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i.
In another world Riza Hawkeye might have asked the Flame Alchemist to burn away the circle on her back, might have looked at those scars in the mirror and pretended they could lift any of the weight from her shoulders.
In this world that is the least dangerous of everything Wrath carries: a stone at her core red as her eye behind the rifle scope, as hands complicit in plans to burn up this country tearing the heavens from their sky.
She cannot walk away from death as easily as Lust or Envy can, but when the elixir had slid into her veins Riza had burned from the inside and Wrath had walked away with that fire still in her veins, always searing beneath skin that she doubts mortal flame can scar.
(“Now hold still, dear girl,” the scientist had said, gold tooth gleaming dull in lab-light, “it’ll hurt worse if you struggle,” and Riza had remembered Berthold Hawkeye saying the same thing to Wrath at ten and fifteen and eighteen, red on her skin red underneath red burning its way into her heart, and it had been a lie then too.)
ii.
Wrath is angry at everyone and everything at once; furious at the ones who had found a cadet with steady hands and steadier soul and saw fit to unmake that, at herself, at those who knew how blood-drenched this country was and kept painting it anyway. The first time she had seen Roy Mustang again she would have snapped his neck clean in half if not for the knowledge of how valuable State Alchemists were in the chessboard of this country.
(That, and her own distaste for the heat of blood over her own hands. Riza has heard enough from Father and the other homunculi to surmise that the previous incarnations of Wrath had loved blood like the edge of a blade freshly sharpened on diamond.
But she is a sniper – the best markswoman Amestris has ever seen, even before they gave her an eye that could see through anything. Why else would they have chosen her?)
She is the Hawk’s Eye, the Fury of Ishval, hell and its woman scorned all in one, and she makes it known in constellations of bullets and impossible shots, precise and deadly as any alchemist’s array.
Riza had been angry too, when she had let herself be, but hers is a cold ire, locked beneath glaciers and the burn of frostbite.
Wrath makes no such pretences. Wrath answers to a dead woman’s name, and Officer – Lieutenant – Major Hawkeye holds her anger boiling right under the surface, scalds her hands in it and fires the next shot.
iii.
Roy Mustang holds her at a careful arm’s length.
It might’ve been offensive if it weren’t so ironic. He of all humans should know what it means to hold flame in your hands: let one weakness slip and fire would burn it right through like so much dry grass.
Then again, maybe it’s that same familiarity that breeds wariness. Riza would hardly know. Fury is not the absence of fear, but in her case it’s fairly close anyway.
Either way, it’s the same distance that prevents Mustang from recognising Wrath’s work in doctoring the Elric brothers’ documents a whole two decades older.
He decides to take Havoc with him, citing something about the persuasion of fellow Easterners; Riza remains in East Command and doesn’t wonder how he will react to finding out that the alchemists he is looking to enlist as human weapons are just barely a third his age.
Not even half of hers, unless you counted the several years since she had become Wrath.
Company for you, Riza thinks none too quietly, and Wrath bristles, shoving her away to wrest back control.
(Riza lets her. This is exactly the duty she’d been assigned – locating potential sacrifices among the State Alchemists and beyond, so there’s not even any insubordination for Wrath to report, even if she won’t realise until much later how spot on she’d been to find one who’d already been through the Gate.
For now she listens to the Flame Alchemist’s empty-handed return from Resembool, hears him say with seemingly unwarranted certainty I saw the fire in his eyes, and this time she does wonder how he can notice that yet miss the same thing in hers.
Riza knows what she sees in the mirror, after all, even if she always has one eye hidden behind a false lens and swept fringe.)
iv.
Wrath, unsurprisingly, finds the Fullmetal Alchemist an absolute riot.
Eight pints of unrefined rage wrapped in red with the volume cranked up to fifty percent past maximum, and if you had asked anyone at all to name one person in this room who might be the personification of fury itself – well.
Edward Elric gets angry in a way that neither of them know how to be. Riza runs cold where Wrath veers hot, but it’s always controlled, the reins another line in the delicate balance between them; in contrast Edward is an explosion, angry and incandescent with it, and sometimes Riza almost wishes they were like that too.
(No you don’t, Wrath mutters over the scratch of a pen.
Riza blinks and sighs, blacking out a line of expletives about Hakuro and the latest shitshow he’d thrown at them; homunculi weren’t much for paperwork. It’d make some things easier, you have to admit. He gets things done.
Like getting himself nearly killed three separate times in a week, ooh, aren’t you supposed to be babysitting the sacrifices, Wrath? I’d like to see them doing it–
Riza doesn’t sigh again, but it’s close.)
