Postlapsaria
Title: Postlapsaria
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: T
Characters: Roy & Rose
Length: 6 pages
Warnings: Spoilers for end of the first series.
Summary: Edward is a horizon-colored memory now. The sun sets a little farther away these days, and through this dense, forbidding wasteland, it can be easy to mistake that flaming sword for the swelling glow that might lead them back home, these people left behind.
A/N: This is somewhat AU unless you ignore those scenes at the very end of the series when Roy is contentedly recovering under the tender, attentive care of Hawkeye.
Postlapsaria
The House in the East
"You can't leave me here," Roy says, claws at her sleeve.
The only visible indication of Lieutenant Hawkeye's strained fortitude was the deepening of the line between her pale brows. "Please don't do this, General," she hisses under her breath-there are people passing the open doorway as they speak, and she hopes, for Roy's sake, that they do not hear him.
"Look at me," he snaps, releasing her wrist with a push. "Do I look like a goddamn General?"
He does not. He looks like a desperately injured man who has spent the last twelve hours under a blanket in the back of a wagon, trundling east on the pitted and winding road from Central. He looks pale and underfed, riddled with infection she does not know how to fight. He looks like a man who cannot sit up, who cannot chase after her, who once could defend himself but can no longer.
"A divided manhunt is a compromised manhunt, sir," she breaths. She wants to brush his hair from his feverish brow, but she knows he would not appreciate it. She does it anyway, and she does it selfishly. "If we're very lucky, they will believe you are still with me. I'll draw them away to the south."
She means that no one would believe that Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye would leave her General on a cot in a backroom at Rockbell Automail and Prosthetics.
Their options now are simple: flee or hide. Riza Hawkeye, with her polished pistol hilt and less recognized face, flees. And Roy Mustang, one leg festering and the weight of a bullet behind his eye, cannot.
"When you're well enough to travel, sir," she says, "I'll come back for you."
He does not ask how she will know when he is well enough to travel.
x
x
x
For the longest time, Roy is unsure of who is living in the Rockbell house. He hears voices, some of which he can anchor to faces he knows: there is the old Rockbell matron, her voice like stones in a wooden cup; there is Alphonse, his voice a single, pure pure pitch without the metallic echo; there is Miss Rockbell, who speaks more than anyone else.
No one in the house speaks his name. Either they call him General or they call him nothing. Already, he is a man erased.
There is another voice there, somewhat smoother and less shrill than Miss Rockbell's, but still feminine and young. Roy hardily ever hears this voice except when it is singing, an airy, crystalline sound. He hears it at night, when the crying of an infant has roused him and, presumably, the entire house. The nursery is above his sickroom. He hears her footfalls, the creak of the crib as she lifts the infant, her coos and shushing. Then he hears her singing. The language, he knows, is not Amestrian. There is far too much roll to the r and lull to the l. It is, he realizes eventually, Ishballan.
The Rockbells pour pills into him for the first four weeks. Some of them help the fever, some of them help the pain. Some of them make him sick, and he forces himself to watch the younger Rockbell clean him up, watches her face as she unbuttons his vomit-soaked shirt and wipes his chin. His body aches and his mind bends and why should he try to mitigate this suffering when he cannot stop it? So he makes eye contact with the Rockbell women when they bathe him, when they empty his bedpan, when they suture and resuture his angry, festering wounds.
He soaks his bandages in just hours at first. He pictures his brain in his skull like an olive in a martini that someone is sip-sip-sipping away at. The liquid is getting lower and lower. The olive presses to the glass until it is beached and dry. And his thirsty, cracked brain sees mockingbirds on the window over his bed, smells the skin of the Rockbell house, and hears the mollifying timbre of the Ishballan girl as she moves around the nursery, a ghost in the walls, a rumor.
x
x
x
It is a Tuesday when his fever breaks for good, when the last lengths of thick, black thread are sewn into his flesh. He can move when he wakes that morning, can lift his head and shift his weight gently. When the terribly young Rockbell girl comes into his room that morning to check his bandages, she presses the backs of her fingers to his cheek. She frowns.
"What?" Roy asks, his voice dulled from disuse. That is a face of confusion.
