you will surely shatter

[lucked]

The blood smelled sweet. Claire had once been told in her youth that death smelled different to each person, that scent was the memory which dug itself deepest into the recesses of anyone's mind and lodged itself firmly there, only to appear again in a person's last days. And if this was what she smelled in her last moments, vanilla hanging lightly

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[bulletrained]

Blood poured from Riza's throat, a slow but never-ending river that soaked her clothes, sticking them to her skin. Her vision swam and it hurt to breathe, but she could not rest. She could hear them behind her, making low, pitiful moans.

The children of Ishbal. Deathless soldiers.

She ran, first through the cave where she died, then through halls she didn't recognize, not noticing the change. Occasionally she would come to dead ends and be forced to fire her pistol. Killing children once again, like Bradley's dog. That they didn't stay dead, that she could shoot one point blank in the skull and it would continue to chase her, didn't matter. She was killing children and running.

[lucked]

One by one, Claire snapped her ribs back in place. Slowly, she could feel life breathing into them again, lungs rising from where they'd collapsed, stitching over with tissue where they had been punctured. Soon enough, all that remained of her wounds was the dark splatter of blood over her uniform, warmth and color fading even as Claire got to her feet and stumbled about in the hallway. She couldn't remember how she'd gotten there. Everything that led her up to that point, it was murky in her memory, almost as though she had been deliberately trying to forget. Wryly, she couldn't help thinking that this, at least, was proof that not everything in her life could be healed entirely, leaving not even a scar. Memory was a tricky thing. Everything became relative in the mind

[bulletrained]

The sound of a girl's voice, desperate and human as opposed to the moans of the deathless children, startled Riza. She should not be here. The battlefield was not a place for children, yet here they died by endless numbers and she could not save them, could do nothing but kill them. Bradley's orders; her sins.

She did not shout; she had turned down a path that the deathless had yet to find and she did not want to draw their attention. But she hastened her steps, hearing the girl's come closer. And then they met and for a moment Riza thought that she was Winry, that Scar had come to kill her too. She reached out to grab the girl's arm, taking in the details that proved she was not the young mechanic.

"Run."

[lucked]

"Ow-"

Claire cringed, feeling the tight grip of the other woman's hand on her arm, although the pain probably paled in comparison to all else that she had been through that day. It was strange. Pain was one of those sensations that had yet to grow old for her, had yet to become something that she felt that she'd built up any amount of tolerance for. So although she gasped, she did her best to keep up with the older woman, staring over her shoulder at all the children that weren't quite right. Weren't quite well. And underneath all that, still that ticking that wouldn't go away, back and forth and back again.

"Where are we running to?" Claire asked frantically. "What are those