Fifteen Royai prompts

Author's note: a friend of mine gave me these prompts. Some of my responses reference my other fics The Toll and Team Players. "Annoyed" also references Informed Consent by favilla, which I consider canon in my world.

True Love

It was clear that he didn't really love Hawkeye. How could a man who loved a woman put her in the position of risking her life to save his? Make it her actual job description, in fact? Every time she jumped in front of him and pushed him out of harm's way, he was both awed by her courage and competence and shamed that once more, she had risked her life, and once more, he had let her.

It was clear that the Colonel really loved her. How else could he entrust her so completely with his dream and his life? Every time she jumped in front of him and pushed him out of harm's way, she was awed by his complete confidence in her and more determined than ever that she would never, ever let him down.

Forgiveness

Roy knew that she had forgiven him for the way he had used her father's alchemy and abused her trust in Ishval. It was unjustified and purely gratuitous and didn't absolve him of his guilt by one iota. But perhaps that was what true forgiveness was.

Riza wished he would forgive her for giving him the secrets to her father's alchemy. She was the one who had put him in the position where he had made choices that had been so horribly wrong. But she could not get his forgiveness because he seemed unable to see that there was anything to forgive.

First time

The first time Roy saw Riza shoot a gun, she laughed at him. It was the first, last and only time he had ever gone hunting with her, and the noise when she'd shot the doe had startled him so much that he'd fallen on his butt in the snow. He'd actually blushed and then stood up, brushing the snow off the one pair of jeans he owned, looking angry. Then he saw the doe, lying still in the snow a few yards off.

When they approached it, he saw the clean point of entrance of the bullet into the front of the doe's head, and the less clean exit point above the blood stained snow at the back. It wasn't a lot, but he'd never seen so much blood in his life. He could even smell it. He felt a little queasy.

She was with him, her knife out, and began to field dress the doe, cutting its belly and scooping out the entrails. At that point, he went beyond queasy and threw up.

She didn't laugh at him that time.

Friends

Roy had a lot of pals but Maes was his only friend at the Academy. The other guys seemed interested in almost anything but actually defending the country. One guy was planning on leaving as soon as his four-year commitment was up and using his State financed education to become a teacher. Another was going to retire after twenty years, when a soldier's pension kicked in, and open a store. A third, a girl, was husband hunting.

And then there were the guys that he didn't even pal around with. They were the ones who were actually looking forward to the chance to kill people legally. Like Kimblee.

Riza was friendly, in a polite sort of way, to everyone at the Academy, but not really friends with anyone but Rebecca. Back home, there had been no avoiding being thrown together with her from time to time. Their home town was small. But at the Academy, she was a familiar face, and she found she wasn't even annoyed by Bec's obvious attempts to snare a "quality" husband.

They had the same goals there. Riza wasn't sure whether she'd make the military a career, but she was going to marry Roy. Why shouldn't Bec be looking for her own man? And how could Riza fault her for looking among soldiers?

Fear

Riza was afraid of her father. He was so obsessed with his alchemy. Once, when she'd interrupted him in his study, he'd actually thrown his coffee cup at her and hit her with it. Then, he'd noticed the broken cup and never even seen the bruise on her forearm, where the cup had hit her when she'd raised her arms to shield her face.

None of the other apprentices her father had taken on had been that obsessed, until Roy had come. She hadn't noticed his obsession at first, because it was so different from her father's. He was continually practicing alchemy, studying alchemy and talking about alchemy, but it didn't seem to blind him to everyone and everything else around him.

Riza was afraid of her father. But she wasn't afraid of Roy Mustang.

Annoyed

[The Toll] [Informed Consent by favilla]

Many things annoyed Roy about being blind. But there was one big advantage to it, especially since they had started work on the Ishval restoration project.

When he could still see, every new Ishvalan he met had to go through what he called "the treatment" in his nightmares. That meant he got to see the Ishvalan man, woman or child as if he or she was a subject in the research he had conducted in Ishval, together with Knox. The research where he had burned them alive to gain better control over his flames and to identify the temperature/pain threshold. In the nightmare, he would see the flesh charred away and hear the screams again, but with a new face and a new voice.

But since he had gone blind, there were no new nightmares and, lacking new material, those types of Ishval nightmares had faded almost completely away. Apparently, the voice alone was not sufficient to trigger them.

Many things annoyed Roy about being blind. But not everything.

Dreams

[This prompt was covered in my separate fic with that name.]

Favorite

One of Roy's favorite parts of being Hawkeye's apprentice was watching Riza shoot. Not when she was hunting - the one time he'd gone with her when she was hunting had been a disaster - but when she was practicing. He loved everything about it, even the sound of the gun, once he'd gotten used to it.

