy. Sometimes she thought she saw a color - a bright yellow from a single dandelion while Black Hayate was barking at a colorless butterfly, blood red dripping from her hands in her nightmares - but her every minute was grayscale, the color of life leeched away by her grief.

Here, in this desert, the sky was blue, the dirt was brown and the bugs fluttering by her black boots were beige and her uniform pants were blue, too. Color existed all around her despite the ache in her very cells and the longing that called out for a soul that no longer existed on this plane. It was like being removed from everything that made her Riza Hawkeye allowed her to see life unfiltered again.

She didn’t know how long she walked, soaking in the feeling of being alive for the first time in what felt like years.

Riza was capable of a lot of things; namely, the ability to zone out of reality and into her head. This ability got her through boot camp and then the ensuing genocide and even the paperwork she suffered through daily. 

She tried not to use that ability here. 

She wanted to feel each step she took, each aching muscle, and to smell the dirt. She wanted her body to ache just as much as her heart did, and she didn’t want to miss a single moment of it.

After what felt like hours she spotted a small hut in the dimming light on the horizon. When she put a hand to her face and turned to get a full look, she couldn’t see anything else. Just the hut. Were there people? Was there water?

When she got closer, the ground changed colors and became much softer, like toiled soil instead of dry and hard-pressed plates of mud. The start of a farm? But there were no crops. No weeds. The trees she’d seen in the distance when she first arrived were long gone. 

The building really was just a hut, but it had a familiar air. The Ishvalan word for library was scrawled over a dry piece of wood that was nailed to the only door. There were no windows so she couldn’t peek inside. She felt the door handle and couldn’t jiggle it - locked. Tired and breathing labored, she pulled her gun from its holster and knocked the door in after hitting it once, twice - 

It was just as hot inside as it was outside. Hotter, even, since outside was cooling down with the setting sun. The room housed a small scatter of books along the four walls. A single table and a small shelf with canned and jarred food stood akimbo across the way. The table was bare except for a single piece of paper, which scrawled in an elegant hand: Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

Dirt and dust muted the colors of the books, and she blew softly on the ones closest to her. There were no titles on the spines, but they ranged in muted colors from green to purple to orange. They must have been sitting there for ages. 

Riza was tired, but she was alone and more than a little desperate for answers as to where she was deposited by the Leap Alchemist’s array. Even though she felt alive she wasn’t sure if she actually was. This desert seemed part of a fairytale. Nothing made logical sense. 

She dropped her dirty jacket onto the table and stretched briefly before running her fingers over the spines of some books closest to her left. Streaks of bright color were left in their wake, and when she pulled her hand away dust followed. She picked a book at random, a pretty purple that reminded her of Roy’s favorite mug, and flipped it open. 

Nothing. 

The pages were all blank. 

Perplexed, she picked another and another, flipping them open and rifling through blank page after blank page, setting each one down on the table. The piece of paper she piled them on seemed to taunt her. 

Frustrated, she huffed and glared down at her small stack of empty pages, yanking the paper out from underneath them. 

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance,” she read out loud, face set sternly. “What knowledge can I gain from empty books?”

As if in answer, the books in question seemed to shimmer before her, and she looked past the paper and back down to the stack to see a small glow emanating from a bright red one towards the bottom. 

“What?” she whispered, placing the paper down gently and removing the tomes blocking her view. 

When she uncovered the red book, it lost its glow. She gingerly picked it up, wry of another array possibly activating. Before she opened it she turned it each way to analyze the bare cover for anything that could hurt her or give her a clue as to why it would glow.

Nothing.

Heart pounding, she cracked it open. There, burned through page after page, was a bright red gem, pulsing and emitting the smallest glow.

“A Philosopher’s Stone,” she breathed.

///

“You mean to tell me that Major Riza Hawkeye and her troop of six infantry soldiers disappeared after they ambushed the Leap Alchemist? And there was an array on the floor?” Fuhrer Grumman asked as calmly as a scorned wife. Breda resisted the urge to shuffle in anxiety and nausea. 

“Yes, sir,” he said, eyeing the man down across the wide desk. “We’ve been doing some digging into the array, but we don’t know anything about it so far. Even Brigadier General Armstrong can’t help us decode this one.” 

And Armstrong was one of the only alchemists they could ask, as one by one all of the alchemists in Amestris were going berserk. He didn’t know what was causing this sudden outbreak of insanity, but nothing was the same after the boss was sucked away from existence. It was like the death of the crazy maniac that had been the mastermind behind everything even related to Amestris released an invisible wall that Major Hawkeye had claimed warped the practice of alchemy. The Major theorized that with this invisible wall removed, alchemy was taking on its original form, which was causing the alchemists to miscalculate. Breda suspected alchemy wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place.

He didn’t know anything about alchemy despite being one of Mustang’s team, but he trusted the Major. The last time he’d seen her had been the same morning she’d confided in the team about what was causing this shift in their State Alchemists. Even civilians had been spending extra time on their studies, certainly as a way to help them remain in control.

