[closed] So now I stand alone
Who: Riza Hawkeye (firebornfidelis)
When: Sunday June 27th
Where: her apartment at headquarters
Format: Paragraph
What: After the death of Roy Mustang, Riza attempts to discern how to continue living.
Warnings: She is in the process of recovering from acute stress disorder, which is a variation of post-traumatic stress disorder. So there are a lot of weird reactions, depression, repression, fear and anger and thoughts of death and violence.
Hours passed unmarked, like eternities, in the dimly lit third floor apartment. Riza had drawn the curtains and not reopened them since dawn on Thursday morning, allowing no natural light into the room, so she was never really sure what time of day it was. Not that it mattered anyway. Faces blurred together, too. People who cared about her calling on the Forge (which she had also turned off on Thursday, after the ordeal that was returning all those concerned messages), people stopping at the room, checking up on her. She could only remember half of them after they left again and all she could think about while they were there was how to look like she didn’t feel as if she was dying.
She hadn’t set foot outside of her apartment since coming home from the ruins. She busied herself with pointless little tasks, spending her days mending clothing and cleaning everything from the baseboards to the cobwebbed ceiling corners. She did not allow her eyes to fall on the neat stack of paperwork on her desk. After the first night, when she recoiled in terror at the sight of the seemingly innocuous documents, Utena had tried repeatedly to get her to look at them, to ‘face it’ as she said, but Riza wanted to scream every time she thought about even touching the pages. So the work remained unfinished. Part of her knew how odd that was, knew that it was not at all like her to leave paperwork unfinished, but she couldn’t bring herself to work on it and she didn’t ask herself why that was.
She didn’t ask herself a lot of things. Like why she compulsively locked her door after anyone came in or out, or why the prospect of picking up a gun suddenly terrified her. Why the thought of cooking on the flame of a kitchen stove was impossible even to consider. Or even why she had no real interest in food at all. Utena, her most frequent visitor, often brought food when she came and Riza would try to eat in an attempt to placate the pink haired girl, but as soon as she put it in her mouth she would begin to feel sick.
At night, she would lie in bed, Hayate close beside her (because though there were times she could not bear to look at him for the worry in even his dark eyes, she needed the feeling of him close to her, his warmth, his quietness) and hoped not to fall asleep. Because, weak and terrible and useless as she felt, at least while she was awake her barriers were strong enough to keep her from breaking down. While she was awake, she could cling to the mask she wore and pretend everything was fine, pretend nothing had happened, pretend that she had not lost everything she had built her life around. But at night she couldn’t avoid it, couldn’t look away from the nightmares that made her relive every second. The slow-motion change of his face in the second that the creature’s teeth ended his life. The blood. The sound of his body hitting the ground. Her own utter helplessness. She would wake up gasping, screaming, crying.
There was no way for her to face her own total, stifling failure.
For the first few days, her every motion was designed to avoid any remembrance of him. It was done unconsciously, a defense mechanism. Intense fear or anger would stop her moments from touching or seeing or doing something that would have reminded her of him. Though she was not usually a person prone to avoidance, part of her she knew just how weak she was right now. She was not yet strong enough to face whatever it was her life had become. She had not yet built enough walls, sealed enough vaults, or locked enough doors to make herself into steel again. But there were certain things that could not be avoided.
Stepping out of the shower on Sunday evening, she caught sight of her own back in the bathroom mirror.
It was a good thing she was alone in the apartment at the time. If she had had the presence of mind, she might have been afraid that her neighbors had heard her involuntary cry of rage and terror and complete despair.
The tattoos. The scars. The lines and burns that had become her path, become herself, and which now stood as the only living witness of both her father and the Colonel. Both of whom she had seen die in horrible splashes of red. The two of them and the marks they had left on her body had defined the entirety of her life. And now both of them were gone, and she was alone.
Palms down on the cold tile floor of the bathroom as she gasped, panicking heart racing, her thoughts spun out, unraveling finally from the tight coil she had been keeping wound in her head. So what was she now? A sad monument to the dead? The unreadable elegy of the two most important men ever to pass through her life? She might have taken comfort in the fact that she bore their marks on her skin, that she herself could stand as proof that they existed, that they had created and affected. The intricate black lines on her back spoke of her father’s intelligence, stubbornness, dedication. She could have been proud to bear some of those traits. The burns were somehow more precious. She had asked him to turn her father’s symbols back on themselves, but he had been soft-hearted. He had not wanted to hurt her. The thick scars only rendered the tattoo illegible, taking away the most vital part of the instructions. She had wanted him to burn it all away, every last letter and angle, every last bit of the ink. But he couldn’t bear the thought of causing her that much pain. And she hadn’t had the heart, with those sad obsidian eyes on her, the eyes of a killer just like hers, to tell him it was not enough. Those scars were a testament to his kindness, his compassion, and his sweet dreamer’s heart that had wanted to see the dawn of a better world.
