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After the battle, they were taken to the hospital. They were bloodied, bruised, exhausted, and near to breaking. But they had done it — Fullmetal had done it. Riza had done her best to ignore the residual pain in her neck, along with all the other injuries she’d acquired in the last… two days? Was that all it had been? It had all melded together into one long mess. But whatever healing the Xingese girl did wasn’t quite enough, and Riza, along with all the others, were flagging.
Time had blurred similarly during the Ishvalan conflict, too. There was no real telling where one day ended and the next began. For her, it had just been a wash of beige and sand and stone, seen through her rifle sights. This battle, and the coup leading up to it, had been far more exhausting.
She was loathe to let the medical staff take her from the colonel, her hand tightening momentarily on his sleeve as they helped her onto a stretcher. She saw the slight change in his expression as he heard the stretcher being hauled away. Worry, she thought.
"I'll see you at the hospital, Colonel," she said, sounding more steady than she felt. He nodded, his sightless gaze finding her unerringly.
Out of the corner of her eye, Riza saw the medics cornering Major Armstrong and the colonel. Others had gone to see to the Elrics — all three of them, and the others who had been on that side of the battlefield. Still others had gone to find the group they'd had to leave in the depths of Central Command. Once they'd loaded her stretcher into the ambulance, she finally closed her eyes and let the medical staff tend to her.
Riza had only been in the hospital for a few hours when they brought the colonel to her room and set him up on the other bed. His wounds had been bandaged, and he moved stiffly, but deliberately.
The doctor trailing in with the entourage glanced at Riza and stopped next to her bed.
"He’s been asking about you," he said, with a nod towards the colonel. "Very insistent. It’s marginally against protocol, but we thought it would be easier to just bring him here... unless you object."
Riza shook her head and looked past the doctor to the colonel. Some of the relief she felt must have shown on her face, because the doctor also glanced over and back to Riza, his expression less troubled than it had been.
"And how are your injuries?" he asked her.
"Lieutenant—" the colonel started.
"I'm fine, Colonel. The other doctors said girl from Xing fixed the worst of it." By the end of her statement she had looked back over at the doctor by her bed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the colonel relax, then allow the nurses to help lower him onto the bed.
"You are comfortable?" The doctor asked.
"As much as can be expected, Doctor."
"Then you are both to rest," he said, stressing the last word.
The colonel almost started to protest but Riza cut him off. "Yes, sir. We'll both rest."
The doctor looked briefly from one to the other, then nodded. "Good."
The doctor and his entourage of nurses left.
The room was quiet, and Riza could hear voices from the hall, and the occasional rumble of machinery from outside.
The colonel's head was angled slightly away from her, not to keep her from seeing him but to hear better. A feeling of helplessness rose up again for a moment before she tampered it back down. She wouldn't pity him, not after everything they had been through. Not now.
His lost sight was just one more thing to accept between them. And if there was anyone would accept this and find a way to move forward, it would be—
"Lieutenant?"
The voice broke her reverie. "Yes, Colonel?"
His face was still angled slightly away but she could see his shoulders relax a fraction.
"Riza."
She opened her mouth but nothing came out for a moment. He must have really been shaken by the events of the day, to use her name. It was a reassurance that they only used in the direst of circumstances. It was her fear, deeply buried, that if she stripped away all the layers of formality it would make it that much more difficult to once they were back in place. And they had to be in place, if they wanted to stay by one another’s side. Though she supposed that if ever there was a time for it… She was silent for long enough that his head snapped up in alarm, turning towards her.
She smiled softly to herself.
"I'm here, Roy."
Nightmares were nothing new to Riza. They had plagued her for years, even before she'd joined the military. Since she'd been reassigned to the Führer they had gotten even worse. There hadn't been a single night since Colonel Mustang's team had been scattered to the winds that she hadn't woken in a cold sweat at least once.
Now, even though everything was over, she didn't expect the nightmares to cease. The best she could hope for was that they might not prey on her mind quite so heavily. She had dozed on and off through the evening thanks to the painkillers the doctors had given her, eventually dropping off into a deeper sleep.
Usually when she woke from a nightmare, she would get up and play with Hayate until her nerves had calmed enough that she could sleep again. This time she awoke without the usual jolt back into consciousness. Something else had woken her. The dream faded after a minute, interrupted before it could morph into something horrible, and she found herself in an unfamiliar room. It took her another moment to reorient herself, to sort out what what was real and what had been dreams, and then another to recall the events of the past days.
Fighting. Injuries. Hospital.
Roy.
The sound that had awoken her came again: a small murmur from the other bed. And again. The figure on the bed shifted and the murmur grew more insistent.
“—ant. —ten—nt..." the colonel shifted again and his words became more intelligible. “—are you? Lieutenant— I can’t— no!"
With a final thrash, Roy's words cut off.
“…Colonel?" Riza whsipered.
Silence. And then, “Lieutenant?"
His voice was hoarse, as if he'd been screaming for too long.
"Why can't I—oh." He must have recalled the horrors of the previous day.
Riza disentangled herself from her covers and slipped out of the bed. Her eyes had adjusted the dark room after she'd woken and traversing the few feet to the other bed was no trouble at all for her. She was stiff, though.
She settled herself on the edge of the bed and reached out to lay her hand on his shoulder.
"Right here, Colonel." It was as much a reassurance for herself as it was for him.
His own hand moved to cover hers.
For a few minutes, they sat in silence. Riza would have wondered if he had fallen asleep again if she hadn't been so aware of the rhythm of his breathing. It had slowed since he'd woken, but hadn't evened out into the deep, even breaths of sleep. His thumb worried lightly on the back of her hand, warm and rough as always.