Now Hawkeye was gone, and there was no way to track her. They searched everywhere in Amestris - squad after squad deployed in all five major cities reported nothing on their return. Team Mustang was losing hope, and Breda didn't know how to change anything for the better. Technically Havoc would be in charge, but with his recent spinal healing by Dr. Marco, he took a leave of absence. Not that anyone on the team blamed him for wanting some time off.

So that left Hawkeye, Breda, Falman, and Feury. With Hawkeye MIA it was up to Breda to rally the team. 

He needed help, though. His team was small now, and they didn't have the know-how or can-do attitude they used to. They were getting tired.

The new Fuhrer, Grumman, seemed more relaxed than Bradley ever was, but the layer of steel in his voice when he decided to use it would scare the shit out of anyone. Hearing it now, while Breda reported his granddaughter missing, had Breda wishing for a quick and painless death by Black Hayate.

“The Leap Alchemist,” Fuhrer Grumman muttered, taking his cutting eyes off of Breda to pull a notebook out of a drawer on his desk. He flipped it open and jotted down the title. “This makes four State Alchemists AWOL, as well as three killed in action on the Promised Day. Our military power is collapsing as we speak, and new information regarding the movement of the Drachman forces tells me we have a potential interaction to prepare for.

“We also have a total disruption of the very power our country was founded on. Alchemists destroyed by their own creations, alchemy acting out, civilians rioting in the streets to burn down libraries containing sacred knowledge… 

“Will the state of our country ever bounce back?”

Breda shifted uncomfortably. He was too low of the totem pole to have been involved in these sorts of talks before the Promised Day. Nowadays he'd been privy to more than he'd ever have liked to know. 

Hearing his new Fuhrer sound so disheartened did not spark any confidence or hope in him. In fact, Grumman was a bit of a wet blanket.

“Sir,” he started, unsure if Grumman wanted his input.

“Go ahead, Gunnery Sergeant,” the Fuhrer said, fatigue coloring his words.

“Sir, respectfully, you can't talk like this.” Breda paused, swallowed, and continued on despite Grumman’s lack of engagement. “You're our Fuhrer. We're struggling, and things feel like they're harder now than they were before the coup, and you inherited a fucked up country. But you're our Fuhrer. We can't give up, we're Amestrian. You can't give up, either, you're our head.

“When you talk like this - like you're defeated - well, it sends a message. And that message is causing us harm.”

Breda took a half step back, stunned at his own honesty. But what he said was true. It was the reality. Grumman needed to have energy. He needed to pull Amestris back into their former glory. 

Grumman hadn't looked at him. He'd turned his chair to look out of the window, just a sliver of his balding head visible above the chair back. Breda stared, nervous sweat beading along his brow.

“I do believe I needed that scolding, Gunnery Sergeant,” the Fuhrer finally said. He spun back around in his chair, and Breda’s shoulders relaxed when he saw a small, hopeful smile on Grumman's wrinkled face. “You're right. Amestris is still strong, and we need to act like it. I want the rest of your squad to keep looking for Major Hawkeye. Use any and all resources we have to bring her home. In the meantime, I will start a rally for new troops. Dismissed.”

“Sir!” Breda said sharply, heels clicking together in his salute. When he left, there was a small flame of something brewing in his chest, and some of the heavy weight he'd felt on his shoulders disappeared. 

Maybe Grumman would make a great Fuhrer. Time would tell.

///

Riza had sat and stared at the red stone for what felt like hours but could only have been minutes. She didn't understand how something so tiny and seemingly insignificant could cause so much destruction and chaos. 

Could this stone have been made in the Ishval conflict? Was she sitting in a hut built on a grave of genocide? 

She paid as much attention to alchemy as she had the patience for, but there was so much she didn't know, still. The piece of paper she’d read earlier seemed to taunt her, hanging precariously on the edge of the rickety table she leaned against. Ignorance indeed. 

The stone couldn't help her. She wasn't an alchemist, barely knew anything about alchemy, and definitely didn't know how to use the stone or alchemy to get her home. And the vague, fanciful feeling of the little hut she was taking shelter in seemed to be something unrelated to alchemy anyways, despite the discovery of the stone. 

She might as well pick a direction and start walking. Doing so before led her here. Hopefully she would find civilization on her next walk. 

In the meantime she browsed through more books, tired enough to sleep but awake enough to feel the anxiety in her breast. Book after book showed blank page after blank page, but something in her kept her looking. Some part of her knew, instinctively, that there was more.

It wasn't until she picked up a completely black book, the first she saw that had no color, that she finally found whatever it was she was looking for.

The front page was titled “Alphonse Elric: Biography.”

“Huh,” she said out loud, something in her chest breaking for the sweet boy she only got to see in person for a second before he was whisked into the void with his brother and her favorite person. “I wonder, Alphonse. I wonder.”

She didn't read more than the title before she closed the book and stuffed it, along with the red book that houses the stone, into her military pants. As always, she was forever grateful for the deep and plentiful pockets these pants hosted.

“Now to find people,” she sighed, cracking the door of the hut open to peek out at the darkening sky. She might as well start walking in the same direction as before.