"Your fever's gone," she says as though it is neither bad news nor terribly good news. He sees her wipe her fingers on her pant leg, although his skin is dry.
The sun is just rising over the bottom lip of the window by his cot, a square of impossible blue. The room smells like age and sick, antiseptic and cotton, and Roy realizes that the block of blue is making his mouth water.
x
x
x
He meets the child first. It is dinnertime on the day Alphonse leaves for Dublith. The meal is a subdued affair, and Roy feel uncomfortable just listening to their uncomfortable silence. In the other room, he hears the clinking of silver and the chime of drinking glasses and then the fleshy thump of something soft hitting the floor.
"Oh, James," the ghost says, a hint of unhurried warning in her tone.
Roy is listening intently now, pulling at a thread in his blanket with his untrimmed fingernails.
A series of quick, arrhythmic pads and the little person is standing in Roy's doorway, which the Rockbells have taken to leaving open. An unspoken apology, Roy assumes. The boy is small, perhaps two years old, with dark, messy hair and brown skin and shockingly blue eyes.
The boy lets out a squeal and dives into Roy's room, hunkers down just inside the door, paying no attention to Roy.
"James!" the girl says again, more urgency in her voice now, as though the child has jumped into traffic or off a dock.
Then there is a girl in Roy's doorway. A new person. It's the ghost from the walls, the rumor of a woman in the house has manifested itself into a lean, tawny shape, her hair pulled back messily and her dress smudged with road dust. She is standing, her hand on the door jamb, her face as stunned and ashamed as Roy's. Frozen like a monolith, the proof of herself, and in her horrified eyes, Roy feels the proof of himself-the shameful, repugnant proof of himself.
She makes only fleeting eye contact-she has brown eyes, not red-before she stammers an apology and dips inside the door, scoops up the infant, and hurries away as though she were fleeing something she was not supposed to see.
x
x
x
After the initial discovery, the child seems unable to curb his curiosity about the strange, secret man in the strange, secret room. But there is nothing like the unabashed interest of an toddler to compromise one's strange, secret status, and he begins to notice his own presence creeping in around the edges. He hears Winry say something about "Mr. Mustang," and his name sounds thin and brittle, like plaster in her blistered hands. After so many sponges baths, he rather she would just call him Roy. This facade of propriety grows thin.
He wakes one morning to an odd patting sensation against his left shin. Roy opens his one good eye and lifts his head-a feat no one has congratulated him for yet, although he thinks it quite a victory. The child is standing at his bedside, staring up at him, his little brow furrowed as though he is trying to place a name or a word. His small, soft hand swats at the wrinkles in the blanket.
Something dawns on the child, and he points a pudgy hand at Roy's face and declares, "Dog!"
Roy frowns a little-the motion hurts, tugs at the fissures in the flesh around his right eye.
"Dog?" the boy insists, now waving his entire arm at Roy.
Then the woman is there, quiet as a shadow and exotic looking as feral cat, and she sweeps in. She wears an apron. She smells like rum and cinnamon. When she stoops to scoop up her child, her sheet of hair brushes over the back of Roy's exposed forearm, and he appreciates the breadth of his deficiencies. A half man. Half a face and half a working leg. Her nearness is a generosity.
The featherdusting of a woman's hair over his skin is a vestige of the past, and when she looks at him to apologize, he smiles at her. Her face freezes, shocked. Then she blushes furiously and flees without a word.
x
x
x
He heals slowly. After the first day of lifting his head, two more pass when he cannot. He is able to move his right arm long before his left, the visceral tear in his shoulder pounding with pain in time with his pulse.
Another week and he can wrench his shoulders up. Winry notices as she spoons broth into his open mouth and stuffs a limp cushion under him. He does it again and again. The cushion becomes a pillow. The day he can hold his own spoon is a victory, and even the elder Rockbell woman smiles at him when he reaches out for his bowl and nods his weak, quiet gratitude.
Then, one day, his breakfast arrives on a tray. He wakes to a stool by his bed, close enough for him to reach awkwardly. A bowl of porridge and two pieces of buttered toast. The room looks different from this angle, the sun more sun-like as it slants through the air. He notices the color of the walls-cottony blue-the trim around his window-flaking, eggshell white-the floorboards-pine in need of polishing.
