Pretend You Don't See

She pretended she didn't notice. Sometimes it was the only way to get through the day – to pretend she didn't see. The bottle he had always kept on hand for emergencies had just started to empty one day. Slowly, bit by bit, it had been drained almost to the point of uselessness. On the next day, a new bottle had appeared and replaced the first one… and she pretended she didn't notice.

It wasn't that she thought he was convinced. After all, he knew her as well as she knew him. He knew everything about her, could read her at a glance, she sometimes thought. There were times, especially during the first days in which the liquid held inside it had disappeared, when she felt almost certain that he would say something – make some sort of excuse to keep her from commenting.

He never did. Somehow, she found that the most worrying part of the whole affair… still, she pretended she didn't notice.

She knew that he was staying late, nowadays. Sometimes she found herself wondering if he went home at all. When she was truthful with herself she doubted it. The spare uniforms he kept in the closet had disappeared one by one, replaced by a collection of dirty ones. One day she had seen him take them all from the room early in the morning, only to return with them clean and pressed that evening… and she pretended she didn't see.

A scowl lined his face all day now, every day. He had always been prone to smirking, she recalled vaguely, but she gritted her teeth and pretended she didn't notice the change. The bags under his eyes had grown steadily heavier. When he suddenly started to look a bit better a few days later, she could have cheered. That night, she pretended she didn't notice that her concealer was missing from her pocketbook.

Late one night, about the time the third bottle approached uselessness just as its predecessors had, when the second set of laundered uniforms had made its appearance in the closet, she found herself wandering back into the office. She pretended the darkness of office didn't mean anything untoward.

She opened the door to his office, pretending not to wince when she discovered he hadn't bothered locking it. For a long moment, she pretended it would be okay if she left the lights off. When at last she turned them on and strode into the room… she found herself trying desperately to pretend that the sight before her didn't break her heart.

He had slumped back in his chair, the now empty bottle lying on the floor some feet away. One hand loosely clasped a glass in which she could still see a small quantity of the liquor that had once filled the bottle. The other clutched desperately to a small picture frame.

"Colonel." She said, her voice sounding strict because of the tight clenching in her throat. Dazedly, the man in question tilted his head forward enough to see her and blinked confusedly at her. She found that if she held to the thought closely enough, she could pretend that he had merely worked himself to exhaustion, that he wasn't too drunk to focus properly on her.

"Let's get you home, sir." She said, gently taking the glass from his hand and setting it on the table. He resisted when she tried to take the picture from him, and she pretended it didn't matter as she helped him to his feet. By keeping a firm grip on his arm from the start she enabled herself to pretend that he didn't need it to keep from falling over as he unsteadily allowed himself to be led to a car. The entire ride home, she pretended the reason she wasn't looking in the rear view mirror had more to do with the late hour then the occupant of the back seat, just as she pretended that she didn't have to virtually pull him upstairs into bed.

"Maes… Riza, Maes is…" He mumbled as she tucked him in, pulling the blanket to his chin.

"It's all right, Roy." She said, brushing strands of his midnight hair away from his dark eyes, pretending she didn't see the tears streaming down his face.

She wondered, later, if he was also only pretending not to notice her own.