Lisa was cleaning her guns. Cleaning them thoroughly enough that she could store them when she was done.

Oil streaked her hands, and she knew she had a smudge of it on her cheek, where her wrist hadn’t been quite clean enough to brush aside her hair without smearing. It didn’t bother her. There were things you couldn’t clean without getting dirty. Attics. Guns.

Countries.

She held the mainspring of her second pistol up to the light; no, that was just a bit of uneven oil, not scoring. She wiped it down carefully.

She liked her guns. Killing made her reluctant to eat for a day or two, but the guns themselves were clean and precise and definite at all times. They were solid. And if she was fast and accurate, then so were they. She didn’t have quite the… relationship with them that a lot of the other sharpshooters did. But, then, she hadn’t been there for the same reason most of them had.

Lisa knew she’d been lucky. She could easily have been assigned to some command other than Roy’s. As it was, she had been able to fire most of her bullets in direct defense of the handful of people she knew and valued in that army.

She wiped her hands and started reassembling the parts.

She didn’t understand the other way; didn’t comprehend how anyone could shoot just because they were told to, with no personal reason of their own. It was some strange kind of abstract insanity, as far as she could tell.

She fished out her second screwdriver, the one Winry-chan had re-ground to make the perfect fit more so, and delicately tightened the screw. One last careful pass with the oil cloths and she slid the guns into their holsters. She hesitated when she started to put them in the storage box, though.

Roy understood the other way.

Slowly she put her guns back on the rack in her front closet.

TBC