He knocks the tray over as he cranes his right arm across his fragile body. He feels the flood of shame-he once hoped to be Fuhrer-and glares down at his traitorous, trembling, naked hand.
Outside, he hears a chorus of scraping chair legs, a house full of women standing from the breakfast table. Then, he hears, "I'll get it," in that least familiar of voices and soft-soled shoes stepping lightly, quickly.
When she appears in the door, he forces himself to look at her, to fill his awareness of his impotence with stones. But as she moves in, her skirt dancing around her ankles, her eyes are wide and curious for just a moment. Then, she is blushing and hurrying.
He understands then. She has intercepted his caretakers outside his door, has braved his threshold, has volunteered to draw so near. He could feel like an animal in a cage, a spectacle to be exploited, but she does not stare. She does not look at him at all.
She is not obligated to crouch by his cot and pick up the pieces of broken ceramic and wipe up the oatmeal. She chooses to. She asks to.
"I'm sorry," he says, and he feels even sorrier for saying it. Sad little man and his sad little apologies as valuable as sand.
But she is not an Amestrian, and if anyone knows how to build a life in the desert, it is she. She manages to look up, her throat and shoulders flushed. "It's fine," she says, her voice like linen. She rests the tray on her thighs, stacks his mess, and stands. She lingers as though she has something to say, but nothing comes out when she parts her lips. Her light-colored bangs hide her eyes when she ducks her head and turns.
And what a strange little phenomenon that was, he thinks. Being sought out.
He feels emboldened. "Miss," he says as she nears the door.
She turns, blinks her eyes at him, waits. He can see her fingers trembling around the handles of the tray.
"What is your name?" Somewhere beneath the borrowed pajamas, the bandages, and slowly knitting flesh, there is a man who once prided himself in his eloquence with women. That man does not emerge now.
She's red to her ears, to her scalp. "Rose," is all she says.
He does not see her again that day.
x
x
x
When he can sit up all on his own, reach behind his own body and pull up his own pillow, she returns. She brings him his tray, which she hands to him to settle on his own lap. She hands him a glass of orange juice and takes it back from him when he is done. She smiles at him and reaches into the pocket of her apron.
"I," she begins but hesitates when he looks up, "I brought you this."
She produces a single, folded page of newsprint, a pen tucked in the crease. She hands it to Roy, and he unfolds it. It's the crossword out of the day's paper, three words filled in: spaces, apostate, and canine.
"I apologize," she says, looking at her feet. "I started it, but I thought you might enjoy it more."
When she leaves, she takes his dishes but leaves the tray so he might bear down upon it. Roy waits for her to be gone for a few minutes, and then he corrects one of the words she had incorrect-spaces should have been lacuna-and another she had misspelled. He finishes the crossword in less than fifteen minutes and immediately regrets his haste. This is a window to be appreciated, a meal to be savored. He turns the page over and reads the ads, each a little glimpse of a past. Not his past, necessarily, but the past of a man who might be like him, and it is familiar enough to hurt.
He imagines Riza strolling past the storefront in the ad for a law office. He imagines her inspecting tires for lumps in an ad for a car lot. He imagines her walking through her own life after walking out of his, and after so many weeks in a Rockbell bed, he almost does not resent her for it. He understands, though. He has always understood.
x
x
x
The boy, James, toddles into his room once a day now, insisting that Roy is Dog. "I'm so sorry," Rose explains as she gathers up the boy. "Your hair is the same color as the dog."
"I assure you, I've been called worse." It is the longest sentence he's spoken in weeks. He thinks maybe she knows.
She brings him his meals, refills his coffee when he is well enough to drink it. She brings him the crosswords and number puzzles but never a complete newspaper, and Roy can only assume that she finds the material objectionable. Something to be kept from him. She is probably right.