Neither of them feel particularly bad about keeping silent over the Elrics’ search when she’s sitting right here, but on Riza’s part it’s mostly because she’s seen enough to be certain that Edward at least would never use a Philosopher’s Stone if he learned what had gone into its making.
Wrath is just looking forward to the day he does find out. Now that’ll be something to watch.
v.
She meets Greed walking down a hallway one afternoon, nodding cordially at the flurry of salutes as he passes each of his people.
Wrath doesn’t miss a beat with her own salute. “Your Excellency.”
“At ease, Major,” the Fuhrer replies with a wave of his hand, but he slows down anyway. “I hear young Elric has made some – acquaintances, shall we say, from Xing with exceptional sensing capabilities. He does collect the most interesting people. I’m impressed.”
“Fullmetal doesn’t take kindly to being called young, sir,” Riza says. “I did hear the same, but I haven’t had the chance of meeting them yet.”
(Not for the first time, she wonders why they had thought it a good idea to put Amestris and all that it represents in Greed’s hands. If humans are possessions to be had, what stopped him from deciding that he’d rather keep it all for himself in the end?)
The Fuhrer smiles, benign as any lethal poison. “Let me know if you’d like some time back in the East, I’m sure your grandfather would enjoy a visit too.”
“I have my duties here, and I’m afraid I’m not much of a chess player. It would only bore General Grumman.”
Wrath’s hands do not tense at her sides, but only because they’re both too disciplined for that. Her aim is every bit as true as his swords, and she might not be able to die and walk away unscathed but neither can Greed; how dare he, Riza thinks.
How dare he, Wrath seethes in agreement, and perhaps it’s time to let some things slip to the Elrics after all.
(She is angry at them, for taking this entire plan one-and-a-half steps closer to fruition, but Riza is angry at everyone; this is just par for the course.
The difference is that she is even angrier for them. Riza barely remembers her mother, and if Berthold had still been alive Wrath would have killed him anyway, so she cannot honestly say that she understands the Elrics in that regard.
But Edward rages at the universe demanding equivalency from it while Alphonse aims cuttingly sharp remarks and wonders about his humanity in the next breath. They would be furious if they knew, anger burning hot and frigid cold, and she is Wrath and Riza Hawkeye and both and neither – this, she understands.)
+1.
“There was something I’d wanted to ask of you, after Ishval, if – things had been different,” Mustang finishes blindly in more ways than the literal, and it’s irritating what a production he can make out of not saying if I hadn’t mistrusted you.
Riza’s fringe is properly out of her eyes for the first time in years, not that he can see it, and she’d walked away from the Promised Day essentially unscathed but the Philosopher’s Stone is gone now along with Wrath; if she did ask the Flame Alchemist to burn away the circle after regaining his eyesight it would even scar over properly.
She won’t. She knows she won’t.
Wrath had known it too. Riza still hasn’t quite parsed the jumbled impressions of those last moments, but above all of it there had been mirth. Amusement, because they had both looked at Riza’s soul unfolding around them and recognised the anger there that was hers. Had always been, only shut away and sunk deep in ice.
If she has any fire in her veins now it is only proverbial, but she is still the Hawk’s Eye, the Fury of Ishval, and there’s more than enough left to burn the next person who tries to lay hands on her.
She looks at Roy Mustang now and continues to not snap his neck because he might be the best hope for this sorry excuse of a country, and anyway if she strangled an injured man in his hospital bed Wrath would laugh at her from another plane and say told you so, he had it coming.
“I’d rather you continue not asking it, Colonel,” Riza says, controlled as ever, but the anger is her own and she relishes the cold-hot burn of it. “I was Wrath, sir, consider yourself lucky that I didn’t let my finger slip on the trigger anytime during Ishval.”
Mustang winces, like he’d managed to avoid consciously putting it together until this point. “I suppose that, ah, rather answers it anyway. So that’s a no to supporting my bid for presidency?”
“That depends on your plans. Which you can tell me about after I’ve returned from my month’s worth of personal leave,” she adds pointedly, and turns to go instead of adding that Greed’s not exactly a high bar to beat anyway. “Have a speedy recovery, sir. Good day.”
Mustang’s expression as the door closes suggests that he’s actually okay with having a second-in-command that has been angry at him for years, and she’s… not sure what to do with that, really, but maybe she can work with it. Maybe.
(Fury is not the absence of fear, nor a dearth of kindness; the Elrics are proof enough of that. Riza knows what she saw in the mirror this morning, familiar and foreign all at once, and she’ll just have to figure out the rest from there.
Perhaps she’ll drop by Resembool and stay for a bit. She’s not angry at anyone there, not anymore – it might be a nice change of pace for once.)