"The Quieter Loyalty"
Tick, tock, tick.
The clock in the reception room chipped away the seconds carelessly, as if they weren't precious. Right now, it seemed like the only sound in the world. Her sharp ears chopped the seconds into smaller and smaller pieces, wishing with every part of her being that one increment would be enough. Riza wished it would stop reminding her.
She sat on one side of an under-cushioned bench, head in her hands. Her back ached; her hands and her uniform were bloody. Her arms, anchored as they were against her thighs, trembled from exhaustion and stress and the aftermath of finally-realized fear. She felt as though a thousand lifetimes had just been torn from her soul, though there'd been no news. Not for hours.
Dead, dead, dead.
For one horrid minute she'd thought so. The Colonel's heart had still been beating as she'd knelt against him already grieving, knowing that her second shot had missed Archer and realizing in brief flash of cold logic that it had gone straight into his handsome face. She thought she'd killed him.
The right thing to do would have been to stay at the crime scene. She'd never not done the right thing before. It twisted her soldier's instincts and made them scream. Something in her mind—the loyal, womanly something that she had tried to ignore for so long—fought back, not willing to believe that her twisted sense of duty had not served well. Who else would have saved him?
Tick, tock, tick.
Every precious beat of that heart against her shoulder had marked one more desperate second she'd not have again. She'd carried him to the car, all the way down the gravel road, leaving a red trail as proof for the trackers that would come. She'd managed to drive all the way into town, stagger into the hospital and cry for help before she'd collapsed into helpless despair. She still didn't know if she'd made it in time.
A nurse had come around and calmed her nerves and rocked her and told her it would be all right. She hadn't spoken to anyone since that plea for the doctors—she hadn't known what to say. All she could think of was him, lying on the surgeon's table so prone and unprotected. He'd be a dead man to everyone, but a martyr to her—Mustang was her hero, even when everyone else thought of him as some bastard who'd do anything in exchange for a promotion.
Lost, lost, lost.
A white tea mug steamed in her hand, but she couldn't feel its warmth. She hadn't taken a drink, though her throat was dry and sticking. It felt as collapsed as her mind; she couldn't breathe and that was all right, because it meant she'd be with him.
She was floundering in the shallow end, trapped in the mud of those irresponsible longings that would never be consummated. If the Colonel died, she didn't know what she'd do. She'd lost hope in so many things. Without him around to color her world she was just a soldier, trained to disregard death in any form. She didn't want to disregard this death. Yet like him, she knew she'd cry at his funeral…even if she was the only one who did.
Perhaps no one would be surprised at her sense of loss. The Colonel was her closest friend, like a brother and a lover and her child all mixed together and spread out before her scrutinizing eyes. She was glad for what they'd shared, that it had never needed to go beyond the office door when life was work, and yet no one knew.
Tick, tock, tick.
How long had it been, that they'd been working together? Back in the beginning, she'd never have suspected that losing him would be so hard. Tonight—no, yesterday—he'd been filling her head with these wonderful ideas, naïve visions of a small, secretly personally satisfying future. She'd be responsible for that future, he'd said lightly, laughing at her scowl, knowing she wanted to be. I'm responsible for his lack of one.
She loved him, as much as she was afraid to admit it to herself, knowing she had not the place to evoke some tragic and overly dramatic position on such a thing. Love wasn't something you had time for in the military. Especially not when he was trying to get to the top, not when he was your superior, not when you worked so closely with a small number of people; any advance turned into a scandal.
Tak, tak, tak.
A soldier's boots. She knew the sound so well. The man guarding (what was left of) the führer's body paced by again, not paying her much mind. She was just some poor woman with some sad story unraveling in her bloody hands; some woman caught up in the violence of the revolution. Not the woman who'd aided in its instigation.
Soldiers didn't do that kind of thing, after all. Soldiers died dutifully without complaint or even a thought of not following orders. Roy Mustang had never really been a soldier, but he had opened her eyes to the flaws of the system. Soldiers never surrendered, either, but he'd known that it wasn't always the best plan to just push forward and pray it was your day.
Tick, tock, tick.
Soldiers never wasted time feeling.
If that was how it had to be…she would to give up the military for him. She'd sacrifice everything in a minute. That was her loyalty, the quiet undertone in her voice as she lectured him or made a wisecrack or played the devil's advocate. That was her choice.
As if God had the heart to make her deal, she heard a different whisper now. The nurse came back and leaned against her knotted shoulders, murmuring words into her ear that at first did not register.
He's alive.
The seconds shattered; the beat broke into fragments to tiny that she could not imagine them, into all different sizes and shapes and colors. "Now" was becoming "then," and all those little visions came back from his words—a windy field not entirely appropriate for a picnic, a sheltered bus stop made warm despite the cold rain that fell around it, a dozen different cars' backseats and steering wheels, a nice restaurant and a gold ring… She sank into the fantasy as if dreaming would make them come true.
He lay in a mass of bandages, surrounded by machines whose displays gyrated and pulsed in visual and auditory chaos. A pump moved air into his severed-and-sealed left lung, while another kept watch on the heart that lay so close by. Thick gauze sheets concealed how her bullet had shattered the bones in his eye socket, and the globe had been damaged beyond repair and messily removed; he was lucky it had impacted the way it has, they told her. They didn't know it'd been friendly fire.
As she stood there, tea still clutched to her stained jacket, she noticed movement. Always his right-hand officer, she lifted it from the white sheets. What was he trying to say through that single fathomlessly black eye? Did he even know how she'd failed to protect him, that of all people she was least deserving to stay with him?
Squeeze.
She gripped his pale skin as if it were her anchor, stout and heavy as it was. He hadn't much strength left to clutch back, but even through the fog of his pain he seemed to understand that she was worried. He didn't have to be able to speak for her to sense that all was forgiven, that he wanted her strength near.
"Let's get you a chair," the nurse said softly. Riza watched her go, saw her pass by the plain white-faced clock on the wall. It had no second hand at all.
Quick comment, if you're interested:
I did some research, watched the last episode over a couple of times and determined with about 99.9999 confidence that Riza did shoot Roy's eye out. If you don't believe me, read further—
Roy's eye was fine when he came out of the fuhrer's house, but Archer never got a chance to fire anything at him. If you count the shots Riza gets off, there's seven; then if you pause as Mecca-Archer starts to fall over, it shows six bullet holes. You never see the 2nd and 3rd shots hit. Riza fired at archer's right side, Roy's left (which is the eye he lost). She also says in their last scripted scene together that "something" is all her fault, but Roy interrupts her before she can get specific. What else could be that "imperfection" he was talking about, if it wasn't her normally-accurate aim?
Kinda tragic and all that, huh? sniffles
Aaanyway, thanks very much for reading. Please drop a review for me. I'd appreciate that.
Itsumo-chan