He is not so engulfed in his own suffering (recuperation) as to ignore the existence of a world outside his sickroom, though. His fate is being determined without him as the elements of his trespasses come to light in the capitol. He does not imagine the caretakers in pressrooms and courtrooms are as careful with him as this desert woman is
She is so careful with him. He notices a marked change in his recuperation (suffering) when she assumes a role, when the doctors in the house see him backing away from the precipice and move on to more precarious-and paying-patients. Her touches are not precise, not medical when she volunteers to change his bandages, when the Rockbells are out and she checks his stitches, which are beginning to itch so badly Roy considers pulling them out himself: the gentle inching of the backs of her fingers against a collar bone as she unrolls gauze; the unintentional graze of her fingers over a nipple.
And she is guileless. She smiles at him now without immediately blushing and hiding her eyes. She is the only woman in the house who speaks to him about things other than himself, his health. She brings him slices of tomato, lightly salted and peppered. She sits on the stool to his left and eats them with him. She tells him about the migratory geese at the pond-she would like to show them to him. She opens the window when it rains to let in the petrichor and patter.
He is being attended to. Not just treated. He feels like he is almost existing again. He is almost anchored in his atrophied, hurting body, not just an incorporeal awareness resting on a pillow.
x
x
x
A man in town who has his arm ripped clean from the shoulder while trying to remove torn shade cloth from the spinning tines of a tiller comes to the Rockbell home four weeks after his accident. Roy hears him say that the only thing he can afford less than the long ten to twelve months of recovery after being outfitted with automail is being a one-armed farmer. He hasn't got no money, owes Risembool Savings and Loan two payments already, ain't paid his men in a month. Pinako Rockbell blows a long stream of smoke and tells the farmer that she'll need his first half bushel of corn when he gets his harvest in, and Roy smiles to himself from where he sits, secreted away in his backroom.
He listens to Pinako explain the gruesome details with the precision of a doctor and the compassion of a grandmother, hears Winry discuss design preferences-simple construction and clean lines and fewer parts to maintain.
Rose passes his door in a hurry, James balanced on her hip. She glances in, expressionless and pale, and then she is gone. She's like an animal in that way, a songbird, perhaps. She flits in, perches for a moment sometimes and stays for an hour other times, and then flits off to do little bird things Roy cannot see.
She's moody like a house cat, though. Somedays, she comes into his room, smiling and bouncing her son and talking-Roy appreciates that she can create a conversation from his reticence-and other days she is quiet, slinks in and sets his tray down where he can reach it and slinks out. She acts as though he's done something to offend her, and perhaps he has. Her expression, tight mouth and distant eyes, is the expression he would expect to see on a brown face in his room. He never much cared for it. Nevertheless, he knows he's earned it in this house full of women, his victims.
So, he does not think to be concerned for her when she returns to the resident ghost in the days following the consultation with the farmer. James wobbles in, and Rose removes him. She brings Roy his meals in silence, will not meet his remaining eye when she changes his bandages.
For three days, he has the same issue of Mechanical Medicine to leaf through. No crosswords or number puzzles. No conversation. He thinks about his feet, his distant, atrophied feet, and he reminds himself that he is big enough to fill his entire body. He takes up every inch of himself, even when there are quite a few inches he is not using, even when he is treated as a notably needy piece of furniture.
He remembers that the victories of lifting his head, sitting himself up, raising both his arms slowly and painfully are his. They are personal. For a moment, they have felt as though he shared them with the desert girl, but he does not. He recovers for himself, for his decaying name left in Central, where he is still a General, for Riza, whom he will find as soon as he gets out of that damn bed. He has been distracted by this young girl and her simple, unsolicited attention-which, under the circumstances, felt like being lavished. What is she but a friendly face attached to a collection of generosities, a momentary reprieve?
He feels like an idiot for looking forward to her. A child. A refugee.
The day arrives when the farmer returns to the Rockbell house in the morning, his voice shrill and stricken. He knows what is coming, and Roy, who has never witnessed an automail installation, hears the terror in the man's clipped words.
Winry and Pinako lead the man to the operating room. Their conversation dies back, and the house is eerily quiet. The ghost is not singing. The ghost's baby is not crying. Roy listens to the house age, the mockingbirds threaten stray cats, the powerful silence of the sun creeping across the floor by his bed.