She could have felt some comfort in being the carrier of those marks but now, without him, it only felt like a burden. It only hurt more because she knew that, without him, that better world would never be born. What could she do, how could she begin to make things right on her own?
Up until now she had always known the purpose of her life. Her father had made her the guardian of Flame Alchemy and branded her with those secrets so that she could protect them with her life. Even with the array rendered indecipherable she still protected them with high-collared shirts and jackets and endless precautions. And when she had passed that knowledge on to Roy Mustang, she became the guardian of the Flame Alchemist. She had joined the military, learned to shoot, fashioned herself into a weapon to protect him and to serve his goal because she still believed in him, even after Ishbal, with a total and almost childlike intensity of faith.
And now he was gone. Everything she had done, everything she had been was not enough to save him. She felt as if someone had reached into her chest and squeezed her heart, constricting it to a tiny point of pain and loss and confusion and anger. All that she had left was the weight of her sins. All the lives she had taken. In Ishval, with her hands on a rifle, alone in her tower. All the lives eaten up by the flames she had given him to wield. The body of that child she had buried, murdered and abandoned on the street, and thousands of others like him lay heavy on her shoulders. She wanted to sink under their weight and drown in the river of blood she did not know how to cross without the firelight to guide her. It was them she owed her life to now, since she couldn’t give it to him. It was a paltry thing to offer them in the face of what she had taken, but she had nothing else to give.
She wouldn’t kill herself. Even with her forehead pressed to the floor, stomach lurching with memory and despair, she had never once thought of turning her gun on herself. Her life was not hers to take. Not after all she had done. But there was an emptiness in her, a hollow part that held her back, stopped her from standing up and facing the world outside of her apartment. An aching vacant space. She had no purpose, no will, no direction.
She took a shaky breath, her heartbeat slowly coming down and sat up. She pressed her hands, still cool from lying against the tiles, to her face, feeling the heat of her cheeks against her palms.
So there was a void. It had to be filled or she would never leave this apartment again. She had to try to keep moving, to follow his order, given months ago now, not to die. In the absence of that silhouette she would have followed into hell itself, that lost purpose, she had to give herself a new one. And she already knew what it had to be. He wouldn’t have liked it, but she didn’t have anything else to hold on to and he wasn’t here anymore to voice his displeasure. And that really was the point here, wasn’t it?
She would have to become stone and steel. But that, she thought, was something she could do.
When: Sunday June 27th
Where: her apartment at headquarters
Format: Paragraph
What: After the death of Roy Mustang, Riza attempts to discern how to continue living.
Warnings: She is in the process of recovering from acute stress disorder, which is a variation of post-traumatic stress disorder. So there are a lot of weird reactions, depression, repression, fear and anger and thoughts of death and violence.
Hours passed unmarked, like eternities, in the dimly lit third floor apartment. Riza had drawn the curtains and not reopened them since dawn on Thursday morning, allowing no natural light into the room, so she was never really sure what time of day it was. Not that it mattered anyway. Faces blurred together, too. People who cared about her calling on the Forge (which she had also turned off on Thursday, after the ordeal that was returning all those concerned messages), people stopping at the room, checking up on her. She could only remember half of them after they left again and all she could think about while they were there was how to look like she didn’t feel as if she was dying.
She hadn’t set foot outside of her apartment since coming home from the ruins. She busied herself with pointless little tasks, spending her days mending clothing and cleaning everything from the baseboards to the cobwebbed ceiling corners. She did not allow her eyes to fall on the neat stack of paperwork on her desk. After the first night, when she recoiled in terror at the sight of the seemingly innocuous documents, Utena had tried repeatedly to get her to look at them, to ‘face it’ as she said, but Riza wanted to scream every time she thought about even touching the pages. So the work remained unfinished. Part of her knew how odd that was, knew that it was not at all like her to leave paperwork unfinished, but she couldn’t bring herself to work on it and she didn’t ask herself why that was.
She didn’t ask herself a lot of things. Like why she compulsively locked her door after anyone came in or out, or why the prospect of picking up a gun suddenly terrified her. Why the thought of cooking on the flame of a kitchen stove was impossible even to consider. Or even why she had no real interest in food at all. Utena, her most frequent visitor, often brought food when she came and Riza would try to eat in an attempt to placate the pink haired girl, but as soon as she put it in her mouth she would begin to feel sick.
At night, she would lie in bed, Hayate close beside her (because though there were times she could not bear to look at him for the worry in even his dark eyes, she needed the feeling of him close to her, his warmth, his quietness) and hoped not to fall asleep. Because, weak and terrible and useless as she felt, at least while she was awake her barriers were strong enough to keep her from breaking down. While she was awake, she could cling to the mask she wore and pretend everything was fine, pretend nothing had happened, pretend that she had not lost everything she had built her life around. But at night she couldn’t avoid it, couldn’t look away from the nightmares that made her relive every second. The slow-motion change of his face in the second that the creature’s teeth ended his life. The blood. The sound of his body hitting the ground. Her own utter helplessness. She would wake up gasping, screaming, crying.