There was something so different about her when she was shooting. It wasn't that she was normally shy, exactly, although she was quiet by nature, or that she was timid, otherwise, although she, like most people, was afraid of her father. It was that she was so confident and that her confidence was so completely in alignment with her skills. It wasn't arrogance, it was simple acknowledgement of reality.

Maybe that's what Roy liked about it. The real and the ideal didn't usually line up so well.

Forgotten

[The Toll, Team Players]

Roy had forgotten where he'd put his Red Dragon again and Havoc was in Gunja this week, so he wouldn't be coming up to the door to check him over before driving him to work. If he was lucky, it might be Hawkeye, but most likely it would be some enlisted person from the motor pool.

He had a love/hate relationship with that ribbon. He hated what it stood for, because he'd gotten it for being the Hero of Ishval, but damn it, he liked having three rows of ribbons and he needed that one to make the third row. And it wasn't like leaving it off would keep people from remembering who he was.

There was a knock on the door, which meant that he was already late for whoever was picking him up and they'd come to the door. Too late to spend any more time crawling around on the floor.

When he got to the office and had folded up and stashed his cane, Hawkeye went over to his desk.

"I think you're missing something, sir," she said, and he felt her pinning the bloody thing on his uniform.

Laughter

[The Toll]

He'd acquired a liking for hyacinths since Briggs. And they had to be blue, which amused the woman at the flower stall no end. Why should a blind man care what color his flowers were? Especially when she realized that he was just keeping them for himself and not giving them to a lady friend.

At first, he'd always asked someone else to verify the color of the flowers on his way home, after he figured he was out of the woman's sight and hearing. But once he'd realized she always gave him the right color, he didn't mind her laughing at him, and just played along.

They had to be blue, of course. It was blue hyacinths that had made Hawkeye laugh.

Clothes

[The Toll]

Before he'd gone blind, he'd actually liked clothes.

First of all, he liked the uniform, because he knew he looked good in it. And he especially liked the way he looked wearing the black overcoat, but leaving it unbuttoned in the front.

Secondly, he liked suits. Three piece suits, with vests and high collared shirts and one of his large collection of silk cravattes. He actually looked better in suits, but he thought he looked more powerful in the uniform.

Actually, he would still have liked clothes, even blind, if he could just get someone to take him seriously when he asked about matching the vests and the ties. No one else in the office seemed to realize that colors came in shades other than the primary colors except Hawkeye. And she refused to help.

Duty

[Team Players]

The last time he'd done his duty with a clear conscience before Ishval had been when he'd arranged Master Hawkeye's funeral for Riza. Since then, something had always muddied the waters, although it would be another two years until his duty would come into direct conflict with his conscience during the Annihilation compaign.

That's why one thing he always checked out before accepting a new person onto his team was how they would, or had, dealt with the conflict between duty and conscience. He didn't require them to have made the right choice - they just had to know what it should have been and be determined to choose rightly if it ever came to that again.

Perhaps Falman, of his own team, most impressed and most shamed him on that count. He, a career man, had sacrificed that career because he'd refused to tell Central what they wanted to hear. But even more impressive, he'd never seen a conflict in the first place. To Falman, following his conscience didn't conflict with his duty. It was his duty.

Mistake

Fullmetal had asked him if he'd done human transmutation, but that was one mistake he hadn't made in a lifetime full of them. He'd been forced, not in the sense of being presented with impossible choices as had happened in Ishval, but in the sense of having someone put his finger on the trigger and pull it for him. He had absolutely no sense of guilt or wrongdoing.

Maybe that's why his first thought when realized he couldn't see wasn't the horror of being blind, but the fear of being useless at a time like this. There had to be some way he could still fight.

Pain

It was funny, but Roy never had nightmares about pain like other people seemed to. Not about his own, anyway.

It wasn't that he didn't have any memories of pain - Bradley pinning his hands to the transmutation circle with his swords had now officially replaced the time he had cauterized Lust's gashes as the most painful thing he'd ever experienced.

It wasn't even that he didn't fear pain, because he did, sickeningly so. But that was one good thing that had come out of Ishval. He had certainly learned how to keep functioning when absolutely everything inside him rebelled.

No, his nightmares were always about the pain of others. That he had caused.

Unexpected

[The Toll]

He had bouts of depression over being blind, but after the stone was destroyed, they actually became less frequent and less severe. That had taken him by surprise and he'd talked to Hawkeye about it.

She'd put his hand to her face so he could read her head shake and her smile. "It figures you wouldn't expect that," she'd said. "Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to live with hope. Some things are much easier once you've given up. But have you ever really given up hope for anything before?"

He'd thought for a moment. "I guess there aren't a lot of things I hope for," he'd answered, and then she had just laughed and laughed at him.

"No, not a lot of things," she'd finally said, when she could talk again. "Just one big thing."