Then, like a bullet in the night, the screaming begins. So sudden is the sound that Roy feels the jolt in his chest, the acrid taste in his mouth, the tension in his shoulders that a military psychiatrist once told him would never completely go away.
His door is standing open. He wishes he could close it, but he knows the sound would come through the walls, as though the house itself were being tortured. He does not hear over the farmer's wordless shrieking the patter of ghost feet down the stairs, the rustle of skirts around her incorporeal ankles. Roy closes his eye, tries to tap into the center of his mind where he is imperturbable.
But the gate is closed. He no longer has the keys to the garden. He opens his eye when he understands that there is no retreat from this moment and the next and the next, and he sees his sickroom, his screaming walls.
The sound is like a punishment. He can taste his bile, and he can see an ocean of bodies, of mouths open, black, festering abysses, a tide of pain and a chorus of pain-sounds, the smell of the vileness of the human body, of animals crawling through the rubble and killing each other like animals, and the crackling of flames. Of flames and bodies and screaming. That God-forsaken screaming.
But the gate is closed. Entry is barred, and he hasn't the strength to throw himself against the door. He wouldn't anyway. Because this is his punishment for the breadth of his presumption and ignorance. He lives in a house of women whose lives he has incinerated, and he wishes to a God he knows better than to believe in that the screams of a man dissected alive were the password to hell, where a special queue awaits him and the other fools who thought naivete was an excuse.
His door bangs shut, jarring Roy into himself. He whips his head around in time to see Rose slam her back to the door, a bundle clutched to her, and slide to the floor, her knees to her chest, her face buried, her hands clawing at her head. She cries a piercing soprano to the wrenching tenor of the screaming walls, and her baby squalls away.
"Stop it," she begs, "Stop it please."
She curls around her son, covers her ears with handfuls of her mahogany hair.
"They're going to kill my baby," she cries. "He'll find me and kill my baby."
She is somewhere far from that house. She is not, however, so far from Roy.
The screaming farmer rages on, begins pounding his fist against the gurney with loud, echoing clangs.
So she flees toward him. She seeks shelter in his cell. They're together here, in two different battlefields in two different deserts, on two different sides of two different wars, but they are suffering the same suffering.
The gate is closed. Roy knows it will never be opened again. And in this wasteland outside, no one is safe. But at least they are not alone.
His legs are moving before he is aware of them. The muscles are weak and flimsy, his freshly-healed wounds not so far on the wound-to-scar spectrum to forgive him just yet.
The floor is cold under his bare feet. The desire to stand is ambitious, and Roy sinks to his knees almost as soon as he is up. He has not moved this much in almost two months, and he can feel every underused fiber of him tensing, pulling, resisting him as he crawls toward Rose, the trio of screams hanging over his head like smoke from a house fire.
Rose does not notice him approaching. She is sobbing and trembling and barely restraining herself. She cries, open mouthed, against her knees, the hem over her dress having slipped back indecently in her torment. She is pressing the breath out of her baby between her thighs and her chest. She is shielding him from hot cinders and falling mortars-there are worse ways to die than suffocation.
Being burned to death, for instance.
Roy manages to near her and reach over her knees. He slips his hands under her clawed fingers and presses the heels of his hands to her ears.
Her hair hangs messily in her face when she lifts it to him. Her eyes stare and her lips tremble and she looks as though she is seeing a stranger. A welcomed stranger, but a stranger nevertheless. Without looking away, Rose sits back a fraction and creeps her arms around her son, who is crying so hard he has vomited on her blouse. She gently turns his head, presses one of his ears to her breast and covers the other with her palm.
The child grows quiet. Rose stares into Roy's one eye like she is watching a well grant her wish.
Roy feels himself in his pounding feet, his burning legs. He feels his pulse thundering through his palms pressing Rose's ears to the bone. He feels his breath in his lungs and Rose's hair under his fingers. He is watching her eyes as she latches them into him, as she anchors so deep in him, burrows into him where the past eddies, where his punishment and her justice merge into the howling screams of a man.
Roy eases up one hand, hooks his finger around the hair hanging in her eyes, and pushes it behind the shell of her ear. He does the same with his other hand, then he returns his palms to her ears, and he almost doesn't hear the screams anymore as he offers his apologia to her, through her.