There was no way for her to face her own total, stifling failure.
For the first few days, her every motion was designed to avoid any remembrance of him. It was done unconsciously, a defense mechanism. Intense fear or anger would stop her moments from touching or seeing or doing something that would have reminded her of him. Though she was not usually a person prone to avoidance, part of her she knew just how weak she was right now. She was not yet strong enough to face whatever it was her life had become. She had not yet built enough walls, sealed enough vaults, or locked enough doors to make herself into steel again. But there were certain things that could not be avoided.
Stepping out of the shower on Sunday evening, she caught sight of her own back in the bathroom mirror.
It was a good thing she was alone in the apartment at the time. If she had had the presence of mind, she might have been afraid that her neighbors had heard her involuntary cry of rage and terror and complete despair.
The tattoos. The scars. The lines and burns that had become her path, become herself, and which now stood as the only living witness of both her father and the Colonel. Both of whom she had seen die in horrible splashes of red. The two of them and the marks they had left on her body had defined the entirety of her life. And now both of them were gone, and she was alone.
Palms down on the cold tile floor of the bathroom as she gasped, panicking heart racing, her thoughts spun out, unraveling finally from the tight coil she had been keeping wound in her head. So what was she now? A sad monument to the dead? The unreadable elegy of the two most important men ever to pass through her life? She might have taken comfort in the fact that she bore their marks on her skin, that she herself could stand as proof that they existed, that they had created and affected. The intricate black lines on her back spoke of her father’s intelligence, stubbornness, dedication. She could have been proud to bear some of those traits. The burns were somehow more precious. She had asked him to turn her father’s symbols back on themselves, but he had been soft-hearted. He had not wanted to hurt her. The thick scars only rendered the tattoo illegible, taking away the most vital part of the instructions. She had wanted him to burn it all away, every last letter and angle, every last bit of the ink. But he couldn’t bear the thought of causing her that much pain. And she hadn’t had the heart, with those sad obsidian eyes on her, the eyes of a killer just like hers, to tell him it was not enough. Those scars were a testament to his kindness, his compassion, and his sweet dreamer’s heart that had wanted to see the dawn of a better world.
She could have felt some comfort in being the carrier of those marks but now, without him, it only felt like a burden. It only hurt more because she knew that, without him, that better world would never be born. What could she do, how could she begin to make things right on her own?
Up until now she had always known the purpose of her life. Her father had made her the guardian of Flame Alchemy and branded her with those secrets so that she could protect them with her life. Even with the array rendered indecipherable she still protected them with high-collared shirts and jackets and endless precautions. And when she had passed that knowledge on to Roy Mustang, she became the guardian of the Flame Alchemist. She had joined the military, learned to shoot, fashioned herself into a weapon to protect him and to serve his goal because she still believed in him, even after Ishbal, with a total and almost childlike intensity of faith.
And now he was gone. Everything she had done, everything she had been was not enough to save him. She felt as if someone had reached into her chest and squeezed her heart, constricting it to a tiny point of pain and loss and confusion and anger. All that she had left was the weight of her sins. All the lives she had taken. In Ishval, with her hands on a rifle, alone in her tower. All the lives eaten up by the flames she had given him to wield. The body of that child she had buried, murdered and abandoned on the street, and thousands of others like him lay heavy on her shoulders. She wanted to sink under their weight and drown in the river of blood she did not know how to cross without the firelight to guide her. It was them she owed her life to now, since she couldn’t give it to him. It was a paltry thing to offer them in the face of what she had taken, but she had nothing else to give.
She wouldn’t kill herself. Even with her forehead pressed to the floor, stomach lurching with memory and despair, she had never once thought of turning her gun on herself. Her life was not hers to take. Not after all she had done. But there was an emptiness in her, a hollow part that held her back, stopped her from standing up and facing the world outside of her apartment. An aching vacant space. She had no purpose, no will, no direction.
She took a shaky breath, her heartbeat slowly coming down and sat up. She pressed her hands, still cool from lying against the tiles, to her face, feeling the heat of her cheeks against her palms.
So there was a void. It had to be filled or she would never leave this apartment again. She had to try to keep moving, to follow his order, given months ago now, not to die. In the absence of that silhouette she would have followed into hell itself, that lost purpose, she had to give herself a new one. And she already knew what it had to be. He wouldn’t have liked it, but she didn’t have anything else to hold on to and he wasn’t here anymore to voice his displeasure. And that really was the point here, wasn’t it?
She would have to become stone and steel. But that, she thought, was something she could do.