"I really thought i lost you that time, Lieutenant."
As always, she heard her name in place of the rank. It had happened out of necessity, and yet...
“I could say the same of you, Colonel.”
As always, she said the rank as if she were saying his name.
Neither of them could remember when it had started. It was some time after the Ishvalan conflict, Riza thought, following her transfer to the colonel’s unit as his adjutant. She’d come to terms with her feelings for him by that point, knowing that they couldn’t have a relationship in the traditional sense because of the military’s laws. But she could live with that, so long as it meant that she was still by his side.
When she’d first met him, she’d barely given him a second thought. He was just Mr. Mustang, that young man studying with her father. He was always kind to her, though. After her father’s death, it was Mustang that took care of most of the arrangements for the funeral and helped sort out some of the estate. To her surprise, she liked him.
When they’d met again in Ishval, she wasn’t sure quite how to address him. Around others, he was always Major. But in her mind, he was still Mr. Mustang. A piece of her past that she hadn’t thought would find her in the middle of that desert, threatening to break the fragile shell of discipline she’d managed to construct around herself.
After finding Mustang, Ishval became slightly more bearable. She often found herself with Mustang and Hughes during the evenings she was off-duty. Very occasionally, she and Mustang found themselves alone.
“Mr. Mustang… Major,” she corrected herself.
He glanced over at her. She continued to stare into her half-empty cup. They were sitting on crates in an alley just outside the ring of light from the street in the late evening. The other soldiers paid them no mind, if they noticed them at all. Most people were in their own heads by that point.
“Do you think my father was right?” The question had been nagging her for days. She could barely stomach the thought that he had been. Mustang had known her father better than she ever had, had understood him in ways she never could. If Mustang thought that her father was right, that there joining the military was a mistake… she would have to find a way to accept it.
“No. I don’t think what they’re doing is right, but… I don’t think your father was right, either.”
“When all this is over, will you still try to achieve your dream?”
He didn’t answer, and when she finally looked up, she saw the look of surprise on his face.
“You still remember that?” he asked.
She nodded. Of course she remembered, she thought. It had been the reason she had chosen to trust him with her father’s research.
His features relaxed slightly. “Yes. Would you like to help me?”
It was her turn to look surprised, inasmuch as she could manage it. After a moment, she nodded again.
“Good.”
Before they left Ishval, she asked him to burn her back, to erase her father’s research. Mustang had agreed, if reluctantly. Her trust in Mustang had not been misplaced, and now on top of everything else, she owed him a debt of gratitude. The pain had been physically intense, but the emotional weight that she felt loosen its hold on her made it bearable. With that link to her past—her father—severed, she set her eyes on the future.
After they returned, she heard he’d been promoted. It wasn’t long after that that she received a transfer notice. It was no great surprise to her that it was Lt. Col. Mustang she was being assigned to.
He was always the Lieutenant Colonel, and then Colonel, after that. She could practically count the number of times she’d called him anything other than his rank (not including her more… covert assignments) on one hand. It had been safer for both of them that way. His ambitions would put both of them in potential danger without the threat of court martial or worse because of a relationship. Their interactions became almost calculated, their conversations strictly work-related. Without another way to communicate their feelings, they learned to read one another without words.
But then, like in Ishval, they would find themselves alone. Even before she joined the military, Riza had never been overly demonstrative of her affections. Years of training and war had solidified her tendency to be reserved. The colonel—Mustang—Roy—was only reserved because he had to be, because they never knew when someone might be watching.
Riza’s purpose had taken shape. The colonel had given her the position, the order to keep him on the path that he’d set for himself, to guard his back, but it was Riza herself that had made protecting him—back, front, or sideways—her purpose. She had known it before she’d walked into that meeting with him, though she hadn’t expected the intensity of the desire. And she had managed it, somehow.
Earlier, below Central Headquarters chasing Envy, she’d been ready to pull the trigger. It would have destroyed her to do it, but she would have done it without hesitation. She could only say a prayer of thanks that it hadn’t come to that.
The silence stretched on again. It was the first time in months that they had been allowed this much time together, yet there was no need for lengthy conversation. They had both learned long ago to be content in the silence.
It was he who finally broke it.
“If only I’d been a little faster… you—“
“Don’t even think of giving me that right now,” she interrupted, her voice a stern whisper. “You did everything you could. We both did.”
“But was it enough?” he wondered quietly. Riza chose to take his question as rhetorical. They’d won, and they both lived, so it had been enough. When she didn’t respond, he added, “I can’t see your expressions anymore, so you’re going to have to talk to me.”
“You never needed to see my expression to know what I was thinking before,” she commented mildly. If he noticed that she hadn’t answered his question, he didn’t mention it.
"Will you..." he trailed off.
"I'll stay," she replied. She’d known the question even before he'd begin to ask.
He shifted to make room for her as she lay down next to him, then shifted closer again once she had settled. The bed was wide enough to accommodate both of them for the most part, with the colonel laying on his side.
"Thank you," he said quietly, almost directly in her ear. She could feel his breath on her neck.
"Go back to sleep," she chided just as quietly.
"What about you, Lieutenant?"
"I'll be right here. Guarding your back like I always do."
She felt him nod. Some minutes later, she heard his breathing change.
Sleep continued to elude her. She could only fight off nightmares if she was awake, whether they were hers or… She turned her head slightly to look at the man next to her. She could fight off his nightmares, she thought, as long as she could stay this close.
It wasn't until the sky began to lighten that Riza quietly slipped back to her own bed, content that there would be no more battles for at least a few more hours.