Rose lifts her free hand and sets it over one of his. She is small and thin-boned and so fragile, and Roy thinks that, perhaps, she understands. Perhaps she has always understood.
x
x
x
Roy cannot move for the subsequent two days. He has over-exerted himself, Pinako explains, frustration in her voice. She doesn't ask why he felt compelled to walk when she and Winry were very, very occupied. Pinako, after all, was the one to find them, Rose slumped to the floor by Roy's door, fast asleep with James in her arms, and Roy struggling with his own consciousness as he attempted to level himself back into his bed.
But the Rockbells haven't the time to tend to him with their latest patient in the most precarious stages of automail installation, so it falls upon Rose, and she accepts.
On the first day of this setback, Pinako give Roy something for the pain. Rose stands back, watches the old woman carefully lift Roy's dark, unkempt head, slip a pill between his teeth, and trickle water down his throat. When Pinako is done, she steps back and turns to Rose. She gives the girl a smile and a nod and slips out of the room.
Rose watches Roy for a long moment, and he watches her back with his one, black eye. He see her swallow, primly smooth her skirt, and approach his bed. The legs of the stool scrape the floor as she pulls it closer and then seats herself in a neat series of folds, a woman trained to occupy as little space as she can.
She opens her mouth to say something, but nothing comes. She smiles, looks at her knees.
Roy can feel his consciousness wavering. He can feel her hand settling on his next to his hip.
When she looks up, her eyes are too bright. "You're going to get out of this bed one day. You're going to clear your name in Central, Roy Mustang." She sniffs. "You'll leave this town, and it will become just a long, dark chapter in your esteemed biography. It'll be that chapter that makes the people reading it cringe and feel sorry for you. They'll see how much you've suffered, and then when you're victorious, they'll feel victorious, too, because they were here, with you, in this miserable little room, in the middle of nowhere, all alone."
She gives his hand a squeeze.
"But do me a favor," she says, "That chapter, the one that lets everyone know how strong you are and how miserable you've been, make it the most desperate, painful chapter you've got. And then, give me a paragraph all my own."
Roy frowns at her, and she laughs.
"I will never leave this town," she says. "The best I can hope for is to be a well-written paragraph in a good man's story."
He wants to tell her that she can come to Central with him. He'll front her the money for a ticket. He'll build a shelter in the wasteland, and she can come stay with him and provide him absolution whenever he needs it. But that may just be the morphine talking, and then he is asleep.
x
x
x
Roy rouses to pain and the snapping sensations of a tourniquet being released and the lilting sound of an Ishballan lullaby. Someone is stroking his hand. Someone is brushing fingertips over his forehead. He cracks his eye. Pinako is packing away a syringe kit. Winry is standing in the door, her hand on the jamb, her brow furrowed, her eyes uncertain as though she were approaching a dog by a dumpster. And Rose sits by his hip, trying to keep his limp hair off his skin. She watches her own fingers and sings lowly.
He wants to know who was going to kill her baby. He wants to know why her baby has such glacier-blue eyes. He wants to know where she's been and where she's going, but she's already told him. She's going nowhere. She's a snapshot of herself, at his bedside, and she's here right now forever. And she is beautiful. A paused, dormant beautiful, sleeping in a dun-colored dress in this lonely house, and he wonders what she would become if she were husbanded, watered and tended properly.
The sun rises through the window behind her, illuminating the stray strands of her hair that do not lay with the others, and she looks as though she is connected to something large and invisible by golden threads.
x
x
x
When Roy wakes again, the paraffin lamp by his bed is lit, the glass chimney swollen with light. Rose has withdrawn her seat to the door, and she sits with her skirt gathered around her, her son in her arms, and her blouse open. She cups her brown left breast in her right hand, her nipple between her index and middle fingers. And her son's tiny hands press to her skin as he nurses sluggishly. She watches her son, a quiet, sweet sort of sadness behind the glass of her eyes, like she is watching something that she loves as it recedes, like nursing is how a mother transitions to being a separate body from child.
Roy watches as unobtrusively as he can, knowing how mortified she would be if she knew.
There are a thousand names for a woman. Roy imagines he has heard them each over the years. But he has never heard them all in one woman at once. A confluence of everything he is not and never will be. A softness and a hardness and the beating heart of a quiet, modest ubiquity. And all in an open-armed girl in a grotto on the side of this road he's traveling. If he had blinked, he would have missed her.
x
x
x
The soldiers from Central come before Roy is ready for them-he knows that they are coming long before they arrive, and he begins preparing as best he can. There is no fleeing it. There is no point in fleeing it. His return to Central is inevitable, and perhaps it will behoove him to allow himself to be captured. Perhaps it will behoove him to be escorted before the tribunal before he is fully recovered. He'll argue his case with a cane in his hand, half his face hidden, his accomplice absent-God, he hopes Riza is absent.
On the morning before they come for him, he begins to wish he had spoken to the Rockbells and Rose more. James must sense his departure as well because he begins bringing his toys into Roy's room individually, presenting them for his scrutiny, and then setting them carefully in his lap. By the time Rose notices, Roy has a sock monkey, a fleet of small, brightly-colored, tin sedans, two cardboard books-one about farm animals and one about dinosaurs-and a pilly, threadbare light yellow blanket. Whether James is sharing or gifting, Roy cannot tell, but the urgency with which the child piles his belongings in Roy's cot shows his fear.
Rose comes in and laughs when she sees Roy reclining against his pillow and flipping through the book about farm animals. James stands on his toes and points at the pictures and says, "Baaah!" and "Oink!" and Roy's name, Dog, over and over and over.
"James," she says, gently scolding. "What have I said about pestering Mr. Mustang?"
Her son turns, his fists still curled at the edge of his book in Roy's lap. "Dog," he explains. He points at Roy. "Dogdog," he insists.
He is trying to tell his mother what he and Roy already know. There are men coming. They are just out of sight now, and they are getting closer.
James begins to cry and wave his arms when Rose gathers him up. He reaches back toward where he once stood, and for one airless moment, Rose looks like she might give in to James's plaintive cries. She looks to be considering handing him to Roy, who is almost opening his palms to accept. And James is stretching, unaware of his mother's eyes on Roy, unaware of whatever quiet contract they would be signing if Rose let Roy hold her baby. Her half-Amestrian, soldier's son. Roy has pieced together that much.
When he expects Rose to cinch her arms tight around her baby, turn, and hurry from the room, she does the opposite. She lowers herself to the edge of his cot, her son seated on her thighs. She keeps a hand looped around his soft belly to keep him from tipping. She hands him his sock monkey, and he begins gnawing on a crescent-shaped ear.
She strokes her son's thin hair like he is a pet, and she says, "You're frightening me."
Roy furrows his brow.
"You know something I don't know," she says. "You're leaving soon, aren't you?"
"That frightens you?"
She starts and blushes like he has not seen her do in weeks. She is a girl with a woman's past. A refugee with a woman's skin. And her son looks so much like her, a softer, rounder, better-loved her. Roy entertains a small pool of otherworlds in his mind, and in one of them, he recovers in Risembool. He takes Rose with him when he returns to Central. He sublets his guestroom in his townhouse to her, helps her with the paperwork for classes at the University and for subsidized childcare. And she needs him like a bird needs a cage, and he needs her like a man needs a bird. They make eye contact while they have quiet, sincere sex, and she can practice blaming and forgiving him, and he can practice accepting both.
James lets out a squeal and lobs his sock monkey at Roy. It hits him in the chest and falls into his lap. James begins to shriek with laughter, clapping his hands and kicking his pudgy feet. And for a moment, the punchline is lost on his elders, and for a moment longer it is still, and then Roy and Rose begin to laugh, too.
Because it's a joke in the Rockbells' recovery rooms that life lives in circles, a joke everyone has heard that gets funny and then old and then funnier yet until it's as threadbare and practiced as a psalm. For someone like James, the joke is still fresh, and just about anything reminds him. But for people like them, Roy thinks, watching Rose's small, soft-looking mouth... well, they'll always have the war.